Archive for February, 2009

Season 4 Week 1 Review – Lots ‘O Racin!

Monday, February 9th, 2009

With the excitement of the new build still at the forefront my mind I was eager to do a lot of racing this week. iRacing didn’t disappoint!

Star Mazda Race Results (iRacing members only!)

Had a good first race in the Star Mazda for 2009. The season started with a new track for me, Road America, and being a larger circuit I was looking forward to racing here. The track is nice to drive, with a good variety of corner types, speeds, and elevation changes.

19 cars took to the grid (one off the maximum grid size) and I began the race 8th, in a SOF of 2817. I had a good first lap, climbing to 5th and soon found myself in a very competitive gaggle of cars racing hard.

On lap 2 I made a mistake following someone closely through a corner (a fast sweeping right hander) where they slowed more than I anticipated and I didn’t slow enough and caused a gentle spin for both of us. I was able to press on with minor steering damage, and recovered a 5th place position for much of the race.

The only other moment of note was a gradual chase down of 4th, which was finalised with a nice turn 1 pass.

So a 4th place finish and 146 points – a great start to the season.

I made a small highlights reel of my first two laps, and my late pass to take 4th place :

Chevy Silverado Race Results

My Chevy Silverado Daytona International Speedway

I was a bit reticent about this first race at Daytona – it’s quite a high pressure ride and crashes/incidents are all to easy to collect. I was happy that I didn’t need to work on a setup here though, as at this superspeedway it’s all about the draft and not so much the setup.

I joined a race with no qualifying time and started 11th (last). It was a pretty good race, and a lot of fun – there was an early caution on lap 10 (I avoided the crash by a wide margin but still picked up a 4x incident) and I was one of the 3 or 4 cars who pit for fuel. The rest of the race I pottered around the back, just hoping that the race would stay green to the end. Sure enough, (somehow) we ran the rest of the way under green and I scoffed when I passed the cars ahead splutter and run out of fuel and I took a good 3rd place finish, for 123 points.

Skip Barber Race Results

Infineon

I’m also having thoughts about running a Skippy season too, but I realise that it is really unlikely I’ll put in 12 weeks of racing…. hopefully I’ll get at least 8 in but we’ll see how it pans out. The first week for the Skippy was at Infineon Long, and with a short amount of practice (10 laps or so) I was comfortably beating last seasons time by a good few tenths. I went into a race (with a high strength of field) and had a good, but uneventful race for 5th place, and 118 points.

All in all, three really good races and very high scores for week 1 (146, 123, 118)!

New colours for 2009

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The new season is upon as and I’ve updated the paintschemes of my cars for 2009. Just the road series cars have been changed, from the purple & yellow of 2008 to a black & amber for 2009.

I’ve also bought the Impala SS, the top tier stock car in the iRacing stable. I’ve had a handful of practice sessions and one fun race in it and I am extremely impressed!

This season I am going to be concentrating on the Star Mazda series first and foremost, but also trying to make a strong showing in the Chevy Silverado series on the oval side.

The Mazda will be difficult – the car has a variety of advanced setup parameters and it’ll take more time than ever before to get a really well matched setup. Same thing with the trucks really, in order to do it justice I need to be able to develop my own setups to make it fulfilling.

One big change for 2009 is that I think I am going to go back to the ‘one race and done’ approach to each racing week. I think I enjoyed doing that for the Solstice season more than I enjoyed the ‘multiple races per week’ approach of the Skippy season.

My goals for this upcoming season are :

  1. Finish Mazda series with more than 800 points
  2. Get a win in the Mazda
  3. Compete in at least eight racing weeks with the Silverado truck
  4. Lead at least a single lap in the oval discipline (it STILL eludes me!)
  5. Achieve a B 4.99 rating in both road and oval disciplines
  6. Have an ‘incident per race’ stat of less than 2.0
  7. Finish the season with an iRating above 3000

A lot of goals there – the hardest one will be the ‘inc per race’ stat. The Mazda races are longer so more chance to mess up!