Top 4 Things iRacing Fanboys Got Wrong When Trying to Shit on Us

June 23, 2015June 23, 2015 ~ James ~ 21 Comments

Today we experienced a very large increase in site traffic due to Jere Seppala of GlacierTV linking our article detailing our surprise ban from the popular online racing sim, iRacing.com. Jere agreed with the majority of the article but could not understand the hostile reaction from 99% of iRacing members, who attempted to discredit the lengthy article just because it was me. Jere’s comments, hacked up from multiple posts to save space, can be viewed here:

Jere backs up our original article on the Camaro stating that “street stock @ charlotte is a really bad combo”, and “[the] article is pretty accurate (tire model + rookie’s cancer mentality). Jere is a long-time iRacing member who contributes to the community in a big way by helping with broadcasting some of iRacing’s biggest leagues; he’d be the first to know what iRacing’s shortcomings are.

However, what followed were some pretty outlandish accusations and stories, turning the comments section of the article into a warzone between iRacing fanboys and PretendRaceCars.net readers. I personally don’t believe in moderation as it goes against the ideology of this site, so the best way to deal with all of these creative stories is to simply just confront the four most repeated comments with facts and get on with ourselves.

#4 . Only five people visit PretendRaceCars.net

This isn’t something repeated by just iRacing fanboys, so it’s time to set the record straight. One commenter used a traffic estimation website to take an educated guess at the number of monthly viewers we receive. The site spit out a number of 9,600 views in the past month, and he was pretty certain that this number was accurate:

Unfortunately for him, WordPress has a Sim City-like statistics screen that you can access at any time.

Alright, onto the next one:

#3 – PRC affiliated drivers were causing problems in the Rookie Series Races

We got a variety of comments of this sort, most of which claimed you were annoying people and spamming the chat. We ran almost 30 races over the past three weeks. Not once were we ever told to shut the fuck up, nor did anyone draw any attention to anything we’d type in the chat box aside from the regular banter, and the entire room, not just us, did their fair share of shit-talking.

Once we all realized iRacing’s Rookie Series was equivalent to the casual environment of Xbox Live, we adjusted our demeanor accordingly. In one race, some guy from Brooklyn described how he’d spent a few years in prison for stabbing a kid. Another race, some clown kept trying to poke his nose under me, totally fine with dog fighting for third place on lap four instead of running down the leaders and giving both of us a shot to win at the end of the race. Anytime I tried to physically force my car in front of his, followed by typing into chat “stay in line so we can catch the leaders”, I was called a fucking asshole and the dude threatened to report me for blocking.

Keep in mind that you can report people for swearing, in case you missed the irony.

As we encountered many of the same drivers, race after race, most made threats that they were going to intentionally wreck me, and as you can see in the shot above, one of them tried to move me, failed, tried again, succeeded, and then called me a bitch and blamed me for the accident despite his car clearly being on the apron in a spot where it shouldn’t be.

As we described in the original article:

[iRacing] surrounds [rookies] with other drivers who will cuss at you for shit that sometimes doesn’t even make sense and drive as if they were never given a chance to wheel mom’s sedan around the block.

My most sincere apologies to not taking iRacing as a super serious racing simulation when half of the room are childishly arguing with each other as if we’re on Xbox Live, and making all of my chat macros instructions on how to bake chocolate chip cookies. Grease the baking pan.

Any aggressive driving towards us was met with equally aggressive retaliation, but that’s to be expected when half the field can’t drive and the other half hates you because you’ve won the last five races.

#2 – James has a insane vendetta against iRacing

Not only did we post a dedicated article encouraging readers to take advantage of a promotional offer and try iRacing for free, we praised how the Street Stock drove at USA Speedway and that’s what prompted a group of us to create rookie-only accounts; so we could enjoy driving the car at our own pace. Additionally, in a review I wrote for RaceDepartment on iRacing back in the summer of 2013, I praised multiple aspects of the online racing simulation, from the sheer abundance of oval racing cars included, the photorealistic graphics that did not rely on any fancy post processing effects, to the unmatched online structure. Sure sounds like an insane vendetta.

How about when five of us sat down for an entire Sunday and collaborated on a 2500 word article breaking down both the positives and negatives of iRacing’s slowest oval racing car? Do these points sound like someone with an insane vendetta?

