So this week, I've made an attempt at getting into iRacing. For those not into sim racing, this is the paid-subscription racing simulator that's used by the current F1 champion and current F1 championship contender to keep their racing instincts sharp. Tens of thousands of people use it, so it's not like I'm competing with actual racing drivers all the time (though there are apparently loads in there, they're just not people I've heard of), but the subscription model and the sim's heavy focus on clean racing (with penalty points and tracked driver rankings) means that the people there aren't just idiots trying to divebomb you at every corner for a quick thrill before going back to Call of Duty. People are serious about iRacing, to the point where a recent incident of a team of real-world racing drivers purposefully ruining the virtual 24 Hours of Spa race was an international scandal and real world sponsors were having to distance themselves from their real world drivers antics in a virtual race.
I had an aborted go at it last year when they were selling subs cheap on Steam - I tried a few practice sessions in the Rookie race series, and realised that I'd been spoiled by all of the driving aids in the official F1 games I'd been playing up to that point, and just could not handle even the basic Mazda MX-5 Cup without traction control (which it doesn't have in real life, so the sim version doesn't either). Add to that that the week's chosen track was Circuit de Lédenon, a horrible, extremely technical little track with blind corners. I don't think I was able to put a single lap together without spinning. My pride destroyed, I put it down and didn't touch the remaining 51 weeks of subscription.
Anyway, I was on leave this week and had it in my head that I was going to finally get to grips with trail braking - a technique where you brake sharply for a corner, and then reduce pressure over time through the turn, keeping the car's weight shifted onto the front wheels and increasing its ability to rotate the car. Snowy and I had been getting into Automobilista 2 after one utterly fantastic (slightly-drunken) duel around Cadwell Park in 1960s Minis, and I didn't want to drastically improve my own abilities in that sim while his PC is out of action, so decided to give iRacing another go.
- Monday: the starter car Mazda Global MX-5 2016 again, this week's circuit is the very famous Laguna Seca, a track I know reasonably well and quite like. Great. I do some practice laps, spin a few times, but I can make it around cleanly most of the time. Good first impression, I'll start looking at actual lap times tomorrow.
- Tuesday: this week's track is Circuit de Lédenon. Shit, the iRacing week starts on a tuesday. Argh. I do some practice laps, and I can make it around without spinning maybe 1 lap in 6. I am unbelievably slow in this car at this circuit, with my best laps barely making it to within 12 seconds of a reference time of 1:33. At this point I start using an app called Garage 61, a free telemetry tool which records all of your brake, throttle and steering inputs, uploads this to its database and then lets you compare your driving to laps from other people using the same service (it's popular enough with iRacers that this is genuinely useful).
- Wednesday: I'm getting quicker, but there are 5 or 6 horribly tricky corners where me making it around without spinning is 50:50. I really can't understand how the driver of the reference lap can keep the speed they're carrying without spinning, it almost feels like they're breaking the laws of physics.
- Thursday: Things suddenly start to come together. I realise that most of my spins are actually caused by me downshifting. I've been spoiled by F1 gearboxes where I can just hammer through the entire gear range in the blink of an eye without it affecting the car at all, but I'm not piloting a multi-million pound track-going missile, I'm driving the racing equivalent of a shopping trolley. I start restricting my downshifts to when the car's revs are down and I'm not in the middle of a sharp turn. It's at this point where everything changes and I mostly stop spinning, allowing me to actually push a bit harder and get my lap times down. I start having consistency, a term that Martin Brundle throws around so frequently but that I finally get the importance of. I manage a 1:36.7. It's still a country mile off the reference time, but that's the top split time - each iRacing event is separated into multiple races based on the number of competitors - I'm not good enough for a 1:33 yet, but I'm good enough to place roughly in the middle of the pack.
- Friday: I decide it's race day. I do a few more practice sessions, then enter the 9PM race.
I've been practicing pretty hard because I've realised that this matters to me quite a bit. I'm a nervous person by nature, and heading into a hobby that people do take very seriously and where mistakes do actually matter, I'm bricking it. I'm only going to get one chance at a first race, and I follow all of the advice to be cautious and stay out of trouble on the first lap, as the iRacing Rookie series frequently ends in disaster as, well, it's for Rookies, most people don't really know what they're doing. I want to get through the race without spinning or otherwise embarrassing myself by locking a brake and ploughing someone else off the circuit. I tell myself the result doesn't matter, it's the experience...
...but that's not what people get into competitive motor sport for, (not even the virtual stuff).
At this point I'm going to admit that the lede I've buried is so far underground that it'll be popping up on the timing sheets at Bathurst. Racing joke. Enjoy this 12 minutes of badly edited race footage that misses so much of the action that the FOM TV director will be taking notes. Racing joke. I'm in the black and orange Fanatec-sponsored number 6 car.
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