The Pegassi Infernus Classic was added to GTA Online on Tuesday alongside the Resurrection Adversary Mode. While the latter failed to make any major ripples in the community, the oldschool Infernus kicked up enough dust for the two of them on its own. Depending on what kind of a player you are, the new car is either a blessing or a curse.
Classic car enthusiasts and photographers have immediately latched onto the car as their newest subject of praise, as it offers a break from all the over-designed modern super and hypercars we've been getting recently. In addition, it's one fine looking vehicle that looks wonderful on well-shot photos, a fact that the game's Snapmatic community has already discovered.
But the Infernus Classic isn't a perfect car. While it looks great from the outside, and still offers a sense of awe when sitting into it and starting the engine, things start going wrong when you try to turn — turn left, specifically. A new a mysterious bug appeared in the game where, while everything is okay during right turns, upon trying to turn left the car would spin wildly out of control. The Infernus Classic wasn't the only car affected either.
Initially, players had no clue what was going on. Those who experienced and reported the issue online were not certain that this is an actual bug, and were met by "git gud" and similar comments suggesting that they were the ones doing something wrong.
But then some of the more experienced members of the racing community took note of the issue, and at that point it became clear that there is no human error involved in these swerves. The cause of the bug was beyond everyone, and even Rockstar released a statement about the issue.
We are aware that some players are experiencing a problem with steering the Pegassi Infernus Classic. We are currently investigating the issue and if you would like more information on this issue as it progresses, please subscribe to this article for further updates.
GTA Online has a history of vehicle related bugs. There was a time when the Pfister 811 was by far the fastest car in the game due to a bug forcing the rear down which broke the physics engine resulting in insane speed increases. A similar effect, known as curb boosting, was also used by RE-7B drivers where driving on the slightly elevated curb of the race track resulted in the same acceleration.
On the flipside, there was also a bug affecting two of the cars that were added to Benny's Original Motorworks after the Lowriders DLC — in fact, they were the first two custom cars not to be lowriders. We're talking about the Sultan RS, colloquially known as the 'weeb mobile' and the Banshee 900R. Both suffered from a bug which caused them to be significantly slower than intended. In fact, after the bug was fixed, the 900R ended up briefly being the fastest car in the game, but this too was attributed to the downforce bug which affected the 811.
This time around, the investigative efforts of the players have proved to be fruitful. Many theories sprung up about why the Infernus Classic has this weird bug, and for a long time the most popular one was that the spoiler options were screwing with handling. However, not only was this unlikely due to the nature of the bug only affecting left turns (maybe it's a UPS conspiracy), but testing also proved unsuccessful.
Eventually, it was the contribution of some users from Nonchalant Dominance, a major GTA Online crew, who decided to get to the bottom of things that solved this enigma. After meticulous testing, not only did they realise that the problem is that the game registers the left tyre as damaged all the time, but that a whole lot of other cars have become infected with this problem as well.
It seems that the update which brought the Infernus Classic in the mix has some kind of coding issue which tossed settings to whack globally causing other cars to suffer. The user, adam10603, also posted the information in a lengthy description with attached GIFs to the Rockstar Support thread to let them know what's up. Players have been upvoting the thread for attention, which you can also do here to make sure this is fixed as soon as possible.
In the meantime, another player who goes by MisturTroll went to the length of compiling a complete list of the vehicles affected by this bug. The list, broken down to classes, is as follows:
In essence, this issue is the game automatically stancing the rear left wheel of these vehicles. Even though the car is in perfect condition, the game will detect the wheel as damaged. The giveaway was that during an impromptu testing stream between various Nonchalant Dominance members, someone pointed out that the wheel was vibrating and bouncing in a jarred manner.
While GTA Online's physics engine only has a passing relationship with reality, it does alter the handling and speed of vehicles when their wheels are damaged. Thing is, sometimes this change is beneficial if used right, and therefore players occasionally purposefully damage the wheels of their vehicles to benefit from the effect — this is called stancing.
Thing is, in this case, damaging the right wheel won't be making things any better for you. If the both wheels are stanced, this bug won't be fixed you'll just not be able to turn right properly either, which is hardly an improvement. Currently this bug is wreaking havoc among the GTA Online racing community, as several vehicles are now utterly uncompetitive since any left turn is essentially a death sentence.
To make Rockstar Games' bugfixing job even easier, the very people who discovered the source of this issue have went and found a fix already. The majority of vehicles in GTA Online have a flag in their handling files called "TYRES_CAN_CLIP", and these are the vehicles which are unaffected. Upon modding the handling file of the Infernus Classic with this flag, it immediately solved the bug. For those wondering, that flag allows for tyres to phase through other 3D models which would otherwise be solid, such as the rest of the car.
The investigation that went into unearthing the cause of this bug is a prime example of the cooperation and dedication this community is capable of at times. GTA Online really has a great community once you strip away the hackers and griefers. These people really know their shit as over the course of a day they identified and solved a bug with no help from the developers whatsoever. Now, all that remains is to wait until the official fix is implemented for all the vehicles listed above. It's a wrap.