We openly advertised a promo code that would potentially bring more people into their sim.
We clearly stated our previous credentials that adequately backed up our opinions.
We explained, to our European readers, what a Street Stock is.
We praised the car’s handling at USA Speedway and admitted we enjoyed how the car drove.
We explained how to drive the car at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

All five of us spent a solid chunk of the afternoon describing the negative experiences we had with the car, and putting those thoughts into written words:

We went into detail about how and why the draft model isn’t realistic, and why it affected the racing in a negative way.
We went into detail about the game’s tire model and how it affected the racing in a negative way.
We went into detail about the new adjustments made to the tire model, even noting the exact lap the tires exhibited odd behavior.
We conducted an experiment to see if turning off force feedback made you faster – and it did.

All of these screenshots directly correlated with what was talked about in the article, to back up some of our more absurd claims. For instance, here’s the “one-groove, can’t pass” racing we’re talking about:

Here’s the guy I talked about wanting to dump me and report me for blocking for position 3 on lap 4. In fact, in the shot, you can actually see him trying to poke his nose under me as the leaders I mentioned pull away in front of us:

Here’s the guy who lagged into Mike and wrecked himself:And here’s Mike dumping him after he slowed up and waited for Mike to come around again.

And here are three stereotypical rookie series wrecks that we talked about several times throughout the article.

And onto our last point…

#1 – James was perma-banned from iRacing years ago, and this ban was NOT because his article ripped on the physics, but because he was using a secondary account to evade a ban

Oh boy. B. Americano got the story right in the comments section, but I’ll tell my side of things.

Straight up, I did some artwork for a YouTube vlogger (you can still buy the shirts HERE) and ran where you’re regularly supposed to put your surname on the Sprint Cup cars. Retarded paint schemes aren’t uncommon on iRacing, and I went a few weeks without anybody noticing. And when I say retarded paint schemes aren’t uncommon, here’s something I saw watching my buddy’s stream a while back.

Anyways, the story goes that it was a late night race at Las Vegas in March of 2013 with a ton of high ranked drivers, most notably Bryon Daley and Ray Alfalla, who’s name you’ve probably heard at one point. Daley and Alfalla tangled with a few laps to go, and I won the race. As I was someone who primarily raced only the K&N Series car and had basically turned into the Frank Kimmel of iRacing, this was a pretty huge deal.

The next morning, I found out my account had been suspended for two months. A friend of mine linked me to Ray’s facebook page with a photo of the exact moment the two leaders got together. In the comments section, a handful of people agreed to protest me.

The reason I was given was “having an inappropriate paint scheme” – and here’s the thing – iRacing’s rules don’t state anything about inappropriate liveries, as you use a third party program that has no official ties with iRacing to download custom skins. If someone found the text across the roof offensive, they could simply delete my car file and I would show up as whatever livery I painted using iRacing’s in-game paint shop editor, with preset bases and sponsor configurations all pre-approved by iRacing. The program itself discourages adult and/or offensive car liveries, yet does not outright disallow them. A report function is included within the program, but had never been used on any of my cars, including some of the more obnoxious ones:

In short, I was parked for something iRacing can’t actually park you for, because a few people they liked complained. And this is where the story differs. iRacing fanboys believe I was permanently banned for a multitude of reasons in March of 2013, never to return.

Here’s me winning at Texas in April of 2013:

Here’s Timmy Hill spinning in front of me a few weeks later, complete with my special Talladega livery:

Here’s me testing out the brand new Super Late Model during the first ever official SLM race at New Smyrna, in February of 2014:

Here’s me making a rare start in the NASCAR Peak Stock Car Dream Challenge Series, also in early 2014.

Oh, and here’s a GT3 video I made where half the field wrecks during the first lap, uploaded on March 1st, 2015.

I was never permanently banned, and only raced sporadically over the past two years simply due to the fact that better games have come along. Assetto Corsa came out in late 2013 and took the world by storm, I got big into organized rFactor racing during the summer of 2014, which carried into the winter and eventually transferred over to Game Stock Car Extreme.

