Archive for August, 2011

iRacing World Tour 2011 – Belgian Grand Prix

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Close encounters at the final chicane

The next event in the iRacing 2011 World Tour recreates the Formula One Belgian Grand Prix. Run on the same weekend as the real world series, this event sees the first time that the iRacing FW31 is used in a World Tour event.

Last years World Tour had a similar event to coincide with the British Grand Prix but unfortunately the FW31 wasn’t released fast enough to be used, so we used the Lotus 79 for a classic style event (my race writeup for that event is here).

363 racers participated in the event, forming 14 individual race events. I started 10th in my split (the fourth split). I was pretty concerned about getting wrecked in turn one (especially as I had been looking forward to this race for a long time and had put a lot of practice in) and sure enough it was a very messy start. Luckily I picked my way through the spinning cars and no-one hit my car.

I settled into what turned out to be a really enjoyable race. I had decided to go for a one stop strategy and it turned out that a lot of the field had chosen two stop strategies. So as the race progressed the cars that drove away into the distance at the start eventually came back into play once the pit stops had worked their way out.

In the final third of the race I checked the race order and found that I was in a very good position – all the cars ahead of me had another stop to make. Sure enough, I soon found myself in first place with a 10+ second lead, and brought it home for a very memorable win!

Belgian Grand Prix results (iRacing members only!)

Started :
10th of 26
Finished : 1st, 142 points (1 incident pt)
iRating : +50
Safety Rating : A/4.98 (+0.34)

There is a similar World Tour event in October to coincide with the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka – a great track.

Racing Rivals v1.2.2 released

Friday, August 5th, 2011

An updated version of Racing Rivals was released today featuring support for the latest version of the iRacing membersite (2011 Season 3 build).

The update is required in order to support the latest implementation of the iRacing friend/studied lists feature. Download the latest version 1.2.2 of Racing Rivals here.

I am also working on the feature list for the next major version of Racing Rivals which will include a wider variety of graphs and statistics reporting, along with bugfixes and sought after improvements. Look for that release later this year.

Finally, Racing Rivals is the product of hundreds of hours of development and maintenance, and is provided completely free of charge to the iRacing community. If you have found Racing Rivals useful, please consider donating to assist continued development – thanks!