iRacing Treats

After many months of only running an occasional practice session in iRacing, my enthusiasm is back! There are several reasons for this.

Leagues

The new "hosted racing" feature is a big factor. This allows people to run leagues as they have done for many years with other sims. It also sidesteps iRacing's iRating, Safety Rating, and Series Championships systems, all of which seem to take a lot of the fun out of sim racing for me.

For the older generation, the big news is that the old GPL league for middle-aged racers, MARA, has started up again, but this time using iRacing. A thousand thanks to Ed Crawford for stepping up to the plate and making this happen.

I raced in MARA's first-ever iRacing race tonight and had a blast. Second fastest in practice (by .010 seconds!), pole, and second in the race. I led for several laps before making one mistake that let my good sim racing buddy Jim Locking get by me. Chased him for the rest of the race and closed the gap from 11 seconds to only four at the end. Really fun!

MARA sets a minimum age limit (50, I think). This keeps out the really fast hotshoes, giving the rest of us a chance. After racing tonight, I feel this is a lot more fair in many ways than pitting us nearly over-the-hill folks against young whippersnappers with super-quick reflexes and ultra-sharp eye-hand coordination - and the energy to practice for hour after endless hour. In MARA, we all get to race with people who have more or less the same physical handicaps. After all, they do it in golf, why not racing?

If you're interested see this forum thread:

iRacing Member Forums: Middle-Aged Racers Association (MARA)

Or apply to join here:

MARA-iRacing Yahoo Group

MARA will normally run on Sunday evenings.

Cars and Tracks

Another thing that has got me fired up is the new content. The Corvette is terrific, a real challenge but also perhaps the most realistic-feeling sim car I've ever driven. I like the Dallara Indy car too, but it's so fast that it's really over my head. The 'Vette is a perfect combination of power, grip, and weight, and the tires are wonderful. I've posted a few setups in the shared folder.

As you know, Mosport is also new, and it's superb. In the Vette it drives just as I remember it from real life, except the Vette has a lot more power than my Cobra, even more than the Lotus Esprit twin turbo V8 that I drove there a few years ago. With NHMS, Watkins Glen, Lime Rock, and Summit Point also in the sim, I can now practice on every track that I have competed on in real life in recent years except Mont Tremblant.

I found the Vette to be a blast at Mosport, but at the Glen it was more challenging than I expected. It really makes you concentrate; you can hang it out a little but go too far and it will bite you. I'm looking forward to trying it at other tracks like Road Atlanta, Sears Point, and of course my old fave, Summit Point.

iSpeed Real Time Splits

The newest thing (to me, anyway) is a utility called iSpeed. This gives you a display with split times and speed and time deltas from your previous best lap (or any best lap from anyone, provided they've saved and sent you a little file with the data).

This is just as fantastic as the real-world data loggers I've used that have real-time splits/performance monitoring/whatever you call it, like the Farringdon dash in my brother Nate's Spec Miata . It is such a great learning tool! You know instantly if you've messed up a corner, or if you've really nailed one. The instant feedback really helps you hone your skill.

I've posted the current version of iSpeed and a link to the web site in the Shared folder, and the lap data from my best lap so far in the Vette at the Glen in the Shared Large folder.

iSpeed doesn't run as an overlay. You can run it one of three ways:

1. In a second monitor.
2. In your main monitor with iRacing in windowed mode.
3. In another computer or a PDA, connected across your LAN.

I'm using a second monitor. I had one lying around anyway that I wasn't using. But you can also use your laptop, set up next to your racing computer's monitor, and run a browser on the laptop and connect to iSpeed on your racing computer. The info will all display in the browser on the laptop. All is explained at the iSpeed site:

Nessoft.com iSpeed

Note that there used to be a utility called THUD which had similar functionality, but the iRacing build in early September disabled it. But since iSpeed operates outside of iRacing (rather than using the telemetry interface as THUD did), it still works and as far as I know, it's perfectly legal. iRacing has said that they will implement something similar sometime "soon," but they were saying that last year and we still don't have it. Until they do, iSpeed fills the gap admirably.

I hope you will be able to find the time to try all these new goodies. I had a terrific time this evening, and I'm looking forward to more.