iRacing Fun Race - Radical @ Laguna Seca - Nov 17

[Neil H]

brilliant thank you

[spanner]

Well i'm not entirely sure how that happened but i ended up giving Oily a bit of a tap then i think he hit me back which flipped me over into the first corner So ended up 2 laps down and in a good gap so had a lonely race but a steady one until after halfway way when the bump on the exit to the 'corner after the corkscrew' corner spun me around to the inside of the last but one corner. Waited till Stew went past, tried to drive over the curb to get back onto track before and the game froze then went to a black screen with it repeating revs. First time i've had an issue with iRacing, hope i didnt cause too many problems. Loved the pace car

[Bernie Lomax]

Had a great race with Pops, pretty much all the way from start to finish altho especially so in the first two thirds of the race. I made a few mistakes and he was off like a shot.

Great driving Pops.

Congrats on the win Dave,  great pace lap after lap

[Neil H]

Thanks for the very friendly hospitality guys, i'll definately be back for more.

Had a nice battle with Brendan for the 1st half, then threw it off backwards at the bleedin kink, kept bogging down and couldnt get going with traffic coming. Then punctured a few laps later, then blew the engine 2 laps after that . At the end my new set of tyres was down to 22 LF 67 RF, so not really driving very well

Thoroughly enjoyed it all the same. Nice racing with you.

[Simon Gymer]

That was a bit of a return for me.

Renewed and downloaded all the updates just before joining. Not driven the game in any car for 4 months and straight into the twitchy Radical!

Qualified 3rd, started ok, but I soon came a cropper when I completely misjudged where I was supposed to brake for T1 on about lap 8. Brendan was in front of me and I know I'd missed the braking point by miles I tried to dive across his nose to miss him and head off into the gravel. Unfortunately I didn't manage it and whacked him hard instead. Great job me! Sorry Brendan. It must have looked like a divebomb from nowhere, but I really wasn't attempting a pass.

Anyway, that gave me my first slow tow experience as I lost 2 laps sitting in the pits waiting for the magical tow countdown to expire and then to be serviced? by the pit crew.

Got back into it and thought the best I could manage was a fastest lap, so just kept pushing hard and I see I just pipped Gizmo to the fastest lap so  .

Then later on I was actually catching Stewart for position and as we diced very close I managed to balls that up too by tapping his rear and sending him into a neat spin. Sorry about that Stewart.

I think maybe it was silly of me to join after so long out and not having the game setup ready for action etc.

There are various new options in game that seem utter nonsense to me, especially in graphics settings, e.g. the FOV calculator which gave me a ridiculous number, so I put it back to what it used to be and then there is the brake force curve calculator. Not sure what I should set that too, the difference between values wasn't apparent and I didn't get a good feel for the brakes the whole event trying different values. I would prefer to have to stamp on the brakes really hard to get them to lock up than have it so sensitive like it is by default (or used to be anyway).

Voice chat seemed very iffy. I could hear others (mostly apart from some breakup), but no matter what I tried only rarely could others hear me. Maybe I stick with TeamSpeak in future.

Finally, is it just me or is the iRacing members site 10x slower than it was 4 months ago? It took ages to download the updates too (running very slowly at 100k/sec max) and everything takes ages to access on the website.

P.S. Are we doing Radicals again? I thought we would have some of the new cars. Radicals are not my favorite car, they are like driving a skateboard.

[Dave 'Gizmo' Gymer]

Congrats on the win Dave,  great pace lap after lap

Thanks - it wasn't a total surprise, given the vast number of laps I did round Laguna in the SR8 earlier this year, where Team Shark worked very hard on setups, but I was still a bit taken aback to be on pole by a full half second.

Was't sure how the pace car was going to work but it was okay in the end, even if they did tell me to catch up at one point and the silly sausage put a wheel off in the right hander at the bottom of the hill showering me with dust. Went a bit defensive for the first few corners but pretty soon everyone had thrown themsevles off behind me; I popped in one 21 and then backed off a little bit just to avoid any accidental trips into the dirt, and to protect the tyres a little bit.

On the last few laps, with a good margin behind, I tried to pop another 21 in case Shark had got fastest lap, as I could see that though he was a lap down, he was sometimes catching me. Couldn't manage it though and the cheeky haddock snatched fastest lap.

I've just got such good feel for that car after driving it so much, I just jumped in with no practice save for the C6-R round Laguna in official practice and qualifying earlier and was immediately at home. If you stop fighting the understeer and just accept it as a signal that you're trying to go too quickly you can soon learn to drive around it, and even make use of it - on my braver laps I was throwing the car into T1 Alonso-style and letting the understeer gather it back up.

