This weeks 24 Heures du Fun was a combination of the late model at Virginia International Raceway – full layout.
It proved to be a fantastic mixup, and once a decent road going setup was found the late model comes to life on road courses. VIR is a great track in any car, but the late model just felt so awesome here – it definitely is a car that needs more road racing matchups in future 24HdF events.
I uploaded a small video of the start of the first race of the day :
 |
|
|
 |
Quite a good week for me this week – managed to squeeze in a race in three different series.
Skip Barber – Infineon IRL
Joined the strongest grid I’ve ever raced (SOF was 3447!) and basically set about not coming last! Had a good, fun, race with some close dicing at points and finished 7th out of 10th which I was actually very satisfied with. The winner took 215 points!
Chevy Silverado – Lowe’s
Needing to complete my fourth official race in season 4 (in order to qualify for the oval B licence) I joined a Lowe’s race early in the week. So far all the truck races have been exhilerating – the immersion is like nothing else in iRacing. The races are harder and more strenous than anything else I’ve raced and I was genuinely scared at several moments in the race! Unfortunately I had a few incidents here, one 4x that was my fault and another when I could not avoid a crash ahead. Finished 7th of 14 though in a strong field and scored 109 points. My B licence is sorted!
Late Model – Stafford
Ugh. Had a setup that was horrendously slow to the top times and could not get close to the pace (was almost 1 second off the times), but went into a race anyway as I had only seven scoring weeks at this point. Had a safe but ultimately forgettable race and finished 4th out of 11, taking 65 points.
So all in all a good week of racing – 3 good races and 2 were incident free. Currently sitting on dual 4.99 C licences (partly due to the clean races, partly due to the recent rating changes by iRating to make it easier) but I’m looking forward to seeing how they convert to B licence values.
We enter week 13 next week and welcome the two new A level cars to the service – can’t wait!
|
 |
 |
Had a great race at Summit Point this week – really starting to love this track and especially this car/track combo. I did the bare minimum race preparation, just running a quali session and diving straight into the race (a full field of 14 entrants). I started 3rd and got off to a good start, keeping pace with the top two early on. One of the leading cars fell off the track leaving the rest of race for me to battle for the lead.
Race Results (iRacing members only!)
iRacing Skip Barber Week 3 @ Summit Point Full from Samiad on Vimeo.
It was a great chase that lasted many laps. Coming into lap 16 the leader made a mistake in the final turn and I was able to snatch the lead and hold on for the win, setting a new PB in the process. One of the more enjoyable iRacing races for sure!
I dipped into a few other series this week too; namely the late model and chevy silverado series. I am still on track for completing a full LM season and this week I spent some time actually trying to make my own setup. A mixed affair, as I still don’t understand all the basics… there are times when a change gives me the opposite results but that’s true in real racing I guess. For some reason my late model races are netting me around 73 points exactly each time… weird!
My first truck race was memorable too – the batteries in my wireless mouse expired literally the exact moment I moved the pointer over the race ‘join’ button! Literally. Mouse was moving fine all day, and the exact moment I move to join the race… nothing! I thought the PC had frozen but soon enough I was searching my room for a spare mouse before cannibilising a remote control for the AA batteries, and luckily I joined the race with one minute left in warmup.
A really enjoyable race with a nice bit of strategy and planning, and long green runs. 3 cautions and 2 pitstop saw me finish 7th in a field of 16 – really good fun throughout. Given the setup work and intensity of the long racing I think when I run a full truck season I’ll have to do a single race a week… the races are seriously hard going!
Truck Race Results (iRacing members only!)
Late Model Race Results (iRacing members only!)
Finally, the divisions are out for all the racing series in iRacing and as expected I’m bucketed into division 1. Cool to be in the top bracket, but clearly going to struggle to make top 20, let alone top 3 this season!