There was no ban being evaded, because I wasn’t banned in the first place. Both myself and several PRC affiliated drivers were able to run 25+ races over the span of three weeks on an alternate account with zero issues. In fact, Chris of PRC had even contacted iRacing support to get his in-game name changed, removing the 2 at the end of his surname and replacing it with his middle initial – indicating iRacing knew full well what we were doing and didn’t have a problem with it.

Yet, within two hours of a lengthy article popping up on the iRacing forums that implied the expensive racing sim was anything but perfect, I’m suspiciously receiving a 403 error and getting notified that my account has been suspended, with no email indicating what exactly happened. Hmm…

Seems fishy, considering the last time I wrote a lengthy article on iRacing breaking down the entire game, listing it’s positives and negatives, Tony Gardner tried to get me kicked off the staff of the website I was writing for:

Untitled-1

I guess Dale Jr has a crazy vendetta, too?

Glass

And finally, to answer some Finnish guy’s question of when the new thread about the article would get removed:

It was removed shortly after this post, so twelve hours:

Reader Submission #11 – To Live and Die in the UI

June 23, 2015 ~ James ~ 13 Comments

Today’s Reader Submission comes from Steve Smith, author of the highly sought after Grand Prix Legends strategy guide and

My first racing sim was Dave Kaemmer’s “Indy 500” (I had
been addicted to computer simulations since Bruce Artwick’s pinball
game and to auto racing since I was knee-high to a 60-spoke Borrani)
and I believed that I must have set a new world record when I turned
a 242-mph lap of the Brickyard…so I wrote to Mr. Kaemmer to boast
about it. Not so fast, he said. Someone had gone even faster, I was
informed, by using a trick that I hadn’t thought of (although Jim Hall
had, some 30 years earlier; the ‘trick’ is in current use 25 years later,
now known as the “DRS Zone”): flattening the wing on the straights;
raising it in the turns.

My letter resulted in a correspondence with the developer (the
late, much-lamented Papyrus), a ‘road test’ of the game for my old
alma mater, Car and Driver (of which I had been the Editor-in-Chief in
the Sixties), an offer from Papyrus to join a small group of outsiders
comprising the beta team of “Grand Prix Legends” (Doug Arnao,
Alison Hine, Achim Trensz and John Wallace), an assignment to
write the strategy guide (“Four-Wheel Drift”) that shipped with the
game, and a minor involvement in “NASCAR Legends” (I seemed to
be the only dude they knew who had actually driven Riverside).

Now, in the subsequent century, I’m still at it (remaining on my
hard drive: Assetto Corsa, Project CARS, Game Stock Car Extreme
and rFactor 2… after shit-canning DIRT Rally).

Like many in the sim ’community,’ I joined Slightly Mad
Studio’s crowd-funding scheme for PC when that star-crossed
venture heaved into view four years ago. At first, I was an ardent
supporter and an enthusiastic participant, firing off a blizzard of
modest suggestions that I hoped would be helpful.

As the birthing process dragged on (and on and on), the PC
players (by which, I mean Windows users, not the “Project CARS”
players) seemed to get discouraged because nobody was listening to
them. They were soon replaced by hoards of clueless console players
whose sheer volume buried any intelligent exchange of information
(the triumph of the lowest common denominator), and whose main
complaint seemed to be that SMS had gotten wrong the color of the
Armco at Brünnchen.

My main concern, then and now, was the user interface,
visually and physically. Why, I wondered, if the game had presets
for my Fanatec wheel and pedals, should I have to struggle with 13
additional settings before it felt anything like it should? And the
menu design, which seemed to have emerged without a thought as to
legibility (the fonts seemed to have been chosen for their ethereal
sans-serif beauty rather than EZ-Read clarity) and usability. Early
on, I recommended Ed Tufte’s classic book on the subject (“The
Visual Display of Quantitative Information”), a suggestion which
was cheerfully ignored.

And nobody seemed to have counted the number of keystrokes
and/or mouse clicks to move from one task to another (or measured
the real estate that the cursor has to move between tasks). Or why
the setup menu requires eight pages to display the information
presented in just two pages in, say, GSCE’s efficient setup menu.
(The issue here isn’t insufficient room; there are acres of empty space
in PC’s UI.)

