Archive for the ‘Dover’ Category

Dover released!

Monday, October 4th, 2010
Dover International Speedway

Miles the Monster greets racefans at Dover International Speedway

Another month, and another new iRacing track – this time an oval. Here’s what the official iRacing membersite has to say about this unique oval.

They don’t call it the Monster Mile for nothing. And it’s not just because there’s a 46 foot tall, muscle-bound statue outside the gates named “Miles the Monster”.

No, Dover International Speedway is a real monster of a race track. Exactly one mile in length, Dover has some of the most extreme banking (24 degrees) on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series circuit. Even the straights are banked at nine degrees. Did we mention Dover is one of only two Sprint Cup tracks (along with Bristol Speedway) that features concrete pavement the whole way ’round?

Dover is also unique in that the track is part of a larger sports and entertainment complex that includes a hotel, gaming casino and harness racing track. But it’s the mechanical ponies – as in the 750 horsepower NASCAR Sprint Cup Series machines and their sibling NASCAR Nationwide Series and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series racers – that grab the motorsports fans’ attention twice a year. Up to 140,000 people from the Mid-Atlantic and beyond flock to the track for two big NASCAR weekends in the Spring and Fall.

Constructed between 1967 and ’69, Dover International Speedway was initially paved with asphalt. It wasn’t until 1995′s comprehensive revamp that the track was paved in concrete, giving Dover’s racing surface its distinctive white appearance – albeit with many shades of grey and black after a weekends worth of rubber is laid down! No matter the pavement, Dover has long been one of the msot competitive tracks on the NASCAR schedule. From 1969 through ’80, 21 of the 22 Cup races at Dover International Speedway were won by drivers who either already had or would go on to win championships in NASCAR’s top series.

The names of those winners are part of the fabric of the sport – Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Benny Parsons and Darrell Waltrip. Allison and Petty rank first on the all-time winner’s list at Dover International Speedway with seven victories apiece. More recently, Jimmie Johnson (six), Jeff Gordon (four), Mark Martin (four) and a host of other stock car legends have added their names to the list of Dover International Speedway’s winners, a list that also includes Scott Sharp and Greg Ray, who each won a race during Dover’s cameo appearance on the Indy Racing League calendar in the late 1990′s.

Next Build Hints

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Steve Myers recently described some of the features that are currently scheduled to appear in the next build of iRacing, deploying sometime in November. The list is pretty large, here are some of the features mentioned :

  • 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.