Tag: sim racing

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Day 3 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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Progress!

What a day!  So yesterday, I had found, thanks to the Virtual Racing School service, that the biggest place for me to make up ground was sector 6, which includes turns 6 and 7, leading to the longest straight away on the track.  As was once covered in Speed Secrets weekly (also, highly suggest signing up for this – incredibly cheap), there are generally two ways to prioritize which corners or sectors to attack first:

  1. The corner that leads to the longest straight away.  Why?  Because any speed lost coming out of that corner, is magnified by the length and amount of time you spend accelerating or at top speed.
  2. The scariest corner or section of the track.  Why? It’s scary.  🙂 If it is scary, than there is a higher probability that most sane people will want to check up and give themselves some room and time to correct for mistakes (and not crash).  If you can be less scared or ignore your bodies natural urges to be physically safe and/or alive, you can have an edge!  Easy, right?

Sector 6 is not particularly scary and has plenty of run-off AND we’re in the virtual world, so there is less of a fear for life.  This is a plain, #1 scenario – it is a long straight away, so don’t screw it up or you’ll pay.

A track map of Road Atlanta, in Braselton, GA

The approach I took

Most of my preparations for this change were mental as I didn’t drive much on Sunday.  In fact, we lost track of time in the AM and missed church.  🙁  So I just realized that in my braking for Turn 6, according to the Virtual Racing School data trace, I was using near 100% of the braking force, when I actually needed to brake more like 50% and trail the braking in longer and a similar situation on Turn 7.

Look at the differences in the brake pressure used. I am the red dotted line. Good-ness!

So I visualized applying the brake more gently, and holding it longer, anticipating the rear end to come around and being able to get on the throttle.  I visualized the same for Turn 7 and long behold – literally, on the very first flying lap, made it work!  ON THE VERY FIRST LAP!  Unfortunately it was a dirty lap because I dropped a tire elsewhere.  iRacing is pretty strict in terms of clean versus dirty laps.  Even dropping one tire can have a lap not count or worse, count against you in a race.  I’m glad that officials in real world racing aren’t as strict.

A little too excited.  Change the setup and carry on.

I’ll admit – I got a little excited and screwed some laps because of how I excited I was at the progress and then realized I hadn’t even changed the setup on the car to the same setup from the reference lap on VRS.  So I took a break to collect myself and load the setup.  In doing this, I realized I didn’t know how to do this.  I was able to easily download the setup file (.sto) but I had no idea how to load it.

Here is a great and simple video I found on how to create, save and load setup files on iRacing.  Old but it still works!

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Back to progress!

After taking a few breaths to chill out, I got back out on track and proceeded to hammer out a string of 1:21.xxx laps and one point even having a 1:20.8xx lap going. I screwed it up by over-slowing for the chicane but I felt like ‘I got it’ and there’s still room for improvement.  My new fastest lap time is 1:21.382, almost one whole second faster than the day prior.

New fastest lap time! 1:21.382 and room to grow!

Tomorrow – more of the same.

My goal tomorrow and possibly the next day is to be able to make this new way of driving the norm.  I am going to try to do 30 minutes or more of 1:21.xxx lap times.  If I can be within .5 seconds of that fastest lap time, consistently – I will feel confident that I’ve adopted these learnings and then can transition to another segment of the track.  I love data (and video)!

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Day 1 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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Alright, so after getting all the updates installed, it was time to drive for the first time on this 30 day challenge.

Three, two…. [FREEZE] …one, go!

Well, it didn’t get off to a great start.  Almost immediately as I loaded up the Mercedes AMG GT3 and Road Atlanta, I noticed that it took a long time for the server to connect and the actual sim environment to load.  Alright, no worries – it’s early for me too, maybe the internet needs some coffee.

Once I got into the car and started heading out, within the first 30 seconds of a lap, I got a freeze/stuttering experience but the car would come back and I could keep going.  Ok, that sucks but let’s stay focused and keep going.

But then it happened again, and again, and again.  Time for evasive actions.

Step 1: Check video quality settings

I remember at one point last month, a big Windows update wiped out my settings and driver stuff for the NVIDIA graphics card and in my attempt to fix stuff, I made a bunch of changes in the iRacing graphics settings.  So I reset them all to somewhat default settings, while still allowing for three monitors.