As my mentor, Doug Arnao, pointed out a generation ago, the
single most important element in setting up a car is not your laptime
(which is subject to a few dozen variables), but the temperature
across your tires’ treads. In the real world (I’ve done my share of r/w
racing; I have a 3rd-place trophy for a Trans-Am race in the Porsche
911 that I shared with Bert Everett), what you do in practice is run a
few laps at what you hope is qually speed, come in and measure the
temps at the outer, middle and inner tread. If the outer tread is
hotter than the inner, you add negative camber (and the opposite if
the inner is hotter). There is no way you can do this in the pits in PC.

The other huge fault in the UI is the lack of an X-Y graph (like
almost every other sim since the beginning of time) for choosing the
ratios for your gear stack. All PC gives you are the raw numbers,
which are impossible to visualize unless you are a particular kind of
idiot savant. With a simple X-Y graph, you can immediately see
which gears are too long and which are too short. And their relationship
to each other. But apparently something this easy, this obvious,
didn’t look ‘cool’ to SMS’s art directors, so we’re left to guesstimate
what’s best for the transmission. Or embark on the long-winded
process of cut-and-try.

When there was no reaction to any of this, I began to suspect
that SMS never had any intention of listening to the army of ‘early
access’ players they had created. Or maybe that the ‘investors’ were
so loud and boisterous that the developers, overwhelmed, simply
clapped their collective hands over their collective ears, put their
heads down, and got on with the business of getting the game out the
door. I drifted away from the forums, figuring whatever will be, will
be, and awaited what used to be called the “shrink wrap.”

Nonetheless, when the game finally launched, I (and many,
many others) was horrified to see how lame the final result actually
was. Is. The UI faults pale in comparison with the game’s other
shortcomings (too well pawed-over to repeat here). Yet it seems
impossible that four years of work by a staff of 140, eighty thousand
kibitzers and thirty million dollars couldn’t have created something
much, much better. (Papyrus made GPL—still miraculously going
strong—with a fraction of the resources, in a quarter the time). Time
will tell if PC has the staying power to sustain its initial (commercial
of not critical) success. Maybe the console fanboys will continue to
be entranced… although I can’t see why they would prefer Project
CARS over Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport, which are professionally
finished products.

That’s my take. I could be wrong…but I don’t think so.

See you at the races.

Wow.

One guy I used to race with a whole bunch always used to praise the gospel of inner/middle/outer tire temperatures, and I remember him saying something about this fabled Grand Prix Legends strategy guide that broke the process down for him, but I wasn’t aware the guy behind the guide was once the editor in-chief for Car & Driver Magazine, was on the beta team for Grand Prix Legends, and also raced Trans-Am back in the glory days. It’s crazy someone with such a long list of credentials found their way to an alleged hate blog and took the time to submit their own story, but that’s exactly what makes PretendRaceCars.net so unique.

Grand Prix Legends has always felt like driving on ice for me, but I’ve been particularly impressed with the third party content released for it. I’m not a fan of the default 1967 F1 cars, but both the Can-Am cars, as well as the European Prototypes drive fairly well given the limitations of the now ancient game engine. Even better, I got to check out the historic Edmonton Speedway that my family grew up drag racing at, and it was cool to run laps while my uncle pointed out landmarks and told stories of a place that was demolished 30 years ago to make way for housing developments. Previously, I was only given glimpses of the track in when it was billed as Big Sky Raceway located in Montana.

I fully agree with what you’ve written about Project CARS – there is absolutely no way 80,000 investors would all come to the same conclusion on the game’s direction, so in my opinion Slightly Mad Studios simply built a shiny version of Race 07 and gave the illusion that WMD members were helping with the title. It’s comparable to giving a small child plastic toys to harmlessly bang around while their father works on a home improvement project. There are still some shining moments with the game; the twitter feed in career mode is the right feature to steal from EA’s Madden NFL games, I personally had no problems with the game’s default force feedback, and the Radical was a blast to drive around the Nordschleife, but the rest of the game was drowning in a sea of bugs and bad design choices consistent with the other products Slightly Mad Studios have released.

I agree that the setup menu is atrocious. I’m not sure how Slightly Mad Studios could look at all these other fantastic racing sims that have beautiful, intuitive setup screens, and then go in the totally opposite direction. I’m a scrub who only adjusts the final drive when building a setup, so my main gripe is, as you said, eight fucking pages when every other title can fit everything into just two. This also applies to other needlessly complicated portions of the user interface, such as selecting a car or configuring the game’s extensive force feedback settings.

