Bjorn Erik Hagen gives the low-down on all the latest on Richard Burns� Rally-community and the general Sim rally world in this, the first of his regular RBR columns for AutoSimSport....

I have been driving rally arcade/Sims since Colin 2 was released; a few and I friends used to get together on Mondays to drive and talk about cars and real world rallying, but the truth is that I have never been particularly good at rallying, and I still struggle to get the pace that everybody else seems to have � but even so, I still drive Richard Burns Rally, and I never seem to lose interest. No other sim does this for me.

The only thing I felt was missing was the online feature. But with time have come two solutions, RBRnet and RBR-Online. I know there are others out there, but I believe that these two are the major ones. (Next month, though, I will also discuss these different solutions and please contact me if you got more info about upcoming or newly released RBR Online tools).

So, to get back to it, I got in touch with Jon Denton some time ago when he was about to start a British league using the RBR-online utility. (BIRC) This sounded very cool to me, so I decided to start my own league too. And that is how NIRC was born. And that�s my Sim racing history in short. Now days I�m running NIRC and I�m happy with that.

Well enough personal rambling. Let�s get down to business�.

The reason for this column is to have a monthly report of what�s going on in the RBR and general rally sim world. So here I will try to write a little about the community. I can�t promise I�ll be fully updated on all areas in the community, but I�ll try my best.

Reason I can�t promise to be 100% accurate is that so much has happened since the �default� RBR was released; and most of that has been fantastic! The community is making car skins, new cars, modifications of all kinds. There are also crews out there working hard to build new stages and having some brand new stages in the future is a possibility.

The WRC 2002 Season Mod:
Latest modding news over at BHMS must be the soon coming WRC 2002 Season Mod which is a stand-alone mod that does not interfere with your exe or other RBR files.

With this mod you can drive the 2002 Season, the year when the Impreza had those weird front lights and Gronholm was pretty dominant in his Peugeot 206 WRC.

The mod features all cars for 2002 WRC season, driver performances, visual updates to GUI and sound/music updates.

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