Precision Motorsports’ team manager looks back at 2011 season.
2011 has brought Precision Motorsports a total domination, in the following few paragraphs I would like to look at the reasons why, discuss state of FSR and Precision Motorsports in 2011.
Firstly let’s ask ourselves why nobody could challenge Bono and PM? If you look closely at race results, you can find a lot of similarities between Vettel’s and Bono’s race wins in a sense that many times it was really close. It would be foolish to think that other teams don’t know what they are doing and mainly Twister was able to put up a strong challenge in the first half of the season. In Bahrain Bono benefited from disconnection of Nilsson, in Australia Bono won only thanks to game crash of Kerkhof. In Spain, Monaco, Germany, Silverstone and Hungary Bono wasn’t any faster than the closest rivals. Yet he was always victorious except of Silverstone, where he started last and put up one of the strongest performances of all times. Many times it was a question of strategy and smart driving by Bono and his extraterrestrial skill in overtaking. Let’s not forget Mikko and Jaakko`s results too. Even though their pace wasn’t always top, they always delivered their pace potential and that’s what makes the difference. After you add up the points, they will always be in front of drivers who might be a bit faster but not as consistent. Winning a championship is not about being strong in half of races and failing to deliver in the other half. Consistency has always been one of my strengths and I have tried to make a team based on the same quality and that’s one of the reasons that we won all titles last two years. The challenge was there – but not a consistent challenger.
FSR in 2011
Everybody was aware that this would be one of the most difficult seasons in the history of FSR due to rFactor being an old game and iRacing’s commercial scheme that sucks drivers into it. To be honest though first half of the season was top class, we had the old ducks racing – Marques, Greco, Hirrle mixing it up with the youngsters and newer drivers. In my opinion the problem arise from Bono’s constant winning, which I believe demotivated and upset a few people. Although generally this is a phenomenon that occurs in FSR every year and that isn’t caused by 1 team dominating. Generally, every year before summer or during summer we lose quite a bit of drivers or teams that give up and we are left with half full grids. More positively, there haven’t been many incidents or controversy this year, which is a good step towards a cleaner FSR.
As usually in the recent years, there have again been talks about limiting setup values, to make setupping easier. Let me tell you something about this pseudo-idea. FSR has always aimed to be the most professional, advanced and most competitive simracing league in the world. If you are not willing to work hard for it, then you can’t win. What has happened in the recent years in simracing, is that people started seeing it more as a hobby and lost willingness and skill of the older generation of drivers. Then those same people say that settuping is too advanced and that top teams have a big advantage. False. This has been the easiest mod to setup since rFactor arrived. Once you got the basics it was pretty much straightforward. If people are unable to make reasonable setups with this mod then they should question themselves only. FSR will always be a challenge, so either adapt to the challenge or don´t expect to win. People can’t expect to get anything for free, to win, or to dominate, you simply need a lot of old fashioned hard work.
The last thing I would like to highlight were repetitive attacks of a group of FSR drivers at FSR administration, accusation of biased decisions and FSR’s inability to see things logically. There have been voices saying FSR administration cannot be tied to any team, which of course is the ideal situation, however unrealistic. Before saying such things think of how you would achieve it. It is virtually impossible for FSR to have an outsider with no real interest in FSR managing FSR. FSR doesn’t have finance of iRacing to achieve that. Regarding the bias, well there haven’t been any signs of that. Yes indeed we have 3 Precision members directly involved in the administration, but all of them have never done anything in interest of Precision Motorsports. All the actions taken were simply following the rules and precedents that have been set in the past and no decision could be question in any way. One of the key things to success is to understand and follow the rules - if you are unable to do so then it is not a fault of administration, it is a simple lack of care. Rules are there for a reason and they cannot be questioned during the season. Almost nobody came up with any ideas the last winter regarding rules updates.
FSR cannot compete with iRacing on the financial level or in the amount of members, but it can with driver skill and talent, FSR – since 2006 – has been the most competitive and strongest simracing competition in the world and this year is no exception. With rFactor 2 arriving, this situation will only improve. rF2 is awaited by everybody in simracing and I am very positive about FSR 2012 season, we could see some big names back in FSR and challenge Bono.
As far as Precision Motorsports 2011 season is concerned – we have had an absolutely exceptional season. After last year all we wanted was to defend titles, but it turned out to be much more than that. Obviously Twister or other teams weren’t always there to challenge us so it was a bit easier than last year as written above. Sad fact of this year’s championship is, that it required the least amount of testing in FSR history and same goes to the world series champion Jeffrey. Average testing laps for Bono are under 450 per race, Jeffrey around 200. Not particularly proud of this fact but more simply wasn’t necessary for them, especially if a team works in a way that reduces necessary testing, which was something that could always be improved but we have done well in this area. I say this is unfortunate as it shows how relatively easy it has been and it is not particularly fair to other team members who have worked very hard to achieve their own top results.
