That feels oddly familiar. 
If I hit 5.00 SR on the nose, do I get a Prize? 
Haha I need to do some SR farming
A very fun race that was almost a Cinderella story dressed in slicks.
I was driving the race of my life, having qualified 10th, but found myself slicing through the field, all the way up to 3rd.
I pass third, but in the subsequent turn, he turns into me and spins me out. In my haste to straighten out and get going, I get plowed into. My bad for being rushed and screwing up someone’s else’s race.
Then, entering the pits, they toss me a 30s penalty for going the wrong way. You cannot win sometimes.
It felt a bit ungenerous of the dude who spun me after being passed so decisively. I had been on him for a while, and he defended, but my pace was clearly faster, and I got by cleanly. It was sad he couldn’t just accept the setback and try to regain it the normal way. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. To be fair, it worked out for him. He was able to continue with only a minor loss of momentum!
Despite the unimpressive finish, it was a very good race, indeed. This one is action-packed, with lots of position changes and narrowly avoided wrecks. Enjoy!
Today I kind of went full race marathon, about 600 laps of racing:
7pm: Q3, P5, 0 incidents
10pm: Q5, P4, 0 Incidents
12am: Q7, P3. 4 incidents
1am: Q8, P7, 4 incidents
2am: Q8, P3, 0 Incidents
3am: Q9, P7, 2 incidents
4am: Q7, P9, 0 incidents
5am: Q2, P2, 0 incidents
6am: Q10, P9, 4 incidents
I think only one car was destroyed in the process. Only other contact was a minor rear-ender at low speed in formation lap. Most of the incidents were rules related, in the darn pits, not crashes or spins.
Here’s a fun moment, from an earlier race:
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I didn’t know you could get incident points in the pits! For what?
Hehe 4.99 is the highest you can go, guess you figured that out already
Should be back in the saddle tomorrow
Nice racing, but bruh, you need to sleep!
Maybe I am wrong. Recalling the races, I thought the incidents might have been track related because I kept getting small 30S penalties related to driving in pit infractions. Other than that, I kept my nose clean and did no bonking.
It took a while to understand why I kept getting blacked flagged for speed in pits. It is really unclear if you aren’t an Oval racer with how to get in and out of pits, either.
Back for more simming today. I thought about driving to GoPro but the weather seemed a bit iffy and I woke up too late.
Between a mixture of me being sloppy and overdriving trying to find more time I had a pretty lackluster day. I had more off-tracks than I wanted, but those days are part of it.
I also got in about 25 laps at AMP on the full course in what rfactor 2 calls a Jr Kart, which is a 20hp 2 stroke. Seems like it’s basically a KA100. This was my first time driving the full AMP layout. Switching to the kart from cars was a bit of a shock at first along with trying to learn AMP. There’s a lot of the track you can’t see and just have to know. I did get down to a low 56 which seems to be about 3 seconds slower than the good times. I can’t wait to drive this track IRL!
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Race 1: DQ because you bastards punted me, Twice!
This is the part of Iracing that sucks. I got rear-ended early on, but survived and was able to continue racing hard. Then, 30 laps in, a guy punts me again. So I am DQ. Yay.
Race 2: Sent down to the Minors, gets a Win!
I got to run amuck in the bottom split. I guess this was a result of the Irating ding from the DQ. I improved a lot this week, apparently. This bottom split is where I lived most of this week. It’s a dangerous but entertaining place.
Nice to get a win, even if it was sort of a lay up.
I closed out the week with another top split podium (3rd) and a really nice SR/IR to show for all the work:
Amp seems like an amazing track irl as well as in sim. Looks like Oliver Piatek races there regularly. It’s definitely a great track in Kartkraft as well.
Amp is unusually long and hilly. It appears to be one heck of a ride. To me it’s part the experience and part the location that makes it special. The fact that it is what it is and totally unique. It’s got crazy elevation changes, overly long straights etc. it’s gorgeous. I am hoping to go there this month, if I can arrange it.
Found the other lunatics:
Mr. Yamagata has a thing or two to reach me with his 220 starts and 17 wins. Odd that there are only 4 with over 100 Starts.
169 starts?! Do you sleep?
I do at most like 3-5 races a month. 169 starts in 5 weeks is 33.8 starts a week. If you figure it’s about an hour between races in these lower classes, you’ve got a full-time job as a sim racer. Congrats Dom!
