Laguna Seca is one of my favourite (if not THE favourite) track in iRacing and I can just about race any car there and enjoy it. What better venue for me to try a race in iRacings newest car, the Spec Racer Ford?
Ten laps practice and straight into a race saw me start from 5th for the short 11 lap sprint race. I had a great start and moved up to third before a bad mistake at turn 6 and spun, rejoining in 6th.
I was determined to recover some positions and had a really memorable battle back to second place.
A really lively car that’s very rewarding to drive – I’ll be planning on getting some more races in both here at Laguna and next week at Lowe’s road course.
Season 2 of 2009 got off to a poor start with my first Nationwide Impala race in iRacing. This race was actually one of the ‘Race of the Week’ events that iRacing publicise (to try and get large grids) but with just 24 entrants it’s quickly losing any sense of grandeur as an event.
As an experiment I spent a few hours working on a setup and once I was into the race I found that it was pretty good – I was just a few tenths behind the fastest guys (who were amongst the fastest in iRacing). I was hoping for a good result.
Unfortunately it was not to be. Relatively early on I had to reset for a brand new car when someone spun on pit road and their car spun onto the track. If you check the (somewhat funny) replay below you’ll notice that the majority of the car was hidden behind my A-pillar and I had quite a shock when the car veered into my view! 4x and a reset later…
The rest of the race went pretty good – really long green runs. I had another 4x given out when someone veered into me (sigh) but the real race breaker was when I decided to make a green flag pit. We’d been racing under green for over 40 laps and with < 50 to go I decided to take a gamble and get fresh rubber, and a fuel load that would see me through to the end. The field were spread out now and as the race wasn't a yellow fest I thought it was a pretty safe bet. One lap later a yellow came, and I was one lap down for the rest of the race - oh well! Finished in 15th, so one of my worst results to date. In a few weeks resets will be taken away so had that been the case here my race would have ended on lap 13 so it's not all bad.
Here's a short highlight clip of the two hits I had during the race.