iRacing

After a fairly decent first week in the Riley Daytona Prototype it was off to Virgina International Raceway in week 2.

This is a tough, tough track in the Riley with more than it’s fair share of challenges. Plunging down towards the Oak Tree turn had my heart in my mouth every lap.

The fastest drivers were unbelievably quick around here and despite a set-up I was comfortable with I was only able to qualify 75% of the way down the field.

A lot of guys hadn’t qualified so I started 14th of 28 on the grid, being the #22 ranked driver there was a decent chance of picking up some points so I was aiming to finish in the top half of the field.

VIR rewards consistency and half way through the race I was up to 9th, not due to any pace I was able to generate, just through others mistakes. I was 7s ahead of the driver in 10th when I made my one and only mistake running wide onto the grass at the penultimate corner. This cost me dearly as I was unable to rejoin safely the group of 3 drivers were able to pass before I got back onto the track losing me over 15s.

I wasn’t able to make up any ground and ended the race 13th so I wasn’t too unhappy. There was close, clean and exciting racing throughout.

77 points, +29 iRating and +0.22 SR.

Unusually I was able to run a second race this week and due to the scoring changes, I’d drop my worst result so there’s not too much to lose, I felt I could go a little better than the first race due to the additional experience.

I wasn’t really prepared to end up in the highest SOF (Strength of Field) race I’ve ever been in, these guys were incredibly fast!

Starting 14th of 16 on the grid I decided that I’d probably had my best result of the week and settle for running a consistent race, gain some SR and hopefully minmise the iRating loss. As I was the #14 ranked driver I probably wouldn’t lose a great deal anyway.

I started pretty well, shaking off the 15th and 16th cars but I was only able to stay with the pack ahead for a few laps, even when I was lapping well they were still over a second per lap quicker!

It was a pretty boring race with no-one to race really and my concentration suffered with a silly trip onto the grass on lap 13 which lost me even more time.

A heart-stopping moment on lap 17 came from when the 3rd place driver stranded himself sideways on the track after lapping me. Thank goodness for the yellow flags as it was on an area of the track with little visibility and without the warning I would have ploughed straight into him probably finishing both our races. Luckily we both came through unscathed.

Whilst I was dawling around, some other drivers managed to variously destroy their cars to leave me at the chequered flag with my first top 10 finish.

Because of the very high SOF I scored a decent 80 points (dropping my previous 77 from the standings), iRating +22 and +0.13 SR.

My target is to score over 500 championship points this season for the first time, which is an average of 62.5 (the highest 8 scores from 12 weeks count). So far I’ve scored 63 and 80 so I’m slightly ahead of target so far!

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Tags: Riley Daytona Prototype, Virginia International Raceway

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 11:55 and is filed under Cars, Racing news, Tracks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.