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.

• 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.

I’m looking forward to seeing an extended clip of the car being driven from the cockpit, but in the absence of such footage this teaser more than suffices.

I missed this weeks racing at VIR in the Skippy – I spent far too much time racing the Impala B at Watkins Glen (in the new fixed setup series).

Number 11 in the series is from Road America. Thanks again to Jay Bonvouloir for his generous permission to use his excellent source photography.

The iRacing recreations come by way of the iRacing Road America 200, which was a special race event in the 2010 iRacing World Tour. You can read my post on the iRacing Road America 200 by clicking here.

A static page containing all the source images can be seen here, and you can see the previous sets in the series by clicking here.

The iRacing Williams FW31

It’s not out for at least another three months but a recent preview in the latest InsideSimRacing episode had a very interesting segment on the AT&T Williams FW31. The graphical model appears complete and the car is driveable in sim which is a good sign.

I was wondering what variant of the FW31 we’d get and it appears to be the early season model / Australia GP. The car should be available to drive as we start the next season (2010 season 4).

I caught up to him swiftly during a practice session and set about trying to pressure a pass, or to try and force a mistake. Taking advantage of it being a practice session, I drove more aggressively than I would during a race. It was a lot of fun setting up runs (faking moves right then diving to the left) but I was quite surprised by some of the dubious defending I saw. His repertoire included :

• Weaving to break the tow
• Blocking/multiple lane changes (I go inside, he blocks the inside, I move outside, he blocks outside)
• Chopping me off when I have pulled level on the inside (spotter had called out)
• Finally colliding with me when I had the inside line

Now with it being an open practice session I didn’t mind the manner of the driving as I had fun attempting the moves but after the collision he actually started insulting me! Now I realise I was driving somewhat aggressively but the only reason I was driving in that manner was purely down to the extent of the blocking – I was having a fun battle (also, I would not try a pass at turn 6 in a race!).

Had it been an official race I would almost certainly have protested any one of a number on his moves, (e.g. the clear blocking, to name but one).

Am I wrong? Was the defending acceptable? Feel free to post your thoughts in the YouTube clip.

I find that I can understand how things work much better when I can get a visual reference for what is going on. I only had a very rough idea for how a gearbox works so I spent the morning seeking some good visual representations for what goes on when you try and force a gear change in various gearboxes.

This link is the best one I’ve found so far – posting here as a permanent reminder for myself as I’ll definitely revisit it again and again!

Car Bibles – Transmission Bible

Intense battling in the late stages of the Brickyard 400

iRacing.com Brickyard 400 results (iRacing members only!)

The next event in the iRacing World Tour has come around already (second event in the month of July!) and this time it was the virtual recreation of a popular NASCAR event, the Brickyard 400. The race sees the top tier NASCAR Sprint Cup racing at the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway for 160 laps of high adrenaline action.

The event was scheduled at a pretty unpleasant time (01:30am) but as I have raced in every 2010 event so far, I made the choice to race and I’m very glad I did.

As suggested in a recent post I decided to avoid the early mishaps by starting from the pitlane, despite being gridded 5th in my split (which was the 4th highest split of the 11 splits). I’ve had such terrible results in the previous oval World Tour events that I set my goal at just lapping at the very back and just seeing what happens. A lot of drivers crash out and retire in these events, so I was just hoping to gain the positions from the retirees and leaving it at that.

The plan worked pretty well. In the early stages of the race everyone was extremely co-operative and willing to give room and it seemed most everyone was on the same page in realising it was a long race and there was no value in racing hard from the get-go. When the inevitable wrecks happened I generally had plenty of space and crept through the carnage unscathed. Mostly.

The first half of the race I stayed in positions 25th to 30th biding my time and then I started to slowly gain track position in the second half. As the laps unwound the field became more racy and I picked up some damage on lap 121 when my car was clipped whilst evading a wrecking car. I had worked my way up to 11th (I was positioning my car for the end-game) but the damage was severe enough for me to use up my one and only reset. Once restored, I had a great car again and it fared well compared to the rest of the field who had already used their resets and taken further knocks.

The last 30 laps were very intense – everyone was firmly in ‘race’ mode and no quarter was given. It made the race quite messy with yellows following yellows but in the short green laps in between the racing was fantastic.

I had an exhilarating battle in the dying laps and was able to finish 4th as we crossed the line for the last time.

Started : pitlane (was gridded 5th initially)
Finished : 4th, 113 points (8 incident pts)
iRating : +66
Safety Rating : A/3.30 (+ 0.07)

The next world tour event takes place on August 14 and features the Tour Modified at Thompson Speedway.