Stage 8 is essentially a continuation of Stage 7, but with a twist.  You’re racing the 919 again, in 5 challenges and 8 events on various tracks.  Completing the stage gets you 20 gold.  Trust me, you’ll need it.  The difficulty of these events may increase as more racers compete, but against offline standard bots it wasn’t too bad.  That said, the 4th event requires you to reach 215 mph (346 kph) on Le Mans.  This was harder than I thought - I barely reached it, and only for a split second.  Bots swarmed me the whole time making it difficult to concentrate on my speed alone. The last event required me to go only 5.5 miles in an endurance race.  I suuspect that figure will be different for most if racing online and against TSM bots.

The twist in this case is FM twisting your checkbook, trying to wring more money and gold from it.  First, twice during the stage you’ll be told they have to “analyze” some of your car’s systems.  This will take time of course (30 minutes per), or you can skip the analysis for 4 gold.  Well, OK.  You get 20 gold at the end, so spend 8 now and you’ll get it back.  Or wait an hour if you have the time - no big deal.

But that’s not all.  You will now have the opportunity to start upgrading your 919, and that ain’t cheap.  By the end of the stage you’ll be able to upgrade Body, Suspension, Brakes and Tires.  Of course, you can upgrade many of these with R$, but the wait time will significantly erode the time you have available to race this stage.  Or, you can instant upgrade with gold.  Total gold needed to fully upgrade all of these areas will be about 250.  This brings up several questions that will only be answered over time as more racers move into this and later stages:

1. Do you have to upgrade in order to compete?  How much is enough?

2. As this is a “loaner” for many of us, will the upgrades carry over when you get the car at the end?

3. If upgrading using only R$, will you still have enough time to race if you wait for the upgrades to be delivered?

I encourage anyone entering this stage early on to help the rest of us figure out the upgrade requirements.  I had the extra gold and not the extra time, so I fully gold-upgraded during the stage in order to get through it. Based on what I've seen from other posts, there may be a real chance I just tossed that out my window.

Pictures will be posted in the next post, as there are a lot this time.