Just like the new month arrived right on time, to draw us further away from the cold winter, the new track arrived on Zak's site at the 1st of May. The only one who is a bit slow here is me, but better late than never, as they say. But I might as well admit from the start that it will be hard for me to make a review that comes near to the brilliance of this new track, which is as beautiful as the month of May, and as exciting as the whole summer J
The car, in which this beauty is to be driven, is the equally well designed Jaguar XJR9. This is the third fastest car in the game, very similar to the Porsche 962, but not quite as fast. This gives you a psychological challenge from the very beginning. Should you behave as if you're driving an Indy-like car, or like you are driving a slower car. There is a clear difference between these two ways of drivining. The first invites you to try the dangerous Stunts, not be so afraid of the grass, and spend much of your time in the air, while when driving in the second way, you are more likely to go the straight way, stick to the ground, and be more careful your lines. Every driver may develop his (or her) own style of handling the car, but personally I prefer to treat the Jaguar and the Porsche 962 like the Indy. This somehow makes you take the chances that seem to be necessary in order to win in this and other competitions.
The track starts off slowly and the first part is difficult. You go up a bridge, and land directly on a sharp and dirty corner, which means you have to hit the brakes before you have gone to the top of the bridge. This difficulty of this corner is relative to the car you are driving in. If you compare it to the Indy, the car has a weak handling, but I'm sure we've all gotten used to driving even weaker cars, so there's no need to be too careful in this and all other corners. After the corner, you go into a corkscrew, and after that corkscrew, you have to land down beside the slalom road and drive on the edge of the water. Zak probably hoped we wouldn't notice, but this part is ripped from CTRACK27 by JTK, the banked corner that follows is also in that track. But anyway, it is a nice part to borrow, because you will only get through in a decent time if you consider your driving lines. There's no point going in between the slalom blocks, since you drive longer that way. After the banked corner, you get to a jump, which is followed by a boulevard. You naturally choose the right side, because that way you can maintain a higher speed in the forthcoming sharp corner. At this point, it seems a good idea to cross water and grass, and go straight to the dirty curve that comes next. That way you you the take a shortcut and slow down, all at once. When you've come through the curve, the road splits into two. If you go straight forward, you face a jump, a loop, a corkscrew and another loop. If you choose to turn to the left, the obstacles ahead are a jump, a tunnel which only creates one problem - that you have to enter the corkscrew that comes next from the air, and a slalom road. The latter is clearly the faster way if you go through both loops on the other way. Without any kind of effort, replay handling or trickery, I drove the right way in 18.95 and the left way in 14.45, which makes a significant difference of 4.50. But it seems possible, though difficult, to jump the loops in one way or another. If that is possible, the two ways become approximately equally fast. However, there seems to be another opportunity, which is to jump from the first loop, across the water to the left way. This saves you both the dirty sharp corners that are on at the beginning of the left way and at the end of the right way, respectively. The only problem is you seem to land on a corkscrew, so it's not all that easy. After having gone through one way or the other, you come to yet another loop. This is an obvious jump-loop. There is no use keeping a high speed, since you come to yet another dirty sharp corner (and it's on water) afterwards. So you jump to the right in the loop, and land at the entrance to a pipe. You go through the pipe on the left side, since you've listened to Ben Snel and know that you should keep good lines.
