What Does iRacing Do For You As A Driver

[Nick Brooke]

Well i have been playing now for a bit over a month and i have thought long and hard about the SR ratings and the IR ratings and i have come to the following conclusion.

iRacing really does teach you have to drive a race car in a competative arena, no really it does. Lets take the SR ( Safety Rating ) i see people moaning about it alot and particulaly new drivers to iRacing and indeed i hated it at the start too. Now however i really understand what its all about it is about teaching you to drive in close company of others and not having silly accidents. How you may ask? well look at it this way if you drive safe and get your rating up enough to progress to the next level, thats one thing but its more complex than this. You see anyone can run around at the back of the pack waiting for others to fall off the track or quit to gain a place but that really is not fun now is it?.

Pretty soon you will get fed up with this and so you start to fight people for places and in so doing you run certain risks. For me personaly i think my driving has been so much better for iracing to due to having to really think through my next move and planning ahead. This is something most of us just do not do most of the time in other sims, why? because the accident can happen and in most cases there is no penalty system in place so therefore the only real risk to most of us is we may go off ourselves. In iRacing however the penalty is various forms of point deduction from your safety rating but also your irating, so what do you think?. Keep on trucking into people and before you realise it you are in a crowd of what can only be described as Rookie Muppets who wouldnt have the first clue about which way to drive let alone race with someone in close proximity and pass cleanly. Your SR dropped that much you got a demotion maybe or your irating is such that your basicaly driving againt the equivilant of Neandathal racers.

If this does not teach you a lesson i dont know what will and with that lesson comes thought, thought about where you should be on the track and what you are going to do not on the next corner but maybe 3 corners ahead and plan your attack so you get passed with no contact and no SR drop. "Yeah but i get penalties and it isnt my fault" you see that alot and i understand that fully and its a pain in the backside but however there is a lesson the be learnt here too. You see i have gained far more spacial awareness since playing iracing and i look for what my competitor is going to do as well as me more. In my last Clio Cup race for instance Ryan picked up i ran wide at a certain corner because i anticipated the mayhem that was most likley to have occured behind me and had a potential to take me out. Two months ago i would have been so much more looking to the front and would never have seen this.

Has iRacing made me a better driver? yes absolutely and even though im am a lowley driver compared to many here i think i now have the skills to advance more, yes i have a long way to go and mistakes are going to happen but i am learning really learning now. If my Sr gets a knock because of someone elses fault i dont like it but i understand that if they drive like that alot pretty soon ill never race with them again as they wont be anywhere near my class or irating so ill never meet them again. Is that worth x 4 points? i think it is to be frank. So yeah next time to have a hissy fit like me about some muppet taking you out stop and think about the fact that soon he will not be able to race against you again, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

So does iracing help you learn to drive? well this old man thinks it does and yes you can teach an old dog new traicks.

This post was not to all of you here that play iracing or are very good experienced drivers, it was aimed at people like me who are average and want to try iracing but are afraid of this points system they have. Do not be afraid of it unless you plan on not becoming a better driver.

Nick

 

[Kevin Watts]

Good post Nick, as an average driver I also still believe the iRacing system has made me a better driver. So far this year we've run 50+ events in iRacing with very few incidents. I'm not saying we don't have any but the number of protests we get is very few compared to some of the same things I see reported over and over again in the RACE and rFactor clubs. Thats not to say the skill level is any less in any other club but for those sims the racers come from an unstructured environment then enter the structured setup RD has and still try the same silly stunts they used to use in the 'quake on wheels' environment that is open racing in rFactor and RACE. We've had new guys turn up here from iRacing and had no issues at all because they are already used to structured racing with a protest system in place where you have to behave as adults or you find yourself being penalised.

 

[Nick Brooke]

Thanks Kevin, i was trying to give anyone with thoughts of trying iRacing on RD a bit of advice on the SR and iRating system as when i started what i read on other forums and such like almost put me off as people are so very nagative about the points system.

I think its an important system to try to keep races clean, yes we are all aware there are going to be incidents there is in F1 for goodness sake but people should not be afraid. I hope if anyone reads this they will take note and give iRacing a try because once you get into it you WILL be hooked unless your a crasher in which case enjoy Rookie league forever

 

[Joe Hubbard]

Nicely writen Nick!!!

