Archive for the ‘Pocono Raceway’ Category

Pocono Arrives!

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Pocono Raceway

Today saw the anticipated release of Pocono Raceway, the latest track in the iRacing service. The track is host to the NASCAR Sprint Cup as well as Truck series and road racers are well served by four interesting road layouts in the infield.

Called the Tricky Triangle by some, the Bermuda Triangle by others, three-cornered Pocono Raceway is utterly unique. Situated in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, the 2.5 mile tri-oval features three very different turns connected by straightaways of varying length. Turn One is banked at 14 degrees, Turn Two (aka the “Tunnel Turn”) is banked at eight degrees and Turn Three at six degrees. Pocono’s main straightaway is the longest on any North American speedway at 3,740 feet, the “Long Pond” straightaway stretches for 3,055 feet between Turns One and Two, while the run from Turn Two to Turn Three is a mere 1,780 feet.

Next Build Hints

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Steve Myers recently described some of the features that are currently scheduled to appear in the next build of iRacing, deploying sometime in November. The list is pretty large, here are some of the features mentioned :

  • Sound updates. iRacing is moving to a new sound model which should allow for more realistic effects. This should improve the immersion of the sim by a good margin.
  • Graphical updates. Work is being done on the shadows and texture lighting in the next build. I’d love to be able to enable some level of shadows as currently I run without them due to performance issues.
  • Pit repair. Basic pit repair functionality should be available. I’m not really bothered about this personally. My feelings are that if someone damages their car they should accept the severity of the damage and retire if necessary, and not try to salvage their race by nursing their damaged car to the end, even with minor damage repair.
  • Spectator mode driving. This is quite an interesting one. When you are spectating a session you will have the ability to drive your car on the same track with all the competitors – except you are a ghost car and they will not see you. Effectively you can race against people and compare pace. It’s an intriguing feature; my only concern is that without safety rating being a factor it might actually pull people away from official races, as crazy as that sounds.

On the content side of things we have :

  • Williams F1 FW31 will be available. A very anticipated car!
  • The Mazda MX5 will become to rookie road car next season and both left and right hand variants are going to be available – both for free. I’ll definitely miss the Solstice – hopefully there’ll be some way they’ll keep that car in general use.
  • Looking further afield the street stock will most likely be ready before the end of the year and is penned to become to advanced rookie oval car, replacing the advanced legends.
  • More Japanese tracks are in the pipeline – perhaps Suzuka? To be confirmed…
  • Pocono will be out this week, Dover will be ready towards the end of September and Spa may be released towards the end of 2010. If there’s one track I don’t want rushed it’s Spa.

So, quite a long list of features and the possibility of further features sneaking in. I’m probably most interested in the spectator ghost driving mode, and I really hope there’ll be a way to drive against saved replays too. It could turn out to be a useful training tool.

The build will be available end of October/beginning of November.