iRacing

I’ve suspected for a while that iRacing have been developing a tie-up with the Indycar series. We’ve had a number of hints but nothing has been confirmed up to now.

I suspect this will change over the weekend.

iRacing confirmed a while back that “a big announcement” was due in August so I obviously suspected Indycar but today, iRacing’s David Moulthrop posted this on his blog;

I will start a journey to California for another major announcement by iRacing this weekend

Indycar is at Infineon Raceway, Sonoma, California this weekend!

I suspect this deal has been in the bag for some time and I think the intention was to announce it before the NASCAR tie-up but  the NASCAR deal got done earlier than expected and so took priority.

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• Predictions… (popabawa.net)

Video featuring footage from Infineon Raceway and Texas Motor Speedway. The video ends with a quote from Marcos Ambrose on how the iRacing simulation has assisted him in his first season of NASCAR Sprint Cup racing. It will be featured at RaceSavers.com.

iRacing have put together this promo for the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway.

A track and object comparison of Infineon raceway.

Audio is from iRacing. Real-world footage courtesy of Ric McCormick/Doug Johnson, 101 Motorsports.

After a horrible race at VIR Grand East earlier this week where I lost -0.19 SR after quitting out after a couple of laps (it’s an interesting call sometimes whether to risk continuing on and making it worse or cutting your losses sometimes) I’ve clawed most of it back to get my SR to 4.81.

4.99 should still be attainable. VIR is a good track for SR due to the relatively high number of turns so even if I just run a couple more timetrials and and maybe another race I should be in good shap to push over the edge next week at Infineon which I seem to get on with quite well.

Sadly, my focus on the road SR has meant that I’ve neglected the Late Model for the last couple of weeks. Since I realised I wasn’t quite going to make the top 25 of the Late Model timetrial rankings I decided to focus my efforts elsewhere.

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• Over 4!

Now my road SR is above 4 again (although maybe not for long if I do too many more Skippy races!) I can race the Formula Mazda.

Here’s a Team Redline lap to show us mortals how it’s done.

I’m finding racing the Skippy’s pretty disappointing which is a shame as I was really looking forward to them Sad

I’ll freely admit that I really suck at driving them (I do a 1:52 in a race on a decent lap), but I haven’t really have anyone to race in the 4 races I’ve taken part in. There are the idiots who don’t seem to have turned a lap of practice and rarely last more than a lap or two while everyone else seems to be faster than me but not all of them can keep it on the road.

I was in a full field of 14 last night with a SOF of 2400 which was a bit of a joke as my iRating is barely over 1600. I started in 13th, everyone ahead of me had a qually time of 1:50 or less (at least a sec. faster than my PB) and the token “no practice” joker behind be. So, everyone zooms off and I’m thinking about padding my SR once again. Half the field then proceeds to fall off and reset leaving me with a 7th place finish but it was the most boring race, the only excitement I had was letting drivers who’d reset unlap themselves as they were so much faster than me.

My long and rambling point is that if these guys took it just a little easier and drove within themselves, they’d keep their SR up, probably finish higher and I might have someone to race! Cheesy

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• Tough going in the Skip Barber…

After a considerable amount of practice and eventually getting to some semi-respectable lap times I ventured into my first races in the Skip Barber at Infineon Long last night.

In race 1 I was severely outclassed, starting at the back of the grid I was too cautious and 3s off the pace but due to a few mistakes from the other drivers I eventually wound up finishing 8th, a small drop in my iRating but the race was entirely incident free so I saw a nice rise in my SR.

Race 2 was a little more interesting, starting in 8th I was able to just hang onto a pack of 4 drivers for the first couple of laps until a spin in front of me led me to lose control, pick up a couple of incidents, and drop back a bit. This was a less experienced field though and frequent mistakes by the others drivers saw me move up the field until I wound up in 6th with 4 laps to go and only a few seconds behind 4th & 5th. I’d have been happy with 6th but my ADSL connection went down and I lost connection to the race so wound finishing in 11th with a fair drop in my iRating to put me under the 1600 mark.

At least my pace improved a little in these races and I managed a timetrial in the 1:51’s in the interim but this season in the Skip Barbers is going to be long and hard.

It’s almost becoming a challenge as to who can post a video of the fastest lap on Infineon Cup in the Skip Barber!

A few days ago I posted a 1:24.4 but this popped up today -> 1:24.013!

Who’s going to be first to break the 1:23 barrier?

I’m still struggling at Infineon with the Skip Barber but I managed to break the 1:30 barrier today!

Further inspiration is required, here’s some hectic action from a recent race;