I live in MA. I would prefer a more low key series if those exist here. thanks for the help
Just did two races tonight at Mosport in the F3 car hosted by Robert Wickens.
Some of the best guys online joined and had a blast.
After being about a second slower in practice than the top guys, somehow I managed to find some speed on the cold tires and put the car on pole! ā¦and then nerves and cold tires got the best of me as I sailed it off into the downhill off camber T2 right off the track. Managed to comeback up to 7th in the first race, and was running in the top 3 in the second race before some late spins cost me a good finish.
Regardless, racing with real drivers like Wickens and some of the best karting guys from around the world is always a treat.
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Congrats, Will. I bet that was a ton of fun.
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I came across this video last nightā¦ A funny compilation of pro drivers complaining about
iRacingās tire model, etc. - Language Warning!
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yep, thatās iRacing. Lockdown has been good for them, but also exposed their tyre problems.
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Yep. Buuuuutā¦ if you donāt want to accept it for what it is, its not gonna work for ya. I understand their frustration though, they donāt really have a choice.
i feel like pro drivers always complain about tires, unless theyāre a team sponsor.
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Courtesy Warren
Tyre/Tire models are the most difficult piece to model. I donāt think thereās any good active models, just passive. They require a real life lap to copy the tire bit.
You know something is weird when the āPacejka Modelā, is called the āmagic formulaā because there is no physical basis for the mathematical equations used to fit the general shape of tire force generation curves and characteristics.
IRacing have a good article for it.
My understanding is most of the F1 teams base their simulators from RFactorPro, thatās sort of telling. Just look at their client list (http://www.rfpro.com/).
But IRacing has sorted out the gaming bit, I havenāt tried it yet but I probably will.
I guess I could have bought a wheelstand, but I bought a welder instead. The results wereā¦ questionable but functional.
Youngest kid bent the frame of a small table so I chopped it down and welded it. Very, very badly 
The TV is an old 720p plasma, it actually works really wellā¦ Iām not sure if Iāll even bother with the VR headsetā¦ weāll see.
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Here comes the FOV policeā¦ 
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My rig has come a long way in the past 60 days, which is more than I can say about my iRating 
I seem to have speed to be towards the pointy end of the fields in most practice sessions but because my iRating sucks Iām in the second split which has been chaos in the 718 cayman clubsport, not quite as bad in the 991 cup car. Basically I finish at the front or I get taken out in the chaosā¦but if you win Iām the second split did you really āwinā?
The Cayman at Road Atlanta last week was so much fun. You can just bomb every curb if you want. I had some really great racing, not much in the way of chaos. Iāve been near the top 5 of my split though so I was never totally in the blender. I did have one race where I 1xād both quali laps and had to start last in class, with pace to have been on pole. The start was obviously pinball, so I had to go off to avoid the wreck, fell behind all the Audis, and had to pass 12 of them before I even could start gaining actual class positions. No incidents though, even coming through the TCR pack and passing up to 6th in the GT4 class. Racing was clean and fun.
And yes, lower split wins are wins. Those are the only ones Iāll ever get, so I gotta count 'em.
@Andy_Kutscher thatās a very nice rig! Sounds like you have gotten up to speed pretty quick. Warren @speedcraft tells me that the new tire model on pavement is good until the limit, it drops off too quick. He says the tire is good on dirt tracks but is hard to drive at the limit on pavement.
Apparently to boost irating, dont try to win. Stay in back and avoid contact. Or so I have been told.
I think the 991 cup is my favorite car now that I have a good brake pedal, it was a bear with the old G27 setup. The Cayman is quickly becoming a favorite as well. I had decent race pace with (really) high 26ās to low 27ās and felt like I saw still finding time at the end of the week.
I saw you online one night and jumped in to watch the race your pace was greatā¦looked like mid to high 26ās for the most part and very nicely executed. IDK where those aliens come from that were running 25ās in practice!