In the following part, it becomes apparent that you must, yet again, use manual transmission at this track. In the whole first part of the track, auto transmission would have worked fine, and made steering easier, but the jump that comes next demands you to switch gears on top of it, because it will have far-ranging effects for your drive if you don't. It is not possible to reach the 4th gear here with auto-transmission, unless you make some weird time-craving stunt in the pipe or refrain from jumping the loop. Neither is tempting, so manual gear it is. You switch gears, and at the same time you enter the fastest part of the track. After the jump, which leads you up on a hill, comes another jump. This nearly gets the Jaguar to its top speed. Then you fall very far (good thing the laws of physics don't apply in Stunts) and land in front of a banked corner. You have enough speed to jump the corner, but you have to be careful, since the Jaguar is not as good at turning as the Indy is, and the track has water all over. So in this banked corner, you get to the Jaguar's top speed, which lies about 212 mph (same as the Audi!). Your car may screech a lot during this corner, even though it is not one of the most screechy cars. The speed you've gained in this part is immediately lost because of the dirty curve that comes next. You frantically hit the brakes, turn, and drive into a tunnel. After the tunnel you come to yet another of those "preparing jumps" that are only put there to get your speed higher, so that the next stunt becomes harder. There are many of them in Zak's tracks, and they may like they are just filling of the empty spaces, but actually they make speed control a much tougher challenge, since you always must remember to press the speeder at the right times, and brake at the right times. If you do it too early or too late, you will crash or drive too slowly. So after this jump, you once again come up on a hill, and you are greeted by a bridge corner. Jumps directly onto bridge corners are always hard. You have to go far to the right, but avoid hitting the barrier to that side. Ideally, you must go through in the 3rd gear, and land with your speeder pressed down, ready to enter the next corner. But this demands lots of practice and trying over and over again. Whether you do that, or drive more carefully, (which won't lose that much time for you, but still a little, and a little is very important J) you must go through three consecutive bridge corners, and then you come down, only to go up again, fall down again, and land on a sharp corner surrounded by "invisible" water (water which looks like grass). You must go down into the 2nd gear here, or else you will drown. So you slowly go to the left and see a vertical corkscrew ahead. If you wan to do like I do here, you must go in on the right, and then go left, stick to the left wall all the way up, and then, just before you reach the top, let go of the brakes. By sticking to the left all the way up, you get these two advantages:
1) You go the shortest possible way
2) You have the straightest possible line (although nothing is straight in a corkscrew J)
3) You have a higher speed when you come out
The two above lines are NOT about homosexuality ;-) After the corkscrew, there is a slalom road, which is no big challenge. Then you drive through the finish line, but wait, your time is way off the scoreboard! That is because you drove through the corkscrew. This corkscrew, like most others, is not worth going through. You can cut the road when you come down from the bridge on the hill. Just go sharply to the left, and drive on the side of the hill. Wait a moment before you go down - there is wet grass at the bottom of the hill until a certain point. However, you also have to be careful not to go down too late, because then you will get 15 seconds of penalty time. Drive to the edge of the water by the road, and then race to the finish line. Suddenly your time is about 4 seconds better.

It is difficult to sum up a track as big as varied as this one, but I will give it a try: First of all, this is not a track for Herr Otto Partz, but Helen Wheels will love it. Lots of Stunts, jumps, quantity, high speeds, all of it. This also means that it's a track where you have to use your brain more than usually. You have to figure out the fastest way to go through every stunt in the track. When you do this, you must also consider what is to come after the current obstacle, etc. You also need to find all possible little grass shortcuts, since they can save you valuable time. It will not be easy to find them though, since there is water all over the track, and I think the water was put there for exactly that reason…
Of course however I turn and twist it, Stunts will never be a brain game, so of course very good driving skills are required. This track is very difficult to max out, since the most important places, where you can win the most time, are in the difficult stunts and obstacles, where you can almost always improve your own effort. You have to take the chances in this track. Don't do it the safe way. This of course applies for all tracks, but it is particularly important in this track, since you can't win back the time you might lose doing things the safe way in corners and straightways. In other words, apart from driving skills, you need brains, guts and time. Brains to figure out the best masterplan, guts to take on the Stunts and not be afraid of trying difficult things, and time to try those difficult things again and again.
You need try again until you fall asleep/starve/start beating up your keyboard. The past competitions have proven that Roy Wiegerinck is the best at that. I think he is going to win it this month, but I also think that some of the great Indy drivers, like Fdzierva, CAP or Mark Nailwood, could easily drive this track in the Jaguar and get a very good time. Generally I really like this track, I think that this and ZCT11 are the best two tracks of this year. It has all that a good Stunts track needs to have: action, challenges for the experts, and beauty. Finally he's learned it J This track is very pretty, especially when viewed from the track menu, the terrain is very beautiful with the coastline and all. But also when you drive the track, the hills, trees, water and buildings make it really nice to drive. It makes all the trying again and again a little lighter. So I guess we'll have a great race this month!

"Drive fast, fly high, never let a chance go by"
--Bonzai Joe