This coming weekend sees the next event in the iRacing World Tour, coinciding with the prestigious Indy 500 real world event scheduled for this Sunday 30th May. The iRacing Indy 500 takes place at 5pm (UKT) on the Saturday and will feature hundreds (probably thousands) of iRacers all competing simultaneously in their own full length virtual recreation of this famous event.
iRacing have taken an interesting approach to their race splitting for this event by deciding to use pure qualifying time as the mechanism to split the entrant list into distinct race grids (of up to 33 racers per split). This means it doesn’t matter how good your iRating is, if you can hook up a perfect qualifying attempt (4 lap average) you’ll earn a spot in the top split and be broadcast on the main iRacing website! (only the top race split gets this treatment)
It will be very interesting to see exactly how this will affect the races. Each race is going to feature 33 cars which exceptionally close qualifying times, so potentially the speed differential between the guy running 1st and the guy in 33rd is going to be tiny!
As always, my aim is to simply make it to the end with minimal damage. With no resets to rely on and spins that lead to almost-guaranteed race ending damage it may be a lot harder than it seems…