Will Project CARS keep the attention of console racers? Probably not. Forza Motorsport 6 is on the way, and the Xbox One will have a brand new Logitech racing wheel to go along with it. Gran Turismo 7 will inevitably land on the Playstation 4, and I think that should be the nail in the coffin for Project CARS on that system. The game Slightly Mad Studios tried to build isn’t all that bad, but you can’t release a game with that many bugs in 2015, and then openly attack anyone who dares to draw attention to the numerous issues.

iRacing Wasn’t Fond Of Our Street Stock Article

June 22, 2015June 22, 2015 ~ James ~ 71 Comments

Yesterday, we ran a 2500+ word article that detailed our time spent in iRacing’s Rookie Street Stock Series using the three month free trial promo code. Myself, Chris, Sal, Mike, and Vince spent a couple weeks messing around with the entry level car as a way to try out the alleged improvements to the new tire model without having to spend money and renew our subscriptions. The article was not meant to be a slam piece, but a detailed look at the current version of the popular racing sim from a handful of sim racers with the credentials to back it up on track.

And it most certainly wasn’t worth our time. In short:

iRacing’s clearly built in some scripted tire wear with the current build. As of this writing, we’ve done ten races at Charlotte. In all ten races, in turn four of lap sixteen, it’s almost as if a switch is flipped on the entire field and the car becomes noticeably loose. While we didn’t exactly have a problem with this sudden change in handling, it was not uncommon to see a large portion of the pack completely lose it, all at once as if the game magically turned on tire wear at the exact same time for everybody. At this point in the race, you still can’t pass anybody, nor can you get a proper run on anybody, but at least the car is sort of enjoyable to drive for the final two minutes of the race.

Yet this is not the end of strange physics oddities. In one race, Sal’s force feedack inexplicably turned off without warning while on the pace lap. For reasons even he struggles to comprehend, his car miraculously found two tenths of a second, and he proceeded to run down the leaders after starting mid-pack, eventually winning the race. Wanting to replicate this, Mike turned down the force feedback on his own wheel and attempted a qualifying session, and he improved his personal best time by a tenth of a second – a big deal on a track where there is no need to lift off the throttle.

iRacing believes the best way to ease newcomers into the daunting sim is to place them into a car that is almost mathematically crafted to exhibit all of iRacing’s biggest flaws – you can’t draft properly, can’t get runs on anybody, can’t pass anybody, can’t run multiple groves, the tires are scripted to become shit at precisely 16 & 3/4 laps, and then surround them with other drivers who will cuss at you for shit that sometimes doesn’t even make sense and drive as if they were never given a chance to wheel mom’s sedan around the block. Better yet, in the same breath they will advertise a yearly subscription price of $90 and then expect you to spend $15 anytime you want to check out a new track or car.

These claims were backed up by one commenter, who experienced the exact same tire model issues and force feedback discrepancies:

As I do with many articles from this site, I drop links to them amongst people who will be interested to read them. Assetto Corsa articles get linked in the Assetto Corsa Forums, pCars articles get linked in the pCars subreddit, and anything else interesting gets linked in the Sim Racing subreddit. As most iRacers spectate bottom split rookie series for the sheer entertainment value, they would have no problem reading through an article written on the fabled series, and I created a thread linking to the Street Stock article around 10am.

Wanting to check the comments on the forum post, I was instead greeted with the traditional “You’ve been banned!” screen:

At first I figured I must have been protested by someone in a previous race because Rookie Races can get pretty hectic as we described in yesterday’s article. iRacing always sends you e-mail notifications if someone has filed a complaint against you, and upon checking my e-mail, there were none to be found, just a generic iRacing.com survey.

Vince sent me a screencap of my account details on the iRacing member forums, showing that I had exactly zero posts. They deleted the thread linking to the article.

This is pretty fantastic. Again, this wasn’t a slam-piece article designed to rip on iRacing; we sat down for an entire day talking about our experiences and crafted a lengthy article that described both the positives and negatives of iRacing – in particular it’s entry level class.

