i havent raced since the 2.4 so im so rusty. havent had any time to practice either, so its gonna be an.... interesting race for me

Fun times in the Miata race! Only 3 screwups. One early on that I don't remember, downshifting to 1st and lunching engine, and a spin in T4 that didn't go off track!

Even managed a personal best lap late-ish into the race :D.

Probably won't make the feature race tonight, need to eat and nap before hockey, but I'll try to make it for GT race tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who attended the races today and tonight. That was a blast, and having a 13-car field at Suzuka made things far more interesting than I was expecting. Highlights of the night streams are on my Twitch channel, and I'll have recaps...well, once I catch up on my season one recaps. It's been a long 2014 thus far, thanks to work, but I'm hoping to crank out another recap or two tomorrow.

I've got hope for this Formula Duder series. It might be going somewhere at this rate. Let's hope BOMBCAR and the rest follow its lead.

That was a lot of fun today :D

Picked a crappy day to sit out the Miata race (took a nap) as Drew was there. Hopefully we'll see more of him.

Fun time at Suzuka! Possibly my cleanest race so far, but that pink car was too quick for me. Nice run @davyc412; we were the same pace for the whole race it seemed. Difference between our average lap time was only 0.087

Yep, great day of racing.

Some crazy fun in the VinnCo Miata race and, like Mouse, I think the cleanest race I've ever had in Formula Duder. I hope the few newcomers we had in FD today decide to stick around The more competitors, the better.

Damn, Drew was in the Miata race? That's pretty awesome but now I'm kicking myself for skipping it. I'll have to settle with living vicariously through Pseg's Twitch broadcast.

@mouse: yep, it was pretty awesome. i saw you inching away every lap, but it always felt like i was close enough to be right on you if a mistake was made, which made for some pretty intense racing :)

Suzuka was my worst race yet, first retirement I've ever had.

Summit Point was fun and at least I came together with THE Drew Scanlon, otherwise I could've had a shot at the win. The finish between me and @khann was pretty crazy and fun too. Never would've been so agressive in a smaller car though :D

@iron1c:

Can't help but feel I contributed a little when I slammed into you broadside on lap 3. I misjudged which way you were headed after the spin, I probably should have slowed up instead of trying to sneak through. I was doing alright before that, overtook a few people. Looking forward to getting better!

Since this is going to start off the season for me, I'm going to do a hosted 2 hour practice session at Daytona, starting in 20 minutes. Everyone's free to join!

dam i guess i should have checked here first i just posted one as well lol

I think we're in for a pretty awesome GBGT race today.

I really hope so. I've got another 1/2 second or so in me, I just need to hit those low speed, late apex turns better. After watching @iron1c in the hosted session, I realized I wasn't starting wide on turn 1. Gained about a second there. Hopefully we have a big turnout.

That turns becomes so much less "shit your pants" when you start taking a wide entry.

@khann: Story of my life.

Also, @maxx77, you might take a look at Matt Orr's youtube channel. I'll usually use him as a baseline for figuring out track lines and that kind of thing. He's significantly faster than me, around a @khann speed, so it gives me a good target to shoot for.

His Daytona video is here:

@skullcrushermountain:

Empty Box is roughly a billion times faster than me. I, too, find his videos really useful (and amusing)

This may be the 1.75 of vodka that I just ingested talking, but a huge thanks to our fearless leader @pseg for getting the GBGT series off the ground! Thanks to EVERYONE who joined, especially the new people to the party, whom I hope had an enjoyable enough time to come back again, and tell their friends.

I had a wonderful time racing everyone, had the best actual race of the GB league so far with several of you, and actually, dare I say it, enjoy the Daytona road course now.

Excellent race! Disappointed to have crashed early and land on my Ruf (entirely my fault), but it felt nice to battle to 5th. Podium would have been nice. I didn't practice as much as you guys so in the early laps I was pretty sloppy; and starting 3rd put me in a Ruf situation. Sorry to those who were around me.

Can't wait for Watkins Glen next week. :D

EDIT: Don't get all soft on us now, @skullcrushermountain. hehehe. You're completely right though. ;)

@mouse: I've been waiting for a series like this for a while. As I said early in the session, I like faster cars, because I'm usually better at them, dunno why. But I also want competition, since it'll make me a better racer. Having almost 15 people for our first race was amazing, and I had several good battles during the hour we raced. Had I not been a dildo and forgotten to change my fuel load at the beginning, I'd have had an even better time, too. I'm just chuffed for this series.

That was a ton of fun. Thank you to those of you who pointed out that my pedals weren't calibrated. I was losing my mind trying to figure out why my car wasn't hitting top speed on the ovals. Made a huge difference after I re-calibrated. Never make a major change just before a race starts though! I had to re-learn how to drive when the race began and overshot way too many turns since I wasn't pushing the brake hard enough. At least it was an hour long race, I had plenty of time to figure it out (but I still screwed up on the last two laps, alas).