It’s interesting that Mr. Yamagata has 51 more starts than you, but only 166 more laps. I guess he bails if he has any problems, but when you have problems, you just keep working the problem. 
It also Could be that he’s week 8 and I am week 5. This week was 13.5 second laps! A full race was 66 laps!
So where’s the damn money?
Yes I am aware this is extreme. But, it IS to character. This is how I get good. Or as good as I am capable of being which means I have to work.
The challenge with being “normal” is that I’d much rather be exceptional. I don’t have the natural talent for it to come super easy, alas.
That being said, working at it like I do has allowed me to become pretty competent pretty quickly!
I think that motorsports is learnable, like anything else. How quickly you learn is a function of natural ability and seat time.
I can’t do a thing about what was given to me ability wise but I can outwork and therefore, ultimately, out drive most people.
The question I do not have a satisfactory answer for is why do I do this?
Mostly, it’s just fun.
Yes I do. It’s all there streamed and stored.
I do not quit in a race, ever. You would be insane to do so. The embarrassment makes you want to crawl into your shell and hide. (Also, you have to wait an hour to try again, so might as well drive it out).
Don’t. Eyes forwards. Drive.
You will make up spots, others will also make mistakes, you can finish this and be proud of what you accomplished after your mistake.
Tj didn’t tell me this directly but I sorta deduced it along the same line as his no window shopping rule. It’s an absolute rule in racing, just like the no window shopping rule. No quit. Ever. Finish race.
In this case, no. I played till 5am. Slept 4 hours. Did more racing. It is interesting racing when your body wants to sleep. Surprisingly doable. Sign me up for Le Mans.
Or another way of looking at it is 5 races a day for 35 days, which is easy. You show up at 11:58 and are done by 12:30. Do that 2-3 times weeknights and backfill the rest when you can go whole hog.
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Akchooly, I thought about this. Here’s why:
Mastery: it’s what I am chasing.
I define mastery as that place where you drive completely intuitively, where you don’t second guess yourself, you don’t worry about the potential of each turn, you just do it.
There are stages to it that you have to go through, I think, to get there, but it (mastery) is ground out. There are no shortcuts.
In order to get to a point where you are comfortable with the car and your skills, it has to stop being a novel experience. It has to become like your underwear, you don’t notice you are wearing any until you think about it. 
Familiarity is the name of the game, here.
I find that the learning progression looks like this:
1: Drive the car
In this phase, you are getting used to the vehicle.
- Drive the Line
In this phase, you’ve got the greater car control figured out. Here you are looking for the fast line.
- Drive the track
You’ve got the car under you, you have a workable fast “base” line. Now you are free to move about the cabin. This is where you get fast. You start finding the subtle bits.
So, if I want to be fast, I kind of need to drive a lot. It gets me to step 3 quickly. For context, mon-thursday was steps 1 and 2. Friday I “woke” and was a new driver. Fast, free and confident in my ability to navigate the USF round Southern National.
And, Friday is when I went from surviving to hunting, btw. There is an attitude change that comes with car confidence, an ability to race, to think and act decisively. That’s necessary to do well in a race and all the practice and repetition seeds that required confidence.
Do you do rentals there or do you own a kart? I ask because I want to head to NC end of month. Are they doing rentals yet? Do you have a contact there I could talk about setting up a test day of sorts? I am guessing g they sell 2 and 4 stroke so maybe I can do race rentals.
I drive concession rentals at GoPro. I don’t have a place to store a kart and I’m planning to buy a house with a garage or shed for toys this year. I’ll buy a kart then.
GoPro does concession rentals year round so there’s no worry about that. Do check the calendar on their website as they have some days blocked off for club races and some days where the track is closed to owner karts. I’m not 100% sure, but I think those rental only days are on the Sundays after Saturday club races.
Kart sport North America has a location on-premises but I’m not sure if they rent real race karts. Unfortunately I don’t have anyone’s contact info there, it’s about a 2 hour drive so I’m not a regular.
IIRC you are in the Northeast so AMP is a lot farther than GoPro. I believe AMP does rent race karts for lapping but it’s hard to find concrete info on that. @olivier.p might know more since he’s at AMP frequently.
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ya amp rents out race karts i’m pretty shure kartsport does rentals to but i’m not shure