We have achieved a few great technological improvements within the team that made everything easier and there is a lot more to come in 2012. On the other hand in summer we lost our server won in Le Mans 2011 event so massive thanks to Jaakko for providing his small linux server. Car has been competitive in all races, we have managed to avoid mistakes we did last year with top speed/high speed understeer and had consistent pace in all 16 FSR races.
Management wise it hasn’t been an easy year. We had a few driver changes and new people coming in during the season which isn’t my favorite thing to do but it all worked out quite well. We had a few incidents to manage during the season, perhaps the last lap between Jaakko and Mikko in Monza was the most difficult one. Again a few bad calls were made but that all supports the progress and gives more experience. To improve you need to take certain risks sometimes. Since we haven’t been pushing on 100% in most of race preparations, there is a lot of room for improvement in team communication, which will be the main area of development in the winter together with improving certain procedures. In most races we didn’t really need to reach the maximum potential so all I can hope for next year is that there will be someone who will really push us. Hopefully people will realize that iRacing is just very poor and come back to rf2 and mainly to FSR – which again I repeat, is more superior in driver talent than any other league or racing game. I will go that far to say that current iRacing champion is no match for Bono. It would be great to see some of those guys in FSR.
In the end I would like to thank every Precision Motorsports member and driver - Johannes for his great press work, especially videos, John-Eric for articles and knowledge input in car development, Mikko for his never ending dedication, activity and hard work during testing for every race of the season, Jaakko for the server, technical support and crucial work on car development mainly before the season, Bono – well for winning almost every race and for feedback on the car that allowed WS drivers to win races in first half of the season, Dennis for working hard in the last part of the season since he joined and for willingness to test things that weren’t tested before, which had some interesting results, Cyril for his never fading motivation to strike back after some difficult races and hard work on setup, Peter for great feedback and setup input in the last part of the season and Jeffrey for winning the championship dominantly and for being useful in a few race preparations.
I appreciate that you were reading until this point. I would like to wish a great peaceful winter to everyone and a lot of strength into 2012 FSR season. Before that however – there will be FSR Race of Champions hosted by Precision Motorsports, which is something we have already started working on and it’s going to be even better than last year! See you around.
2011 has brought Precision Motorsports a total domination, in the following few paragraphs I would like to look at the reasons why, discuss state of FSR and Precision Motorsports in 2011.
Firstly let’s ask ourselves why nobody could challenge Bono and PM? If you look closely at race results, you can find a lot of similarities between Vettel’s and Bono’s race wins in a sense that many times it was really close. It would be foolish to think that other teams don’t know what they are doing and mainly Twister was able to put up a strong challenge in the first half of the season. In Bahrain Bono benefited from disconnection of Nilsson, in Australia Bono won only thanks to game crash of Kerkhof. In Spain, Monaco, Germany, Silverstone and Hungary Bono wasn’t any faster than the closest rivals. Yet he was always victorious except of Silverstone, where he started last and put up one of the strongest performances of all times. Many times it was a question of strategy and smart driving by Bono and his extraterrestrial skill in overtaking. Let’s not forget Mikko and Jaakko`s results too. Even though their pace wasn’t always top, they always delivered their pace potential and that’s what makes the difference. After you add up the points, they will always be in front of drivers who might be a bit faster but not as consistent. Winning a championship is not about being strong in half of races and failing to deliver in the other half. Consistency has always been one of my strengths and I have tried to make a team based on the same quality and that’s one of the reasons that we won all titles last two years. The challenge was there – but not a consistent challenger.
FSR in 2011
Everybody was aware that this would be one of the most difficult seasons in the history of FSR due to rFactor being an old game and iRacing’s commercial scheme that sucks drivers into it. To be honest though first half of the season was top class, we had the old ducks racing – Marques, Greco, Hirrle mixing it up with the youngsters and newer drivers. In my opinion the problem arise from Bono’s constant winning, which I believe demotivated and upset a few people. Although generally this is a phenomenon that occurs in FSR every year and that isn’t caused by 1 team dominating. Generally, every year before summer or during summer we lose quite a bit of drivers or teams that give up and we are left with half full grids. More positively, there haven’t been many incidents or controversy this year, which is a good step towards a cleaner FSR.