We openly advertised a promo code that would potentially bring more people into their sim.
We clearly stated our previous credentials that adequately backed up our opinions.
We praised the car’s handling at USA Speedway and admitted we enjoyed how the car drove.
We explained, to our European readers, what a Street Stock is.
We described some of the instances of bad driving we experienced from other opponents.
We described the personalities you could expect to compete against in a Rookie Series race.
We explained how to drive the car at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
We went into detail about how and why the draft model isn’t realistic, and why it affected the racing in a negative way.
We went into detail about the game’s tire model and how it affected the racing in a negative way.
We went into detail about the new adjustments made to the tire model, even noting the exact lap the tires exhibited odd behavior.
We conducted an experiment to see if turning off force feedback made you faster – and it did.
We gave several examples where the competition around us were cunts to us, backing up our stories with both video as well as fancy screenshots.
We gave a direct example of how your average iRacing member handles on-track incidents.
We then summarized why the overall experience was unsatisfactory.

According to iRacing, this is all worthy of a ban without explanation.

The First Project CARS 2 Footage is Here!

June 22, 2015June 22, 2015 ~ James ~ 58 Comments

Today, Slightly Mad Studios shocked absolutely no avid PretendRaceCars.net reader by announcing that WMD sign-ups are open for Project CARS 2, less than two months after the release of a game that spent four years in development, tested and “perfected” by 80,000 sim racing enthusiasts. Above is the first gameplay footage, of build #0000 featuring a Mitsuubishi Lancer RallyCross car at what appears to be a generic physics testing facility.

The comical investment tiers have only gotten more absurd – while standard “toolkits” are available for those who want to treat Project CARS 2 as a traditional early access title, spending upwards of 1000 euros nets you some fairly cheeky rewards, including a dinner date with Ian Bell himself!

I’m actually serious.

All of this comes six weeks after the launch of Project CARS, which has featured a notorious amount of bugs and glitches that Slightly Mad Studios have barely began working on fixing. A quick adventure to the official forums will net you a lengthy list of bugs, glitches, and oddities – some of which hadn’t been fixed since the game began development in early 2012.

I just can’t believe what I’m seeing:

All this for a flashy, buggy version of Race 07.

When It Hurts to Drive – iRacing’s Street Stock Camaro

June 21, 2015June 21, 2015 ~ James ~ 11 Comments

A few weeks ago, we ran an article detailing a promo code for iRacing that straight up let you try the game for three months, completely free of charge. As iRacing doesn’t discourage multiple accounts under the same name, myself, Chris, and a few of our friends weighed our other options for online racing and decided the best use of our free time was to start from the bottom all over again and invade the rookie oval races on iRacing using the free promo code to see if both the physics and the driving quality have improved since we’ve last invested a heavy amount of time into the sim.

Unfortunately, it’s comically bad. For a game that prides itself on a mature community full of clean drivers, and world-class driving physics unmatched by any other consumer sim, the sad reality is that iRacing does neither well, and as these cars will be your first impression of the game no matter how you choose to spend your time on iRacing, a radical new approach needs to be taken in order to ensure a much better first impression is left on new drivers.

For the sake of this experiment, it’s important to say who all got involved in these free account rookie shenanigans. Chris (of PretendRaceCars.net) and Sal are both former Black Stripe drivers on iRacing – meaning at one point they blew the doors off 95% of iRacing.com members and were classified as “Pro” drivers, eligible to drive in the NASCAR iRacing.com Pro Series, whatever it was called back then. I myself won two overall championships in iRacing’s equivalent of the K&N Pro Series car (at the time it was called the iRacing National Series), setting the record for most amount of points earned in a single season that still hasn’t been broken even after the series was used for the PEAK Stock Car Dream Challenge and high-ranked drivers would drop in to farm XP. Mike still manages to destroy all of us in street cars in Assetto Corsa, and Vince wins every other race the rest of us get wrecked out of.

We are more than capable of testing this shit out.

When we all got our free accounts up and running, iRacing was in the final week of their season, which sent the Rookie Street Stock Series to the now demolished USA International Speedway in Lakeland, Florida. To our surprise, it didn’t drive terribly. In fact, our initial impressions of the car were what caused us to write the article notifying people of the free account promotion in the first place. While iRacing has traditionally suffered from some really wonky physics, the Street Stock at USA was actually fun.