Anyway, that was my first time racing one of the RUF cars, and my first race on that track. I'm pretty satisfied with my finish. That car was a blast to drive. It's very nimble and fast. It doesn't feel like the Skippy which always seems to be on ice. It does pretty much what I want it to. Looking forward to more races in that series.

Thanks everyone that was great fun, I'll try to practice more for the next one and stay on the lead lap at least... Also, if you haven't already, check the end of PsEG's stream to see my post race crash with IroN1c if you want to a RUF do 10-11 flips and go 20m in the air :D

Great racing today. Really competitive and fun. I'm super excited about next week, all the races really. Dover should be insane/fun, and I like Okayama and Watkins Glen as well.

Yep, great racing everyone. Despite a poor race for me, I had a lot of fun.

Couple of silly incidents at the start put me on the back foot, decided to gamble on a one stop to take a sneaky podium. Nope. Still managed to have a few fun battles through the race, so I'm happy.

Looks like we've got ourselves a solid front runner in newcomer @charlie_sears. He's gonna take some beating. That said, nice win for @iron1c, solid start to the season there. Hopefully the McLarens can maintain their competitiveness throughout the season.

Hopefully sort my internet issues out in the next couple of weeks.

Also:

@khann: If that's not proof God hates rotaries, I don't know what is.

In other news, looks like iRacing's going down to fix some stuff tomorrow afternoon, Eastern time. Hopefully, this includes the shifting bug fix.

I just want them to fix the free pass, darn it. ...I also wish it wasn't widely referred to as the lucky dog, either.

Regarding the fuel situation for GBGT, McLarens have gone from a 58% fuel load cap to 54%. That should even things up a little more. If it doesn't, we'll try 50-51%.

Overall, I'm happy with the race attendance this weekend. Despite a few weakly-attended supporting races for Formula Duder (at least one had Drew, though!), everything else was over ten attendees, which is a nice start for season two. Hopefully we can continue to grow in numbers as this season progresses, and the point systems (or in GBGT's case, the challenge) should help support that.

Keep being awesome, everyone.

Way ahead of you.

I found this chart on the iRacing forums that shows the transmission type and recommended shift methods for each car; your mileage may vary but hopefully this is useful. Personally, I'll keep using auto-clutch so that every car has the magical easy shifting that it deserves :D

Thanks for the great race guys.

Great turnout and a lot of fun. Getting my PoV video with commentary rendered now, then the long upload to youtube.

I'm definitely looking forward to Watkins, fun track and should be a blast to race. I'll try and get some sets up earlier than practice time. See you all on the track!

Or I'm an idiot and they're doing the update right now. Didn't see any release notes, but if the shift bug gets fixed, I think I'll probably run the RUF on Sunday.

They did fix the shifting bug in the Ruf. See you in the better car ;)

Updated the championship points tables and calendar. You can bookmark this link, as it will stay the same and I will continue to update it. Looks better than the iRacing table and it's easier to access. -----> Points and Calendar

I had a blast last night even though i was struggling with the Rough/Roof transmission. I think it was on fire at the end...the roof that is. Anyways, just wanted to say that i have finally found an Iracing league to race in every week. Now if i could just afford to buy the tracks i need to keep going...

Well, we have several series which don't all involve premium tracks. Those might be a little less attended at the start, but hopefully they'll get better as we move on :D

From the patch notes:

- Fix a bug where scheduling hosted sessions with lucky dog cautions could end up having no cautions at all instead.

:D

D:

So, about that whole McLaren 'fuel gate' thing, here's my view:

I actually did some practice and preperation for this race, which is something I rarely do. Because the Ruf was to be the only car, I did a lot of practice laps in that, I attended one of the 2.4 sessions and did some long-runs at Daytona Day by myself (I thought the day/night difference would be more significant. Or should I say, I thought there would be a difference at all?) to figure out fuel strategy. I don't like the Ruf, I don't like that its a Ruf instead of a Porsche, I don't like the original Porsche either, I don't like it's stupid look, it's sound, it's cockpit, it's handling or the fact that it's a German car. The McLaren suits my driving style a lot more and when pseg finally gave in to our demands I was very happy. I knew the McLaren from the old Grand-AM series and even though I was never fast with it, it's one of my favourite cars. Look at it. Okay, enough of that.

So, during the 2h practice session @skullcrushermountain hosted before the race I did a long run and tried to figure out when I would need to stop during the race - that is when I realized that the McLaren didn't burn as much fuel as the Ruf does. Especially on the Oval part. So I had a bad qualifying, made some places in the first few laps and after I could not keep up with @charlie_sears (because holy shit, he's a much better driver) I made the decision to stay back and drive safely. Driving safely in the McLaren for me basically means: Drop the throttle mapping (TPS), increase ABS and short shift, 7250 RPM to be exact (oh god I love the McLaren's HUD). The gears rev up to ~7800 RPM if you take them full. I wasn't trying to safe fuel at this point, I was just trying to not crash. Then @slowbird asked how much fuel we had left and guess what? I could do 2 laps more than the RUFs. This was the result of a better fuel consumption rate, short shifting for half the stint at this point and just being in the cooler car. So in the second stint I just focused on saving as much fuel as possible to do a one stop strategy. And it worked. @charlie_sears came out only a couple of seconds behind me and was catching up, but then made some mistakes I guess (He later said so, right?) otherwise he would've gotten past me and won this thing, I'm pretty sure.