Anyway, that gave me my first slow tow experience as I lost 2 laps sitting in the pits waiting for the magical tow countdown to expire and then to be serviced? by the pit crew.

Heh heh, yeah, I got nobbled by that and lost two places in the Skippy at the weekend.

[popabawa]

That was brilliant

I think Bernie technically jumped me at the start (no overtaking before the s/f line)  but I was quite a long way back so I don't really blame him, it was my fault. The pace car was quicker than I expected and I was finding going double file a bit scary so I was hanging back a bit and ended up quite a way behind Shark.

Quite pleased to qualify 5th, the Radical isn't my best car but I love Laguna so it's worth a few extra tenths there.

Got a decent start despite dropping a place and setting in behind Bernie while the top 4 disappeared all too quickly. I know Bernie doesn't get on too well with Laguna and although he was making a few minor mistakes you could barely separate us, running nose-to-tail for the first 15 laps. I have to admit I was getting a bit frustrated but eventually Bernie put a wheel off after the left-hander running up to corkscrew and I squeaked past and pulled out a few seconds to the end of the race.

It's not often I get a podium, even in fun races so I enjoyed that immensely

Well done to Dave and Brendan, very fast and very consistent 

Also wanted to add, great drive by Truetom who kept it to within a few seconds of Bernie and I for a long time, you're picking this up WAY too fast TT!

Nice to see some old foes/friends and some new faces too tonight

Looking forward to Silverstone in 2 weeks. Yes, Radicals again Simon, some of the new guys signed up on the Radical/Silverstone free trial (and are running PnG tonight) hence why we're doing that. As well as the scheduled SKippy races there will be fun races with the Dallara, Star Mazda and Spec Racer too, all in the name of helping us decide what to race next season.

Carp! I forgot to save the replay

[Burtoner]

Hi all I would of joined if I could get a connection to the server!

Going to have to just wait till I changed ISP in the next week.

[Kerr]

Grats Dave nice win.

I was looking forward to racing as it was good fun racing it week 13 eating up those lazy DPs.

My internet connection is still dead. I've been chasing ADSL24 up all day and getting nowhere.

They have been blaiming BT and said nothing was wrong at their end.

I got fed up and called BT. The guy said I need to go through my ISP but was good enough to run tests.

He said the problem clearly exists at ADSL24s end which after a further call to ADSL24 they dispute that still.

I'm stuck in no mans land and ADSL24 seem hugely reluctant to get an engineer to have a look at it from BT.

I've got a feeling they know it's them at fault and don't want the bill.

They asked me to leave it until tomorrow before taking any more action. It's already been down since Monday afternoon.

[Dave 'Gizmo' Gymer]

Well done to Dave and Brendan, very fast and very consistent 

My lap times were anything but consistent - my lines in T1 and the Corkscrew are made up afresh every lap.

[popabawa]

Well done to Dave and Brendan, very fast and very consistently faster than me 

Fixed! lol

[Dave 'Gizmo' Gymer]

Finally, is it just me or is the iRacing members site 10x slower than it was 4 months ago? It took ages to download the updates too (running very slowly at 100k/sec max) and everything takes ages to access on the website.

I just had a look at the HTML being sent for the results page and also for a series standings page... around 500k each. Both highly compressible but the internal details are almost worth posting to The Daily WTF.

[fozzmeister]

Race was great, I held TT of for maybe 7 laps and hung onto him for about 4 more. Later he slid off but overtook me that time with ease. At one point I managed to close for a few laps but by that time I was >6secs behind. I never got de-motivated when alone this time, which is something that's been happening recently.

I think this is the first time I've not been lapped at Laguna in a long race :-)

Will race again

[Truetom]

Well done, Fozz, very close the whole time - more than watching Bernie, Pops up front I was motivated by your car in the mirror. And at least I didn't punt you off the track this time. Ok, maybe I'll do it at Magny again, if we ever race there.

Pops, what was that talk about 1:22 being average? I was sure with Q in high 1:23s I'm gonna be left behind by everybody. I guess you and Bernie were just pulling my, erm, leg then?   Was closing over a span of time, even down to 4 seconds, then Bernie got a bit bored waiting for me and just drove away.

Lots better to drive this car than the Skip. Must say I rarely succeeded to place the car into corner the way I planned, was constantly under impression I could go at least 1 sec faster. Was braking too soon, had to press the loud pedal before entering, lost time. Next time started braking just a tiny bit later and overshooted, lost more time. Somehow like the darn car was making fun of me.

[Dave 'Gizmo' Gymer]

My PB is 1:21.207 so I was pretty close to that in qualifying.