The tires got greasy halfway through the 40 lap race, and it took a proper amount of skill to not only bring the car home in one piece, but continue to run fast laps in the process. USA Speedway isn’t a multi-groove track like Bristol or Thompson, but finally being able to drive an oval car that did all the right things and reacted to proper pedal management accordingly was something we’ve longed for from iRacing for quite some time. It was like the physics guys at iRacing finally improved upon NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, it’s just a shame it took them eight years and several sub-par iterations of a new tire model to get to that point.

However, the rest of the field may as well have been driving with Guitar Hero controllers.

The Camaro Street Stock in iRacing is designed to replicate a very common amateur level Saturday Night Short Track class. While the car featured in iRacing is taken from Dale Earnhardt Jr’s personal stable of race cars, the car is still built to adhere to generic Street Stock specifications used all over North America. To those not familiar with oval racing, these cars are designed for sons and daughters of local race car drivers to beat and bang with before their father races later in the evening. Most Street Stock drivers haven’t even graduated high school yet. Whether on dirt or asphalt, these cars are idiot proof, and there’s nothing stopping you from buying one right now because they’re really Goddamn cheap and you don’t need a fancy racing license to show up to your local track.

This concept of low powered, idiot proof oval car seems to be lost on the majority of iRacing members who drive it. USA Speedway is not a difficult track, nor do you ever reach any high rate of speed because the car physically can’t do it. While the tires did get noticeably worn as the race progressed, the car just didn’t have enough power to loop itself had you gotten it sideways. In most cases, being smooth on the wheel and gently rolling on the throttle would prevent the rear end from stepping out for several races at a time.

And yet, it was not uncommon to see a portion of the field wrecked mere seconds into the race. I myself managed to win the first eight races I entered. I have to stress that this car is so slow, you have to try to spin it out, and yet five laps into the race, you’d come across backmarkers who were already junked. And this was a theme that continued from race to race; even as you’d start to see the same guys each race, with the same familiar car liveries adorning the grid, none of them would make any noticeable improvements. Somehow, some way, these guys were managing to total their cars on a track where a lap lasts approximately 22 seconds, there are four identical left turns, and the car rarely hits 90 mph. Again, in real life these cars are built for teenagers to get their feet wet in oval racing, yet in iRacing, unless Chris or Mike were in the field, I’d end up lapping most of the grid.

iRacingSim64 2015-06-07 01-28-36-83

These same people who were winding up on their lids seconds into the race would then cry that rookie classes are impossible to get out of, and then go onto fantasize about driving things like the IndyCar and the NASCAR Truck Series, vehicles that are much faster than a Street Stock Camaro and much harder to control. Upon watching the replay of each race with iRacing’s incredible replay controls, none of these guys were the unfortunate victim of a wreck that spiraled out of control – most just flat out couldn’t make a lap to save their lives. It was as if they had never driven a car before. Some guys would go full throttle into a corner and plow into the outside wall. Others would crash just coming to the green flag, intimidated by the mere presence of other cars around them. My personal favorite were the guys who quickly attempted to move out of the way for the leaders, only to loop the car as if the high line was made of black ice.

And if people actually made it through the start, you bet your ass nobody had any spatial awareness and dudes would just blindly drive into each other as if we were watching extreme barbie jeep racing.

But to be fair, USA Speedway is a track that takes a bit of skill. As I said earlier, you need a decent understanding of pedal management to challenge for the lead – with how simplistic oval racing is, every hundredth of a second counts, and that’s something that only comes with perfecting the line, not just knowing it.

So what iRacing does is send all of these noobs who can’t control a car under 100 mph to Charlotte Motor Speedway, where the combination of a low-powered Camaro with shitty aerodynamics and high banked corners turns the 1.5 mile speedway into a scaled down version of Daytona.

This doesn’t make things any better.

For starters, you don’t need to brake or lift at all. The car isn’t fast enough to generate any handling discrepancies. The Street Stock Camaro essentially becomes an IndyCar in slow motion; glued to the race track and impossible to lose control of. This makes for some really garbage racing among people who know what they’re doing because there is no way to pass the leader, or anybody for that matter.

