iRacing

These guys have a futile attempt to beat Dale Jr. at Lowes in the Silverado!

A great video of the Chevy Silverado at Las Vegas Motor Speedway put together by the iRacing team.

It really captures some of the excitement and close racign tha’s possible with the trucks.

Florian Godard has done a great job on this Chevvy Silverado race at Las Vegas Speedway;

Image via Wikipedia

After the incident-fest that was Daytona last week I was hoping Milwaukee would be more enjoyable.

Finding a set-up that wasn’t too loose and didn’t degrade too quickly proved elusive so I stuck with the ‘Advanced’ set-up that I’d used for practice. I knew it was a little off the pace but I found it pretty stable and was pretty confident that I could handle it for 120 laps.

I found myself qualifying in 6th in a pretty decent field (2235 SOF) of 15.

My series of terrible starts continued when on lap 3, coming out of T4 the 5th place truck got the power down too early and oversteered right into me and sent me into the wall and a reset being necessary. A lap down and 4x incidents already and another 117 laps to go!

With no expectations for the rest of the race I hoped to pick up some places with retirements so decided to take it easy and not put myself in any danger, running at the back of the field.

As luck would have it, on lap 30 after the restart, the leader went way wide into T3, taking out the 2nd place driver allowing the 2 trucks a lap down through and to get our lap back.

I continued to stay out of trouble and to keep my tyres in decent shape after that to try to take advantage of the inevitable mistakes. it was evident that I wasn’t quite on the pace, whenever I grabbed a place or two after a yellow I got picked off again fairly quickly. Still, I was pretty steady and didn’t make any further mistakes to finally finish in 8th (I was the #8 car so well predicted iRacing!) and +0.08 on my SR to start the long haul back to getting over 4.99!

Posted by Dustin McGrew of Mid-Atlantic Racing

iRacing Silverado Truck Race at Daytona from Dustin McGrew on Vimeo.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I’ve been looking forward to racing the Silverado truck since it was announced so I was eager to jump in as season 4 started over the weekend.

My enthusiasm was somewhat dampened seeing some of the results of the first races. People’s SR was taking an absolute hammering, drops of 0.5 (or a lot higher in some cases) weren’t uncommon. Even some of the top rated guys were struggling to come through the races unscathed.

However, looking at a busy week ahead and a free few hours yesterday afternoon I decided to bite the bullet and take to the track.

Not wanting to get caught up in the middle of the pack I decided not to qualify and hope I’d end up near the back. That worked out perfectly as I lined up 17th out of 18.

Pit-stops and Yellow flags are brand new to this series and something new to think about so I planned to hang around at the back, get some experience of running in a pack, see how the yellows work and maybe try a pit-stop.

I got the chance to see how the yellows worked less than a lap after the start, and unfortunately that was the first of way too many laps under yellow with frequent accients, I think we did 21 of the 50 laps under caution so I had plenty of practice seeing how they worked!

Being at the back gave me the chance to practice a couple of pit-stops without losing any places too.

The racing ended up being pretty sporadic with the frequent yellows and actually quite disappointing. The trucks are an awesome drive but similar to my experience in the Silver Crowns, drivers are too keen to race each other from the very start rather than working together. Consequently, we kept getting dropped off the back of the main pack after the restarts which was very frustrating.

Things weren’t going too badly nearing the end of the race, I’d moved up to 12th as retirements and resets piled up and I’d only picked up 4 incident points with some contact mid-race.

On the last lap I was up to 11th, we were on a yellow, cruising home when the driver in front managed to spin in T1 leaving me nowhere to go but into him! Another 4 incidents and the two drivers behind took advantage of the tangle leaving me with an eventual 12th place finish, 8 incidents and a subsequent 0.11 SR drop.

Not a great start to the series, I can only hope that when everyone has a bit more experience the racing will be cleaner, faster and more fun.

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