Global Racing League (abbreviated to just GRL) is a play-by-post "simulation" where users manage a team of racing drivers and engineers, competing in a number of racing leagues set around the world with the goal of becoming champion. The race events are simulated using the racing game rFactor and its AI drivers with a lot of mods, and are broadcast via the GRL Twitch Channel
. The league forums are located on a Freeforums board here.
GRL runs in "Seasons", a period of a few real-time months, when a variety of events and leagues are open for racing, with the timing typically coinciding with the temperate seasons. However, not every league is the same, as GRL has a number of disciplines (types of racing) that the leagues run in.
Global Racing Tropes:
- Ace Custom: Practically enforced in the newly introduced Pro Tuned discipline, which takes a bunch of Japanese street cars and throws every performance mod under the hood.
- Badass Driver: Duh. Even the scrubbiest of drivers in GRL are at least somewhat capable of handling the cars at race pace.
- Badass Family: Several of these, many of which are named after real-life racing circuits.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite being professional racing drivers, a number of drivers are exceptionally quirky.
- Character Tiers: In-Universe. Drivers are placed into Driver Classification categories depending on their stats totals, going from Unranked (lowest tier) to Platinum (highest tier).
- Cool Car: A given with the subject matter. The cars racing in the league were essentially picked to maximize coolness, so many of the cars competing in GRL are either very successful in real-life, or just look really, really cool.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Amy "Amie" Radcliffe is this relative to the rest of the league; she is someone who seems to live in a world where supercars can fart rainbows.
- Crossover: The GT Endurance PRO and AM classes have subtle cases of this; GTE PRO has cars from early 90's Endurance racing, mid-2000's GT1, and Super GT GT500, for instance. These are, of course, Pv P Balanced.
- Elite Tweak: Car setups.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first Season of GRL was run on GTR2: FIA GT Racing Game, and had a number of rules and mechanics which would be scrapped or altered with the move to rFactor, as well as a number of cars which would not be used in Season 2.
- Originally, if a car had lost a wheel after a collision, the car was to be considered totaled (can't be fixed, can't be sold). Cars in Season 2 and after are now only considered totaled if their roof is damaged or the car catches fire.
- The GT Endurance AM category was predominantly Japanese, with many of them being former Super GT GT300 and GT500 race cars. Of these, only two carried over to Season 2.
- Expy: A lot of the drivers take their names and personalities from characters in games or anime.
- Genki Girl: Amy "Amie" Radcliffe, who combines this trope with Cloud Cuckoolander. To a lesser extent, Haruna Tsuchigami, a Tuner Village shop owner, also counts as this.
- Improbably Female Cast: Well over half the drivers are female, and the engineer characters in GRL are predominantly female as well.
- Women Drivers: Averted quite heavily, as a number of top-ranking drivers are women.
- Improbable Age: Taken to slightly ridiculous extents, with a few of the drivers having raced in the in-universe equivalents to junior Formula car races when they were as young as 13. In particular, Weiss Hockenheim is 15 years old and is set to race 700 horsepower GT Endurance race cars in Season 2.
- Prone to Tears: Yukiho Yamamoto, owner of the Yukiho Speed Factory car tuning shop, is one of these.
- Punny Name: Emma Pergusa, a pun on the Enna-Pergusa race circuit.
- Serious Business: Despite how whimsical many of the characters seem to be, the users are very serious about keeping their teams at least sort of competitive.
- The Alleged Car: An interesting case. The Supra was originally a middling car in terms of reliability in Season 1 (40% "base" when the max was 45%), but now shares the dubious honor of least reliable car in the GT Endurance AM category with the Honda NSX (50% when stock, but now the max is 65%). Can be downplayed with upgrades, however.
