This week was a patience tester for me in the world of sim-racing. Road America hosted both the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup series and the Radical fixed series.
This was ideal for me as I could switch between the two cars quite easily for a little more variety while enjoying one of my favourite tracks.
However, Porsche was up first. I had a few good races finishing decently well but the first laps always seemed to involve a significant amount of carnage, I managed to survive most of the incidents but came away from the first two races with more incident points than I wanted. My safety rating didn’t like it at all.
With Porsche’s becoming a seemingly one-way trip back to a C license I tried my hand at the Radicals. A fixed setup made my life quite simple but I realised that I was around a second off the pace of the leaders. So be it, I still managed to hold onto top 10 grid slots most of the time. However, this is where my woes began.
My first three races all ended in retirements, drivers seemed unable to keep their car going in a straight line for longer than about two corners. It was infuriating – no matter how I tried to avoid other peoples’ mistakes, they seemingly always found me. I’m normally quite a calm sim racer but I must admit seeing the downright terrible first corner lunges of some individuals pushed my blood pressure up a little.
Later in the week, my patience was somewhat rewarded by multiple top 5 finishes in the Porsche Cup and my first ever win, quite a dominating one at that, beating 2nd place by 4.5 seconds and 3rd by 14.5. I finally found some solid Porsche pace and finished my last two races of the week in the top 3.
As for Radical’s, I persevered and managed to achieve a number of top 5 finishes, but not after being involved in yet more accidents.
A positive I can take away from such events was that no crash was a fault of my own, my consistency in both Porsche’s and Radical’s was good and if I managed to avoid first lap shenanigans I normally finished the race with no incident points; certainly a welcome relief for my safety rating!
My quest for a GTE setup continues into next week whilst I begin to think about the upcoming 24H of Le Mans endurance in June. I become more confident on iRacing by the day and I feel like my racecraft is improving.
The week ended on a high as the team confirmed I will be part of the LMP1 programme starting with the virtual Le Mans 24 Hours which is a whole other ball game. Watch this space!