As usually in the recent years, there have again been talks about limiting setup values, to make setupping easier. Let me tell you something about this pseudo-idea. FSR has always aimed to be the most professional, advanced and most competitive simracing league in the world. If you are not willing to work hard for it, then you can’t win. What has happened in the recent years in simracing, is that people started seeing it more as a hobby and lost willingness and skill of the older generation of drivers. Then those same people say that settuping is too advanced and that top teams have a big advantage. False. This has been the easiest mod to setup since rFactor arrived. Once you got the basics it was pretty much straightforward. If people are unable to make reasonable setups with this mod then they should question themselves only. FSR will always be a challenge, so either adapt to the challenge or don´t expect to win. People can’t expect to get anything for free, to win, or to dominate, you simply need a lot of old fashioned hard work.
The last thing I would like to highlight were repetitive attacks of a group of FSR drivers at FSR administration, accusation of biased decisions and FSR’s inability to see things logically. There have been voices saying FSR administration cannot be tied to any team, which of course is the ideal situation, however unrealistic. Before saying such things think of how you would achieve it. It is virtually impossible for FSR to have an outsider with no real interest in FSR managing FSR. FSR doesn’t have finance of iRacing to achieve that. Regarding the bias, well there haven’t been any signs of that. Yes indeed we have 3 Precision members directly involved in the administration, but all of them have never done anything in interest of Precision Motorsports. All the actions taken were simply following the rules and precedents that have been set in the past and no decision could be question in any way. One of the key things to success is to understand and follow the rules - if you are unable to do so then it is not a fault of administration, it is a simple lack of care. Rules are there for a reason and they cannot be questioned during the season. Almost nobody came up with any ideas the last winter regarding rules updates.
FSR cannot compete with iRacing on the financial level or in the amount of members, but it can with driver skill and talent, FSR – since 2006 – has been the most competitive and strongest simracing competition in the world and this year is no exception. With rFactor 2 arriving, this situation will only improve. rF2 is awaited by everybody in simracing and I am very positive about FSR 2012 season, we could see some big names back in FSR and challenge Bono.
As far as Precision Motorsports 2011 season is concerned – we have had an absolutely exceptional season. After last year all we wanted was to defend titles, but it turned out to be much more than that. Obviously Twister or other teams weren’t always there to challenge us so it was a bit easier than last year as written above. Sad fact of this year’s championship is, that it required the least amount of testing in FSR history and same goes to the world series champion Jeffrey. Average testing laps for Bono are under 450 per race, Jeffrey around 200. Not particularly proud of this fact but more simply wasn’t necessary for them, especially if a team works in a way that reduces necessary testing, which was something that could always be improved but we have done well in this area. I say this is unfortunate as it shows how relatively easy it has been and it is not particularly fair to other team members who have worked very hard to achieve their own top results.
We have achieved a few great technological improvements within the team that made everything easier and there is a lot more to come in 2012. On the other hand in summer we lost our server won in Le Mans 2011 event so massive thanks to Jaakko for providing his small linux server. Car has been competitive in all races, we have managed to avoid mistakes we did last year with top speed/high speed understeer and had consistent pace in all 16 FSR races.
Management wise it hasn’t been an easy year. We had a few driver changes and new people coming in during the season which isn’t my favorite thing to do but it all worked out quite well. We had a few incidents to manage during the season, perhaps the last lap between Jaakko and Mikko in Monza was the most difficult one. Again a few bad calls were made but that all supports the progress and gives more experience. To improve you need to take certain risks sometimes. Since we haven’t been pushing on 100% in most of race preparations, there is a lot of room for improvement in team communication, which will be the main area of development in the winter together with improving certain procedures. In most races we didn’t really need to reach the maximum potential so all I can hope for next year is that there will be someone who will really push us. Hopefully people will realize that iRacing is just very poor and come back to rf2 and mainly to FSR – which again I repeat, is more superior in driver talent than any other league or racing game. I will go that far to say that current iRacing champion is no match for Bono. It would be great to see some of those guys in FSR.
In the end I would like to thank every Precision Motorsports member and driver - Johannes for his great press work, especially videos, John-Eric for articles and knowledge input in car development, Mikko for his never ending dedication, activity and hard work during testing for every race of the season, Jaakko for the server, technical support and crucial work on car development mainly before the season, Bono – well for winning almost every race and for feedback on the car that allowed WS drivers to win races in first half of the season, Dennis for working hard in the last part of the season since he joined and for willingness to test things that weren’t tested before, which had some interesting results, Cyril for his never fading motivation to strike back after some difficult races and hard work on setup, Peter for great feedback and setup input in the last part of the season and Jeffrey for winning the championship dominantly and for being useful in a few race preparations.
I appreciate that you were reading until this point. I would like to wish a great peaceful winter to everyone and a lot of strength into 2012 FSR season. Before that however – there will be FSR Race of Champions hosted by Precision Motorsports, which is something we have already started working on and it’s going to be even better than last year! See you around.
