My iRacing Career, Introduction.
So I actually write this at the end of my second week of racing in the racing sim iRacing, I’ll start posting at least once a week about my accomplishments, goals and races in iRacing since It’ll be good for my motivation. What is iRacing, why do I race in it and what’s my sim racing background?
iRacing is a car racing simulator, that will say it is a very advanced car racing “game”. I say “game” because it is too realistic and, should not really be seen as just playing around in a game like forza or project cars. iRacing is simply more than those games, it’s exclusively multiplayer, you race against other sim racers in different classes to improve your iRating (mmr/ELO) in different license groups to improve your safety rating (SR is calculated as a function of the number of incidents and laps driven) . I will probably be talking a lot about my safety rating and iRating since these two combined are basically what tells how good of a driver you are, and therefore I will use the abbreviations SR (safety rating) and iR (iRating). Your iR and SR is calculated independent of eachother after each race, a high placing in a race will grant you a lot of iR while a safe race (with few incidents) will earn you more SR, so even if you finish dead last but have 0 incidents you’ll still improve your SR as much as if you’ve finished first with 0 incidents while your iR won’t be affected by the number of incidents you have, only which position you finish in. If you want to know more about iRacing you can go to: http://www.iracing.com/overview
(I’m racing in the road series btw, or at least that’s what I’ll write about here)
So what’s my background in sim racing?
My family have always had a love for racing, ok maybe not my sister but she’s usually the odd one in my family when it comes to interests.
One of my earliest childhood memories is of my mom and dad waking me up 4 a.m. on Sunday morning and saying “Time to wake up, the race is about to begin” and us three sitting on the couch to watch the opening race of the Formula 1 season on Albert park circuit in Melbourne, Australia and hope that this will be another season where our finnish hero Mika Häkkinen will once again beat Michael Shumacher and win another championship for our home country. I honestly think that between the age of 4 to 9 i didn’t miss more than maybe 2-3 races per season tops. We just loved to watch Formula 1 and I think I have F1 to thank for my initial interest in engineering and, it’s partly thanks to F1 that i am pursuing an engineering degree today.
Anyways back to sim racing, the first racing games I got was some formula 1 game when I was like 5 years old, I also got some rally games and the Need for speed series, not much of sim racing but I took my first real steps towards sim racing when I got a ps3 and bought Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, but to me it was still just a game, even tough I only had ABS and sometimes traction control as assistance while racing, I mean I was still like 10 years old, I didn’t even know you could play it online and still used a normal ps3 controller to drive. My next step was of course when I heard of GT academy, it was the GT academy season of 2014, I was still just 17 but would turn 18 before the offline event and probably get my driving license the day after my birthday, so I tried to race the first event and actually finished in 700th place or something like that without really trying and using just a gamepad, the real qualifying event was still one month away and I made the decision that I wanted to qualify so I went to my mom, explained the situation, everything about GT academy and told her about it and the fact that it was a really low chance of me winning the whole thing but that I wanted to at least try to qualify and said that if I was going to do this I needed a real set of pedals and wheels but i was short on money, and I had to start practicing basically that very day to be able to get used to racing with a wheel beofre the qualification round. I only had like 1500 kr and a logitech g27 was about 2-2.5k, and she asked if I really belived in being able to qualify, I said yes and she bought it for me the very same day.
My parents had the room next to mine, they would always force me to go to bed/stop playing when they were going to bed b/c they couldn’t sleep with all the noise i was making if I was playing video games but during this month, after buying me the g27 they never complained, not once. I was still in high school so I had to play during the evening and usually played for 4-6 hours straight every day after school well after my parents went to bed and I am so grateful for my parents, they’ve always believed in me and supported me no matter what.
With 2 weeks left of school the qualifying round finally came and it was a dream scenario, it was the Nissan NISMO gt3 at spa, AT SPA! when I saw that I knew this one was in the bag, spa was, is and probably will alwasy be my favourite track, it’s just so fast paced and exciting, nothing beats the feeling of taking Eau Rouge flat out.
The first week of qualifying went well, I even practiced a lot in Assetto corsa, my first real racing sim, to get a better understanding of how to drive and how to be fast. I think I was at like 7th place in Sweden or something, I needed 6th or better and I knew I had much more to give. Then disaster struck, I got an email from my teacher that said that on Friday, (the last day of the qualifying event) I would have a Swedish test that I’ve failed earlier that year and I knew I had to study all week for that, now I had to choose between GT academy and my education, it was an obvious choice, I had to finish high school, I could go for GT academy next year…but It didn’t come back to Sweden after 2014. since then I’ve almost exclusively used AC as my racing sim but I haven’t raced competitively in over 3 years until now.
Me and iRacing
I have never really liked iRacing because of the whole subscription payment thingy (You actually subscribe to iRacing and it costs about $11/month) but I decided to give it a shot since it’s the place where the best of the best sim racers race, the most competitive and realistic sim racer out there. in the future I’ll post about my sim racing once a week, it’ll be a progress/update post which will be a lot shorter than this big wall of text here, I’ve already done my first 1.5 weeks so I‘ll do a week 1 post today and a week 2 post on Sunday.
