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Yesterday saw the public doors open to iRacing and the first of the ‘uninvited customers’. As of today there are some 4200 accounts in the community and around 2700 of them raced last week. The iRacing press release mentions ‘thousands of new members’ so it should be interesting to see this number grow over the next few weeks and months. The more the merrier!

In other news I did my weekly Advanced Solstice race on Monday, and it was probably a mistake. I had finished my setup (or near enough) and run about 200 laps in practice and time trial. I wasn’t feeling especially fast really, my average laptime was around 60.2 seconds. The problem started when I saw that a quali session was starting up, and as I like to race with some real traffic I thought I would join that instead of starting a practice session (which would be empty). So I entered the quali and found myself lapping consistently, with a few sub 60 second laps, and a quali time of 59.699 which was pretty high up the rankings.

So with that in mind I decided to hop straight into a race session, riding the laptime high of the previous session.

Unfortunately I wasn’t quite at the pace that I wanted to be and my race pace was a touch over 60.1 seconds. I started on pole and lapped consistently, if not rapidly (I was giving the final corner a lot of respect) but on lap 18 I made a mistake which saw me half spin and lose the lead. Kudos to the second place guy because he narrowly dodged me and we avoided incident points.

I was pretty distracted in the few corners immediately after and made a slight mistake which affected my exit of another high speed corner and I lost 2nd soon after, despite feeling I had the speed to keep him behind. Despite this, I had an enjoyable final six laps and could put some pressure on 2nd, which saw him out of shape and a bit rattled. Not enough laps left, however, and I finished 3rd.

I was still pleased with the result although I knew I’d not get much for 3rd in a field where I was ranked #1, but still I netted 92 points. Given the fact I’m not in love with Jefferson @ Summit Point I think I’ll accept my weekly points tally and not race again this week. I think it was a mistake to race so early in the week, and I think if I had ran more laps I could have a race pace of under 60 seconds easily (I’m still taking the final corner way too slow).

I’ll put in a few more laps yet, working towards a good time trial result, and will put in some Skippy practice at Lime Rock Park. Next week the Solstice series rotates around to the week 1 track which is Summit Point Full Circuit and the home of my highest ever points tally….