iRacing

Skip Barber

With a week to go before the season starts, this was the final pre-season event. It gave us an opportunity to get a fairly large grid and to assess the competition.

Despite a few ‘regulars’ missing, we had a nice 15 driver grid at 28 lap (approx. 40 minute) race at Summit Point Raceway.

Qualifying was a close affair. iRacing Pro driver Paul Richards was out in front with a qualifying time of 1:21.950 but then the rest of the field was oh-so-close with less than 1 second covering 2nd down to 12th.

Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to pull together a decent lap during the 15 minute qualifying period and only qualified in a disappointing 10th.

The race was anything but disappointing though. After some early pressure from Ken Murray in 11th he dropped back after some minor contact and I was able to concentrate on mounting a challenge on the car in front, Don Wright in 9th. As it turned out, we were nose-to-tail for the entire race picking up the odd place here and there and in a train of 3-4 cars the whole time, it was thrilling stuff, trying to force that crucial mistake that could lead to a passing attempt.

In the end I just couldn’t manufacture the opening to pass Don and finished less than a second down in 7th place somewhat relieved to have made it to the end unscathed.

Paul Richards was in a different class as expected and won by 14s over Dave Gymer in 2nd and Brendan Wright another 14 seconds down in 3rd, rounding out the podium places.

Don Wright (6th) put together this great video of the race highlights;

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• Simracing.org.uk Hosted Skip Barber league (popabawa.net)

Skip Barber

We’ll be running a Hosted Skip Barber league over the forthcoming season at simracing.org.uk

It’s open to all members but it’s particularly beginner friendly as we’re trying to use as many of the layouts included with membership so as it currently stands (we may alter it slightly) the only entry requirement is the Skip Barber 2000.

There’s a trial race tomorrow (Tuesday 3 Nov.) at Summit Point Raceway and the season starts on November 10 with 6 races every fortnight after that.

Here’s the proposed schedule – http://www.simracing.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=7014.msg122374#msg122374

2 new images have been added to the screenshots section.

Start of the race

Rear suspension of the Skip Barber

This is a really well put together video of a great battle at Summit Point. iRacing at it’s finest!

iRacing at Summit Point – Great battle from BryanH on Vimeo.

After a pretty good qualifying session yesterday decided to race at Summit after all and got my best ever Skippy result, a 2nd place!

My SR is at 4.68 now.

Image via Wikipedia

With three weeks of the season to go, my road SR is sitting at 4.61.

I really want to get it above 4.99 so there’s some laps to be driven and some decisions to make.

Summit Point last time around was pretty hard on my SR. I’m tempted to just timetrial this week but I’m not sure I can spend enough time to get my SR high enough to give it that push in the final weeks to go above 4.99. Even a full 30 minutes of lapping in timetrials without a mistake yields only about +0.03 SR.

I wonder if this is the SR system really coming into effect, it’s making me really think about the decisions I make on track.

Putting the disastrous Lime Rock week behind me it’s time to look forward to Summit Point’s Jefferson layout.

It’s a short but very technical track throwing just about everything at you in just under a minute;

Wow! What a lap. I can’t believe how late this guy can brake!

Image via Wikipedia

An onboard video of the Skip Barber F2000 at Summit Point Raceway.

I’m really looking forward to driving the Skip Barber. Since the days of Grand Prix Legends, no other sim has really delivered such a fantastic single-seater experience.

I think closest we’ve come is the F1 ‘79 mod for rFactor and the rFactor single-seat advanced trainers come a close second for great racing.

I love the way you can see the suspension and chassis really working hard in this clip.