Not racing whatever track the Cayman is at this weekā¦991 cup is at Road America which is where iāll be spending most of my time.
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Clean races just give you better safety rating which is whatās used for license promotions.
iRating is basically where you finish in comparison to people with higher and lower ratings than you. Have to finish ahead of people with a higher rating than you gain iRating.
the iRating is whatās used to determine field split.
Ah that makes sense. Thank you.
Thanks man! Yeah I could do low 1:26s with a good tow, with most of my laps in the mid 1:26s. I donāt know how some of those aliens do it. I feel like my baseline setup is pretty good now though and my understanding of the car is to the point where I can start tweaking the setup to be a bit more on-edge.
Looks like Cayman is at Donington this week which I actually quite like that track too, so Iāll probably give it a shot. Itās got a great flow for the first two sectors once you get in the groove.
Otherwise Iāve been spending some time in the ARCA car which is a pretty fun series too. I also jumped back into a dirt 360 sprint race a couple days ago at Eldora which was great, minus the cautions every 2 laps.
One thing Iām noticing after getting fairly serious into iRacing again is that as a driver with real racing experience, my racecraft and consistency is helping quite a bit. I think a lot of these guys on the service are driving without that experience, and they seem to make more mistakes and they either cave at any overtaking attempt or make a mistake when battling for position. Sometimes itās scary, like when they out-brake themselves going for an overtake and bounce off your door, but if you know how to position your car to defend safely, you can really take advantage of some other driversā inexperience in door-to-door battle, and finish higher than your pace would normally allow you. Iām rarely the fastest car, but Iāve been able to battle back much faster guys who have no idea how to perform an overtake, and then just pound consistent laps while they make mistakes trying to find a way around.
Hehe 
this makes me happy. Itās nice to see an actual racing driver go āHmm. Maybe there is more correlation than I thought between irl and sim.ā
All the pros who got involved in the racing online, the only ones throwing shade were the ones who didnāt take it seriously. It is what it is and what you make of it. There are lessons to be learned in sim, regardless of how true to life it is or is not.
Well, I donāt think I ever doubted the viability of sim racing being an actual training tool for real racing, I hope I didnāt give off that vibe. Certainly, racecraft, mental strength, stress adaptation, consistency, and overall driving can be trained on a sim, some sims more than others. Sure, it will never be a direct correlation to reality in terms of vehicle/driving dynamics. iRacing has shown with some of these high-profile Indy events that real drivers have less-than-positive feedback with regards to the tire model, so when you are driving on a sim, you have to adapt to those differences. So in that respect, you canāt necessarily go from training in car X on iRacing to driving real-life car X and expect to be proficient right off the bat. And vice versa.
For sim racing, you will always be ādriving to the simā. So youāll be taking into consideration the quirks and non-realistic little tidbits that a game cannot realistically simulate compared to the real thing. Newgarden jumped into iRacing and got handled by Karam and Power and McLaughlin, guys who have put in a TON of time to learn the simās differences to real-life. Newgarden tried to drive the car like a real IndyCar and found he had to change his style a bit to compensate for iRacingās differences to reality.
But yes, Iāve always been a believer and proponent that a very good simulation game can train you for tons of racecraft aspects, even if it isnāt ideal for learning very specific vehicle dynamics. My main critiques leveled at KartKraft for example, are that although itās a very good feeling sim, things like the tuning aspect donāt feel ironed out enough yet to actually learn much in-game that could be applied to real-life. And some of the physics arenāt dialed in perfectly yet, which is all to be expected because itās still in early-access. The tire dynamics arenāt quite there yet for it to be useful as an actual substitute for real test days I donāt think. You can learn things like racing lines or the aforementioned racecraft lessons, or general kart handling, but in a kart the tire and chassis flex are so important to your speed in a real kart, that if itās not perfect, you canāt gain much in the way of usable tuning or technique data that translate to a real kart.