Sim Racing

I played rFactor 2 for a couple of years and raced GTEs and GT3s in the Virtual Endurance Championship and GT3 Endurance Series.

I really enjoyed the team aspect of the races and built some great friendships that have lasted even now I've taken an extended break from sim racing. The highlight every year was the 24 Hours of Le Mans - I have really fond memories of doing the night shift at 4am with the one or two other people online, knowing we had to carry the car to the morning.

I really enjoyed the multi-class racing. There was always someone in my mirrors and the first couple of times the prototypes would come to lap us each race would always be so hectic. I can vividly remember the feeling of dread being in a very intense battle at Spa, having the leaders stream past us leading up to Eau Rouge.

Another thing I loved was just racing as part of a team and the pressure of not letting me teammates down. In a weird way I enjoyed the underlying feeling of dread in the couple of days leading up to each race, the peaking in the laps before I took over the car, and then in longer races, the way the fact it didn't go away after my stint as I knew I had to get in the car again later on! Then when we'd cross the line, there was always such great relief knowing that I wouldn't have to get in again.

My team has a fair few people in it who pretty much only do the big enduro events, and it bugs me how they can not touch the sim for months and still be so dang fast 😂

I frequently run enduros in iRacing with my permanent team. I posted a Spa24 summary a while ago, where we had many little mistakes over time causing us to quit when we fell too far behind. Looking forward to the Petit LeMans at Road Atlanta later in the fall though. Also rain will be quite interesting.

I tried endurance racing a little bit in ACC and I'm not aversed doing more in the future but compared to your regular Sunday evening 1 h league races it takes a lot of commitment, not only from yourself, but also from your teammates. It's actually a lot of fun and driving 4.5 h alone when your teammates need to cancel is f'n intense.

I tend to go for more short sprint style races, preferably fixed series on iracing. I like them for that punishment factor it forces me to drive more consistently and build more spacial awareness. But I am also relatively new to sim racing without any real-life racing experience outside a couple of laps at an indoor Karting track. I'm not big on formulating strategy or setups yet as I am more focused on trying to improve/learn proper techniques in my driving so those differences can fuck with me a bit more as I'm not sure if i am just overdriving the car or if i fucked the setup. I'm sure as I get more time in the sim these preferences will change a bit, also because as it sits I don't even have an endurance races available to me yet in iracing so my only other experience is like 20min races in ACC 😅.

@ChoccyMilk that's an interesting take that I had not thought of. I always avoided longer races because it was more of a commitment, time-wise. Not that I didn't want to, but just seemed like more of a big deal. Maybe I should give longer format races a shot! I know iRacing does a nords eduros that is like 2 hour long races iirc.