Be Excellent To Each Other

The iRacing 24 Hours of Daytona starts in a little over an hour's time. I'm driving the Wernä Digital Racing Mercedes AMG GT3 in a team of 3 so it'll be about 8 hours driving each.

You can get updates on Twitter here: https://mobile.twitter.com/wdr_simracing

No live steam? Can't you twitch it?

Myp has spun!

Nothing has a happened since. I think they're having trouble with their Twitter thing.

It's more that our race engineer is also the same person who updates the Twitter feed.

I left the car at the end of my second stint in P6 out of 28 in the GT3 class (28th overall I think). Next stint is at 1:20am.

I've just seen the feed. Yeah, that spin happened about 2pm today. He's a bit behind.

Just found out that my friends at Dilligaf Racing are streaming the race from their point of view. Luckily we're both in the same split!

Title

Twitter updates are happening now but they're miles behind.

Up to P5!

We briefly had 4th but the pit cycles are all out of whack so probably not a true position. Back in 5th now. I am just about to get back in the car.

Still in P5 as I finish my stint. Time for a quick sleep before my last one at 7:30ish.

4th as I'm about to get back in the car for my final stint. 6 hours left!

We are now double-stinting tyres as we sniff a podium!

Our podium ambitions have gone up in a cloud of engine smoke. I just stacked it coming out of the bus stop with about 18 laps left of my last stint. After 19 hours. On lap 632. After I'd taken care of the car almost perfectly for 7 hours and 247 laps. I am a bit gutted.

1 hour of required repairs and it may still not be drivable afterwards. If it is then we still have a shot at the top ten.

Ah, shitty luck, Myp.

What caused it?

I had a backmarker Audi driving really close to me trying to unlap himself as I approached the chicane, was driving in my mirrors a bit, touched the grass on the exit, got loose and turned 90° right, straight into the outer wall on the banking. Engine went boom.

I'll do a video later.

We are back out in P10 with just over 3 hours left.

Is there prize money?

Not for this competition, no. Just for the fun of it.

Last driver swap now. 1 hour to go!

With 34 mins left we are P10 in the GTD class (out of 28) and P29 overall (out of 56).

Shame I ruined our chances of a better finish, but it's been great fun.

Annnnnd it's over. 24 hours and 737 laps later, we've taken the chequered flag!

Not sure what to do now. Too wired to sleep.

Meaning you ended up in first? Nice!

Well no. Technically everyone takes the chequered flag.

Bloody Millenials.

Aw thanks! Please have it engraved with "finished 29th in split 8 of 13"

There's a space underneath when you print it out.

Seriously though. Well done. How long were your stints?

Just under two hours. So two full fuel tanks - roughly 66-69 laps depending how economical you were.

That's why I queried it Well done anyway!

In the technohat? For 2 straight hours?

Yep. It ain't no thang. I also spotted my teammate from the helicam in VR. Great for looking ahead and behind at other cars.

Only if you finish the race.

Technically correcter!

Looking at the standings we finished 150th out of 452 teams in our class. Top third - I'll take that.

I was driver 657 out of 1682. Not quite top third, but comfortably top half.

So when you were in fourth place until you binned it off was that out of 452? Or were there multiple instances of the track or something. No idea how this works.

There were 452 teams across the whole event. You can only have a max of 60 cars on the track (across two classes) at any one time so it was divided into 13 "splits" or server instances. We were in split 8 (ordered by iRating which is an indicator of driver "skill"). The higher split you were in, the higher the strength of field (average iRating for all drivers), and the more championship points you would get for any given position.

So we were in a below average split but ended up in the top third of teams for the whole event, which is pretty good.

We finished 10th out of 28 teams in our class in our race. P29 overall out of 58 (pretty good considering we were the slow class).

Would you have finished much higher if you hadn't stacked it?

If conservatively we'd finished 5th we'd have got 101 race points instead of 79, so that would have had us placed as 92nd best team and me 409th best driver.

How many finished out of the original 60 on your server?

Looking at the results sheet it shows 17 disconnected teams and 1 disqualified. So 40 out of the 58 were there at the end. That's a pretty decent attrition rate.

I am irrationally angry that the jargon here is "split" and not the technically correct "shard."

Well, for all I know the development team may refer to them as that in the back end, but they are known as splits on the front end.

"Shard" is the correct computer science jargon. I suspect "split" is something that's come from a community of race car fans, given the connotations around split laps etc.

Aye. When we talk about splits they are seen as separate races. It's not really a reference to server instances - I just used that comparison for explanation.

At least we weren't involved with any idiots trying to do stuff like this:


This is also pretty dumb:

Video of crashy crashy, as promised…

This is better.

There's no fucking way you'd have driven away from that

I didn't. The engine blew and I had to get a tow. Then it was another hour and six minutes to replace the engine.