Another round in the ‘Real Vs. Virtual’ series, visiting an older track in the iRacing range – Texas Motor Speedway. Thanks to Jay Bonvouloir for once again allowing use of his photos for use in this series.
Check out the comparison video :
Source images can be seen by clicking here and you can also see the previous sets in the series by clicking here.
A lot of luck is needed to get through these iRacing special events as anything can happen at any part of the track and at any time. The guys who make it to the end of, let’s say the iRacing Daytona 500 for example, demonstrate both a measurable level of skill as well as a good amount of sheer luck.
My split for the Indy 500 saw me start the race 5th. A very decent starting position, given that it meant that any mishaps would ‘probably’ take place behind me. And so it turned out, as the early cautions were safely away from me.
However one of the more risky aspects of racing here is the need for cars to catch up to the pace car under yellow. The track is so long that people regularly accelerate to 200mph (even under yellow) as they strive to catch the pace car as quickly as possible. This can cause absolute chaos when people catch the pace line and realise they have to slow down – immediately.
Unfortunately despite my ‘safe’ race position it didn’t help me in the following incident (a race ending incident for me). A competitor made a large error of judgement when catching the pace line and ploughed through a number of cars, with me being the final car. I didn’t notice any damage initially, but once under green it was clear my race was over as the rear wheel was knocked out of alignment and the car was undriveable. A shame to end the race, one day I’ll finish one of these oval special events…
Started : 5th of 33 Finished : 24th, 183 laps down, DNF (4 incident pts) iRating : -58 Safety Rating : A/3.23 (-0.24)
The next race in the iRacing World Tour is the Nationwide Impala at Road America – definitely looking forward to this one! With three DNFs from the last three oval World Tour events I’m relieved to be back racing a road event!
This coming weekend sees the next event in the iRacing World Tour, coinciding with the prestigious Indy 500 real world event scheduled for this Sunday 30th May. The iRacing Indy 500 takes place at 5pm (UKT) on the Saturday and will feature hundreds (probably thousands) of iRacers all competing simultaneously in their own full length virtual recreation of this famous event.
iRacing have taken an interesting approach to their race splitting for this event by deciding to use pure qualifying time as the mechanism to split the entrant list into distinct race grids (of up to 33 racers per split). This means it doesn’t matter how good your iRating is, if you can hook up a perfect qualifying attempt (4 lap average) you’ll earn a spot in the top split and be broadcast on the main iRacing website! (only the top race split gets this treatment)
It will be very interesting to see exactly how this will affect the races. Each race is going to feature 33 cars which exceptionally close qualifying times, so potentially the speed differential between the guy running 1st and the guy in 33rd is going to be tiny!
As always, my aim is to simply make it to the end with minimal damage. With no resets to rely on and spins that lead to almost-guaranteed race ending damage it may be a lot harder than it seems…