Back on Track
I am not sure what exactly you call it… a hobby or a past time. Most people problably call it odd and a waste of time but luckily I’m not most people. So back in 2004 my Dad and uncle came to me with the idea of starting an online racing league and at this point VMRL was born. I had raced online before in some other leagues but that was mostly road racing with very experienced sim racers. This new league was going to be a Nascar based league. I worked up the website and the rules and set up a server and we raced online twice a week. Unfortunately over the years people lost interest and we started losing drivers and eventually merged with another league called Reverence Racing, which I became an admin for. I again set up a website and helped work on the rules and helped build a stronger league. Again, slowly we were losing people through the years and I eventually didn’t have time for all the work. The game everyone uses this type of online racing can no longer be bought in the stores so it is hard to come by new racers. Many aspects of online racing is similar to real life racing because it is a bunch of people with different opinions put together with the same goal in mind, to win. Long story short, I didn’t have time to keep up with everything that was expected of an admin or time to deal with everyone’s opinions so I decided to stop racing last year. Well, I decided it was time to start again.
The Reverence guys recently joined with another racing league called Nascar Sim World and it seemed like a good chance to get back in to racing and not have the admin duties. So I redid my last paint scheme on the current truck body and went back out on the track last week for the first time in over a year. The interesting thing was I actually still did pretty good. These leagues allow drivers to using racing aids (stability control and traction control) and that is probably a good thing because it is by no means easy to drive or race. It has taken many, many hours of practice to get to the point where I can race without any aids (on most tracks). My means of tracking the time on the track isn’t perfect, but I have over 800 hours of racing and over 15,000 laps completed (before Sierra took down their service last year). If everyone was spinning in every turn it wouldn’t be that much fun. I guess the benefit to those drivers using aids is that aids tend to produce lower laps times and higher tire wear so in the long run it all works out. It is also the reason the goal is to learn to race without aids. I was very excited to be able to go out on my first time back and run with no aids and keep it on the track the entire evening (for the most part).
The thrill of racing with other real people is you never know what will happen. Racing against AI is predictable and really not that exciting in my opinion. Real people act like real people. I had a bad qualifying run and I started in the back row of a field of 16 drivers. I worked my way up slowly and after an awesome pit stop, I found myself in first about midway through the race. I got to lead about 10 laps before there was a caution and I had to pit again. A penalty pushed me to the back of the field again. After working myself back up to 5th, a little bit of over driver had me scraping the wall coming out of turn 2 a few times and the damage slowed me down to lose the front pack. I was holding 5th but had 6th on my bumper with 10 laps to go. At about the 5 to go mark, he dove under me when he shouldn’t have and I let him go knowing I had time to repass. I moved back into 5th on the next turn. So with one lap he was nosing his way in again, so I let him go to set up a pass on the last turn to save my 5th place position. Things didn’t quite work at as planned. The grass offers no traction so it is very easy to turn yourself around trying to come back on the track. You can see for yourself what it is like to take the checker flag sideways.