Went back to racing and… still had issues.  No perceived change.  Frustration level: 4

Step 2: Check background processes and other things that could be using up the internet connection

I shut down iRacing and checked out what other processes were happening that might be using internet bandwidth:

  • OneDrive – it was syncing 9GB of stuff, of which I should just not sync anything on this computer since I only use it for iRacing.  Sigh.
  • Other browser windows – there were a couple other browser windows, like Virtual Racing School, so I closed those down.
  • Steam console – it was connected and I tried to close it but it kept popping back up.  🙁

Result? A somewhat perceivable difference so I decided to keep going and just get as much seat time in as I had already burned through 40 minutes of my hour.

Result: Limited quality track time

This was really frustrating.  I got about 6 or 7 clean laps and most were ruined by the stuttering.  My son was awake and I decided to figure it out later and at least see if my data was being logged by the Virtual Racing School system and while the lap times sucked, at least that worked.

Aha! Found the culprit!

Just as I was about to get out of the sim rig, I decided to search on the web for other people who have had this issue.  Pages were loading slowly but loading and then suddenly, everything stopped loading.  WTF?  Did my internet go down?  Checked networked status and no, packets are still being sent and received.  I was about to get up to reset the router and modem when I looked over and saw my phone that I had used to record the part 1 of this day 1 video blog and it was uploading the HD video to YouTube.

I paused the upload, turned off the WiFi on the phone and looked at the PC.  Suddenly, the pages were loading again.  Then literally a few seconds later, I see a pop up from Windows that it was getting ready to install the Windows 10 Creators Update.  Great.  So two big upload and downloads were essentially eating up the internet connection.

Lesson learned? Make sure your internet connection is clear and prioritized for your iRacing.  Having someone else uploading something, streaming a movie, having a Skype video chat, will not do you any favors.

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Day 0 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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I’ve seen several articles on taking on a new thing by doing that thing for 30 days in a row, such as running a marathon (30 marathons in 30 days), stretching 10 minutes a day for thirty days, meditating, doing 15 burpees per day for thirty days and so on.

Why?

Usually it’s help start a new habit, kick a habit or accelerate development in something.  No difference here, I’m doing this to get faster and have fun!

The goal: 1 hour of racing per day, everyday, for 30 days.

While I wish I could race a real, physical race car  each day, I don’t have that kind of scratch or logistics setup but I do have a pretty sweet sim racing setup and iRacing.

So everyday, usually in the early AM’s, I’m going to practice and/or race on iRacing.  Through the next 30 days, I’ll also have at least 2 full race weekends where I’ll be racing in the real world.  So for those days, I won’t be on the simulator but instead on a race track, in my race car!  Yeah!

What do I expect to happen?

I’m not exactly sure but I am at least hoping to get noticeably faster in the virtual world, hammer out details on my sim setup and be better at learning to get fast.

To stay focused and reduce variables, I am going to focus on just one car and one track.  The Mercedes AMG GT3 and Road Atlanta.  Why?  Having a rabbit to chase.  I’m a huge believer and advocate in the power of data + video.

Literally thousands of virtual laps of this track but have yet to actually drive it.

Here is a good review of the car, right before it was released by the crew at Inside Sim Racing.

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There is a new service that recently launched, Virtual Racing School, and while I’m new to it also, I am in love with the premise and potential of what they are doing.  With a simple download and activation, VRS logs all of your iRacing data and video and saves it to your profile.  No downloading, uploading or anything to deal with. Just install, activate, drive and you’re all set.

As part of the service, they also have data packs for certain cars and track combinations and even setups, that you can automatically use as a reference point to work towards.  This is massive!  Having someone else who is much faster than you, in the same car, same track and similar conditions is one of the best ways to learn and learn fast.

Getting ready

So I decided to start the journey, one day ahead and get my day 1 as smooth as possible.  I booted up my computer, installed updates to Windows, iRacing and NVIDIA.  My goal was to be able to simply wake up the next morning, do my morning routine and be up and running, in a race car within 15 minutes of getting out of bed.

I’ll create a post later on with the details on my current sim setup, so you all can get the full details then but at a high level, here is the setup:

So, while I technically have a motion simulator and I have an Oculus and have used them for iRacing, I will most likely not use them very often over these 30 days.  Main reason: we live in a tiny apartment and I’ll be doing most of my daily racing in the early AM, while my wife and 2 year are asleep, 15 and 40 feet away, respectively.  The motion simulator isn’t super loud but it makes noise and my wife has complained about it before.

The Oculus is AWESOME but I sweat easily and have found that when I’ve worn it for 20 minutes plus of intense driving, I sweat pretty bad and the lenses start fogging up.  So I’ll be using the triple monitors and headphones, without motion.