I suppose it was inevitable.

My love for driving games is pretty obvious to anyone who watches my typical behavior on the site. I could rattle off a bunch of the telltale signs, but rather than indulge you in that self-absorbed wankery, it's easier to just say that I’m working on a second edition of a top 100 racing games list that I’ve easily played enough games to create, and let that represent me as it may. Auto racing’s just as much of a passion for me as video games, and has been for as long as I can remember.

Despite the fuckton of racing games I’ve played in my life, including simulations, I haven’t owned a functional racing wheel in at least seven years. That’s also the last time I played a PC racing simulation. PC sim racers aren’t necessarily the best driving games around, but they tend to be the most realistic and the most punishing. They’re light on assists and heavy on fucking you over if you don’t have a clue. They tend to be a little niche, as a result.

The most notorious of the PC racing sims is iRacing.com. It’s considered realistic enough that they try to eschew the term of game, despite showing at PAX East for a few years. Professional drivers use the service to hone their skills at unfamiliar tracks, and thousands of users play iRacing to live the dream they likely don’t have the talent or money to experience in real life. It’s a brutal game with a monthly fee, severe punishment for poor driving during races, and racers who have little patience for the unprepared. It’s the DOTA 2 or League of Legends of racing games, and demands just as much time to develop skills.

As of this morning, I had never played iRacing. This afternoon, I made a terrible life-altering mistake.

A racing wheel and pedals are making their way to my house. I have a very long time to experience iRacing, thanks to a reasonable discount that I could not turn down.

I don’t think I can turn back now.

Day 1: May 25th, 2013

Time to see how far down the rabbit hole my driving talent, or lack thereof, can take me. I’m entering this game/service with almost no clue on how anything works, beyond stories of the harshness of penalties and ratings. I’m going to try and avoid getting myself into any trouble, and advance my “career” as timidly as possible.

Of course, it would have been helpful if I had waited until I had possession of a racing wheel before signing up.

I have an Xbox 360 controller, though, so after a setup fraught with warnings on safe, fast driving and calibration, I’m ready to start test driving. Test driving is a solo practice that doesn’t levy any penalties for bad driving, so it’s perfect for my inexperienced ass.

I start off as a rookie class driver in iRacing, with two starting points for my career: Competing on road courses in a Mazda MX-5, or racing around ovals in a JR Motorsports Street Stock car. Both are fixed setups, which is really good, since I’m terrible at setting up a car. Road courses are more my style of racing, so for the time being, I’ll go down that route.

My first test session is with the MX-5 at Lime Rock, which is a fast and relatively short track with a great history of racing in America. It’s one of four tracks I’ll have to master to be competitive in the iRacing Mazda Cup.

As I’m taking off, I note just how sensitive the steering is on a 360 controller. Since there’s no steering assistance, the whole stick is lock-to-lock, which means if I flick the stick back and forth, my driver steers the wheel back and forth around its full rotation at an inhuman speed. This is, as you might imagine, incredibly hyper-sensitive to work with. I can imagine dedicated players finding a way for this to work, but for someone who’s used to Forza and its steering compensations for a controller, this is troublesome. It’s pretty evident in replays, too, as my MX-5 jerks around turns and on the straightaway as if I’m using my elbows to steer while drinking coffee and chatting on the phone.

Lime Rock’s not exactly the best track for a difficult control scheme, either. Like I said earlier, it’s fast, and that means smooth inputs and finding the perfect spots for turning are crucial. If I mess this up, I lose at least half a second through a turn. All too often, I’m letting my guts overreach my ability, and I’m putting wheels off in the grass and spinning out. If this were an official practice, I would have several points worth of incident penalties, which would certainly not help my career advancement.

There’s also a lovely hill at Lime Rock that is crested coming off of a right-hand turn, and it’s more than willing to punish me if I’m still straightening out at the time. Again, my controls are keeping me from correcting properly, so I just end up rapidly flicking the steering back and forth any time I begin to lose control cresting the hill. It works only occasionally.

This is where my introduction to the damage system begins! I brushed the wall lightly a time or two, and in every case it was enough to seriously affect the handling of the car. The lightest hit knocks my rear wheel alignment off. A slightly harder clip of a tire wall at speed rips up my suspension and completely fucks up my car’s ability to drive in a straight line, much less at all. This is a lesson I’ll have to learn quickly, I fear: Hitting anything will likely end my race.

For now, I finish the session with a best lap around 1:02.3, with my best splits adding up to an optimal 1:01.7 or so. Looking at a friend’s best times, I’ll need to get down to at least a minute flat to be competitive in MX-5s.

That racing wheel can’t arrive soon enough.

Side Notes

I still feel completely unfamiliar to iRacing, but I’ve at least been able to customize my car, helmet, and driving suit to have reasonably bland designs on them. At some point, I’m going to need to figure out if I can use custom car designs, and more importantly, if other drivers can see said designs without having to manually download them. No point in a tremendously fancy car if I’m the only one who can see it.

I’m also completely curious about clubs. It looks like that’s something that might open up once I’m no longer rookie status, but I have surprisingly little interest in belonging to a Michigan club, and plenty of interest in finding or founding a Giant Bomb club.

For now, I sit at Rookie class, 2.50 safety rating. That will not change until I re-familiarize myself with a racing wheel, but perhaps I’ll have a chance to spot or something before then.

...I also need to re-install Photoshop on this computer so that I can have images that aren't poorly-cropped shit.