Myself, Chris, Mike, Sal, and Vince were all fortunate to be put in the same split with each other numerous times. Cruising at a constant 140+ mph, it was impossible to slingshot around anyone. Drafting in iRacing doesn’t appear to work as it does in real life. Out in the real world, you’ll suck up behind someone, and then at the last second pull out to shoot around them. For whatever reason, you can’t do that in iRacing. The game doesn’t let you. The result is that every single race looks the exact same – a conga line of cars in a row, usually in the exact same order they started the race in. The draft lets you keep up with the car in front, but that’s about it. On the flip side, venturing outside of the draft guarantees your race is pretty much over. It’s a slow motion restrictor plate race, without the fun parts of a restrictor plate race.

This also means that you’ll never have enough of a run on somebody to physically knock them up the race track. Among good drivers, the race at Charlotte turns into a twenty lap parade. But as we’ve said, there’s a complete lack of good drivers.

Even better, the game’s lackluster tire model prevents any sort of alternative groove from being experimented with. You don’t have the option to run in the middle of the track or out by the wall to avoid chaos as they do in real life. Venturing away from the white line on the bottom will cause you to drop like a rock through the grid. You are literally forced to run nose to tail along the bottom of the race track until turn four of lap sixteen.

So what happens in turn four of lap sixteen?

iRacing’s clearly built in some scripted tire wear with the current build. As of this writing, we’ve done ten races at Charlotte. In all ten races, in turn four of lap sixteen, it’s almost as if a switch is flipped on the entire field and the car becomes noticeably loose. While we didn’t exactly have a problem with this sudden change in handling, it was not uncommon to see a large portion of the pack completely lose it, all at once as if the game magically turned on tire wear at the exact same time for everybody. At this point in the race, you still can’t pass anybody, nor can you get a proper run on anybody, but at least the car is sort of enjoyable to drive for the final two minutes of the race.

And this frustrating environment where everyone is in a conga line along the bottom of the race track causes tempers to boil over. As one comment on another article put it, less aliens and more forum-elitists trying to make up for sucking at racing – and this accurately sums up the online experience:

Our first glorious taste of this elitism was in a pretty high ranked room among statistically good drivers. Mike qualified around mid-pack and decided to exploit a well-known loophole in oval racing rules to shoot up to the front in a few hundred feet. In stock car racing, each lane of cars is treated as its own separate entity, and once the green flag drops, you are allowed to pass on the right side of the row you started in. What Mike does here is 100% within the rules, and it’s why you’ll see on single file restarts in real NASCAR, everybody lines up by the wall – it’s to prevent this from happening.

Most of the field bitched out Mike over voice chat for jumping the start, and this continued well into the race, with threads of protesting and all that jazz. Again, this is 100% within the rulebook, and a fantastic driving job to thread the needle between the huge pack of cars.

In another instance, someone straight up lagged into Mike and wrecked themselves.

This guy went into the pits, repaired his car, and waited for Mike to come around again to try and wreck him back. Mike isn’t a shit driver, so he was able to easily avoid this childish maneuver and sent the 5 car flying into the infield.

As many long-time iRacers will tell you, there’s also an abundance of Careful Charlies on the starting grid, belting out stereotypical phrases like “play it safe in the first corner, guys”, and “no jumping the start, please keep it a fair race.” These guys are usually the first drivers to cause gigantic pileups because they have no idea what in the fuck they’re doing.

My favorite display of elitism was during a race earlier in the day where the front two cars began to break away from the pack. As I said above, staying in the draft here is essential to keeping up with the leaders, and if you stay in line, you can always run down the cars in front of you, erasing the gap by several tenths per lap. Instead of staying in line after a start where the leaders had a solid jump on the rest of the field, some clown kept trying to poke his nose under me, totally fine with dog fighting for third place on lap four instead of running down the leaders and giving both of us a shot to win at the end of the race. Anytime I tried to physically force my car in front of his, followed by typing into chat “stay in line so we can catch the leaders”, I was called a fucking asshole and the dude threatened to report me for blocking.

I ended up hooking up with a different guy, and went on to win the race. Should have kept in line so we could chase down the leader. He was still whining about it when we met in the following race.

I could go on and describe every last race we’ve had in the Rookie Street Stock series, but I think this picture alone accurately describes a solid 90% of the races:

As a group of sim racers who have progressed up the ladder and seen all there is to see in iRacing, we can safely say that it doesn’t get any better once you start paying for stuff.

Something should probably be done about this.

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