Or in short:

McLaren is slower, but consumes less fuel which gives it some of the advantage that it needs. Fuel consumption differences were especially dumb because of the Oval part of Daytona. @charlie_sears would've won without some smaller mistakes on his part (though, admittedly, he needed to fight more than he should've). The fuel load of the McLaren needs to be nerfed a bit, but it won't be this 'bad' (it really wasn't bad at all at Daytona, just slightly) at Watkins. Don't make the McLaren useless. We're having a proper GT3 series with different cars - all competitive but with different disctinct advantages and disadvantages. Different cars will be better or worse at different tracks and I hope everyone sticks with 'his' car and doesn't switch to the 'better' car how they see fit for each track. Please don't ruin this.

And what do you know, maybe the Caddy is the real problem and that car would've won easily because of its fuel :D

Very new to iRacing here, but after hearing about the last weekend racing, i would really like to join in on the fun.

The new fuel load settings for the MP4-12C, thankfully, didn't screw up the new 54% limit too badly -- closest selectable setting is 18.5 and the max is 18.6. If that's still too much fuel, 50% has no such variance, but I'm comfortable with the 4% drop for now. I'd like cars with roughly equal speeds to have roughly equal distances to empty, and if the MP4's a little slower, I'm comfortable with it going a tiny bit further.

2.5 laps, conservation aside, isn't tiny, at least not in races of this distance. If we ever get to the 12-hour or 24-hour races, I'll gladly turn a blind eye to such differences.

Oh, and five car maximum now. I think that means I have to start researching other competitive cars for future GBGT seasons, yeah?

@nitrius: Welcome! We're happy to have new people aboard.

@pseg: I'm glad you're the one doing the math here because my head would be spinning if I had to figure this stuff out. Fortunately the next race is 45 minutes, so that will give us a good idea of the balance. (I think both cars should be able to make it easily on just one stop, but we'll find out in the race if it's the same/a lap apart/etc.)

Oh yeah, we should do some hosted practice sessions with other cars thrown in, just so we can see what the speeds are like. Even if they don't match up, it will be a fun way to get to drive some more cars :D

@slowbird: The difference definitely won't be as significant in the 45-minute races, since both cars will be just short. I'm interested to see how they'll handle the next hour-long race, though. I suspect the McLaren will be able to go 31-32 minutes.

Which reminds me. I should set up a future Friday Night Thunder where fuel is so limited, cars can't even make it around for a full lap without needing to pit. It would be AWFUL.

...awful fun, maybe.

e: Yes, I fully endorse this FNT idea :D

Well I just did an extremely un-scientific test at Watkins. 4 gallons in each car, baseline setup, engine/throttle maps at default. Shifting normally (just as the red lights come on on my G27, occasionally a tiny bit before) and being careful not to over-rev on downshifts. Drove the out-lap at racing speed.

The RUF ran out of fuel exiting the bus-stop on the 4th lap. The MP4 ran out almost exactly on the line starting the 5th lap. My un-practised lap times in each car were very similar (low 1:49s).

Take that for whatever it's worth, I guess.

@pseg: Yep, when we get to the pit-stop window at Watkins Glen, we'll see just how much the McLaren is affected by the new limit, and you can adjust as needed for future races.

I totally like the idea of a FNT race with minimum fuel. Although it would be better if we had an admin who wasn't racing to clear our black flags so we could ignore the pit road speed limit. (But who would want to sit on the sidelines and miss all the fun? :D)

I agree with @iron1c

He 100% called that if I had pushed harder I could have beaten him. He was 6s ahead of me at the end. I could have been within draft distance in the last lap if I hadn't made the mistakes I did after my 2nd pit. I also could have conserved fuel but I chose the risky strategy of going for speed. The mistake there was I had already chosen to be a bit conservative and not go HAM every lap so I'd stay on the track. I could have won by changing my strategy a bit, and @iron1c did, and won, and I commend him for it. Doesn't mean I'm not frustrated to have taken 2nd ;) but damn if he didn't put up a good fight and chose the right strategy to win.

Each car has its ups and downs, and each car gives a different feeling to each driver. I'm insanely more comfortable in the Ruf than the McLaren. The Ruf feels like home and the McLaren feels like yo momma's house, powerful, big rear end, the low end torque, I digress.

Still looking forward to the 1 stoppers for both at Watkins and what kind of pit strategy that brings out!

@charlie_sears: Hopefully, I'll not be a moron and use the right fuel load at the beginning.

Also, iRacing is releasing the Z4 GT3 soon and apparently doing a GT3 version of the Ford GT. I think we'll have our 5.

"soon"

iRacing "soon" = "just prior to the heat death of the universe."

That would/will be a hell of a field, though. Get a GT3 GTR as well and the iRacing devs can call it quits for a few years.