 

[orion2001]

As someone who has been racing for under a week (just joined with the $12 - 3 month offer), I have to agree that the Safety Rating and strict criteria (penalties even for off-track excursions) really help you in a number of ways.

In my personal experience, it didn't just make me a safer driver in terms of not trying to do stupid things around other cars, but more importantly, it has forced me to train myself to sustain concentration levels over 20-25 laps without having any incidents. Driving a hotlap and setting a competitive time is relatively easy (at least for me) compared to sustaining a constant level of focus, consistent lap times, and no stupid errors that have me spinning out.

I think the Safety Rating system really forces you to learn the latter, and that is invaluable, because in a lot of single player racing games, you can easily hit restart, (or rewind even ) to make up for mistakes. I've gone from setting wildly fluctuating laptimes to consistently lapping in the high 59s at Lime Rock Park in the MX5 roadster. I still have my occasional brain farts, but I'm getting much better

 

[Carl Abrams II]

IRL, iRacing has only made me pissed at my truck when, after a multi-hour racing session, I have to drive somewhere and find that the steering wheel is just way too damn big :wink:. But it has taught me LFB, which is nice after hockey when my hips are on fire. Now I don't have to rotate my right foot over to hit the brakes, which makes the post game ride home much more pleasant. Thanks, iRacing!

As far as sim-racing goes, it has transformed it, and there are a few key reasons why. Funny thing is, they seem to be the things that people gripe about the most that I am finding to be the best features.

First is SR. Yes, it sucks when you're minding your own business and get run over. But in the grand scheme of things, once you get past that Rookie mindframe of "I NEED SR NOW! I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE!!", a -.20 race isn't the end of the world. I had my first Tour Mod race last night at Richmond, fought from 16th and finished 9th, and had two scrums where I was involved in wrecks. One was a pack crash that I awesomely avoided without damage but did hit someone for a 4x, and another was a muck up on lap 92 of 100 where miscommunication led me to pile into someone giving way too much room to the leaders. It was a -.16 race...and it was the most fun I had with my pants on (actually I wasn't wearing pants, but you know what I mean :wink Being out of that Rookie mindset, SR goes from being that cloud of doom over your head, to kind of a gatekeeper. I'm more careful than previous sims, because I can't just quit and immediately start another if I'm dumb. That SR will count no matter what. But now that I'm C Class, I can take a FEW liberties with it. I'll be safe for 95% of a race, because I don't want a -.80 result, but I can afford to go hell for leather on a green / white / checkers, or hang it out there if I gained position on pit strategy and need to hold it on old tires. I can take a chance here and there, in other words, which to me, seems a hell of a lot like reality.

The second thing is the "unrealistic damage" I've seen blasted on iRacing's forum. My uncle built these Mods for many years and I was around them for a lot of my young life. In my opinion, yes, iRacing's version is a little on the flimsy side. A simple bump shouldn't affect your car at all, let alone severly change it, and a gentle wall scrape is nothing, yet iRacings Mods seem to have tie rods made of LaffyTaffy and a scrape almost always wrecks the toe. BUT, as frustrating as these issues can be, the mindset of car protection it puts you in has given me the most heart exploding races I've ever found. Driving something cheesy like NASCAR11 for Xbox, if you drift up the corner and someones there, you lean on them. Who cares if they spin, right? In iRacing's Mods, you're fighting the wheel and the throttle, trying to both overtake your opponent AND keep your car down low because you HAVE TO. Sure, the somewhat flimsy nature of their version is frustrating when you hit something, but look at the big picture. Would you rather have tanks you can bang around and have people smashing all over, or have it a little on the delicate side which gives these wicked races? We don't have fear of injury, or fear of high repair costs, this fear of "gentle damage" is a damn good placeholder, IMO. I wouldn't change a thing and damn the forum whiners. While it's somewhat of an unrealistic feature, it CREATES realistic racing, and that's why we're all here.

I have one more note, but it could get a little long and is kind of off topic. I'm off to create another thread, stay tuned...

 

[Mark A Warmington]

As an average driver, I have to say that my driving has improved demonstratively since I focused all of my efforts on iRacing rather than any other sim.

My feel for the car and my ability to extract performance from it has improved.