Archive for November, 2008

Week 3 – Close racing at Summit Point and my Trucks debut

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
My Helmet Design Summit Point Raceway Phoenix International Raceway

Had a great race at Summit Point this week – really starting to love this track and especially this car/track combo. I did the bare minimum race preparation, just running a quali session and diving straight into the race (a full field of 14 entrants). I started 3rd and got off to a good start, keeping pace with the top two early on. One of the leading cars fell off the track leaving the rest of race for me to battle for the lead.

Race Results (iRacing members only!)


iRacing Skip Barber Week 3 @ Summit Point Full from Samiad on Vimeo.

It was a great chase that lasted many laps. Coming into lap 16 the leader made a mistake in the final turn and I was able to snatch the lead and hold on for the win, setting a new PB in the process. One of the more enjoyable iRacing races for sure!

I dipped into a few other series this week too; namely the late model and chevy silverado series. I am still on track for completing a full LM season and this week I spent some time actually trying to make my own setup. A mixed affair, as I still don’t understand all the basics… there are times when a change gives me the opposite results but that’s true in real racing I guess. For some reason my late model races are netting me around 73 points exactly each time… weird!

My first truck race was memorable too – the batteries in my wireless mouse expired literally the exact moment I moved the pointer over the race ‘join’ button! Literally. Mouse was moving fine all day, and the exact moment I move to join the race… nothing! I thought the PC had frozen but soon enough I was searching my room for a spare mouse before cannibilising a remote control for the AA batteries, and luckily I joined the race with one minute left in warmup.

A really enjoyable race with a nice bit of strategy and planning, and long green runs. 3 cautions and 2 pitstop saw me finish 7th in a field of 16 – really good fun throughout. Given the setup work and intensity of the long racing I think when I run a full truck season I’ll have to do a single race a week… the races are seriously hard going!

Truck Race Results (iRacing members only!)

Late Model Race Results (iRacing members only!)

Finally, the divisions are out for all the racing series in iRacing and as expected I’m bucketed into division 1. Cool to be in the top bracket, but clearly going to struggle to make top 20, let alone top 3 this season!

My Skip Barber RT2000My Chevy Silverado

Week 2 – Getting Lost at VIR Full

Thursday, November 20th, 2008
My Helmet Design VIR

Bit late with this (well, last) weeks update, but I had an interesting week – as I mentioned previously VIR is a completely new track for me so I had to spend a lot of time learning the course before taking to the track. In the end I was able to manage a handful of races, and all were pretty good.

I was soundly beat in my first race however, as I was really unlucky to be put in a field where just about everyone was running 2:11′s…. that was a pretty brutal introduction to VIR. I finished 9 of 12, in a race where seemingly no-one made a mistake.

Eventually I ran more races, generally improved my pace (dipped into the 2:12′s on occasion) and netted some solid top half finishes and will take 101 points into week 3.

Here’s a collection of highlights from this weeks racing…nothing special. In the first clip I made the legendary mistake of using the guy in front as my braking point….I brake at the correct point, notice he’s going far deeper into turn one, mistakingly think that I can go a bit further so I come off the brakes, and yes, I end up following him off the track…. nice!

Additionally I managed to reach an SR of C 4.99, which was one of my preseason goals…. keeping it is another story altogether….

My Skip Barber RT2000

GameVee.com loses my racing vids… (and then recovers them…)

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

My Helmet Design

Unfortunately GameVee.com (the video hosting site I use for my iRacing videos) has relaunched as GotGame and it appears they haven’t ported their previous gaming videos over. Nice of them to tell us all!

Long and short of it is that all my previous hosted vids at GameVee have now ‘disappeared’ from my posts.

I use Vimeo & GameVee and I would have put money on Vimeo being the first to take my racing vids down, but what do I know!?

In the future I’ll have to use Youtube along with Vimeo…. lower quality, but hopefully more reliable.

EDIT (20/11) – And they’re back! Phew!! Must have been a server blip or something…

EDIT (01/03) – Aaaaand they’re gone…. for good. All of the posts prior to this will no longer have the videos embedded, so might look a bit odd. Oh well!