Vehicle Chase Combat, Is it broken, or am I missing something. Options

[jgalak]

So I was trying to run a car chase using the Chase Combat system during last nights session, and it seems broken in several ways. My players were really unhappy with it, so I'm hoping for some advice on how to resolve this. Please note that this all under SR4a.

1) Penalties/bonuses for multiple vehicles. Players are being chased by 4 cars. The PCs have 1 car. As I read the rules, the PCs get +2 to their drive roll for one car on their side and -8 for 4 card on the other side, for a net of -6. The NPCs are jsut the opposite - +8 for 4 cars, -2 for the PC's one car, for a net of +6. That's an effective swing of 12 dice! That seems huge? Am I looking at it correctly? Is there another fix? One obvious way is to just drop it to +1/-1, anyone try that and like the results?

2) Timing of the opposed vehicular roll. It seems that this roll needs to be done at the beginning of each chase combat turn, but it just says the driver must contribute one complex action per turn to this. Can the driver choose which action? If the driver has multiple initiative passes (jumped-in rigger in hot VR), can he use his last pass for this?

3) Use of the opposed vehicular roll. It says that the action being used for the opposed vehicular roll can be used to perform a stunt (cut-off, etc.). Is this a separate test from the main opposed roll? I'm not quite clear on how this works.

4) Length of chase combat turn. This is the biggie. SR4a states that one chase combat turn is 1 minute, or 20 rounds. That's plausible in terms of getting vehicles maneuvering, but what about the actions of the characters inside? Do the passengers get 20 rounds worth of actions for each one of these? In the case of the street sam with WR3, firing a pistol, that's 120 shots each chase combat turn! I tried making each chase combat turn one normal turn in length, but then the scale for vehicle response doesn't really work (if Knights Errant show up in 5 minutes to investigate the firefight, in normal combat turns that's 100 turns..). Any advice? I'm tempted to split the difference and make each chase combat turn maybe 3-5 regular turns, see if that works.

Any advice on a better way to do this would be appreciated.