I’m mainly a Sim racer for endurance events and was curious how many others there are out there that mainly focus on these events. I find shorter sprints a little too punishing in that one mistake/incident can cost you the entire race whereas enduros can be a little more forgiving.
I find personally a lot of satisfaction in doing the strategy as I’m not necessarily the fastest driver, but it can come up with some good strategies to find time over a long race.
What about anyone else? Curious to hear about your experiences and opinions!
I played rFactor 2 for a couple of years and raced GTEs and GT3s in the Virtual Endurance Championship and GT3 Endurance Series.
I really enjoyed the team aspect of the races and built some great friendships that have lasted even now I’ve taken an extended break from sim racing. The highlight every year was the 24 Hours of Le Mans - I have really fond memories of doing the night shift at 4am with the one or two other people online, knowing we had to carry the car to the morning.
I really enjoyed the multi-class racing. There was always someone in my mirrors and the first couple of times the prototypes would come to lap us each race would always be so hectic. I can vividly remember the feeling of dread being in a very intense battle at Spa, having the leaders stream past us leading up to Eau Rouge.
Another thing I loved was just racing as part of a team and the pressure of not letting me teammates down. In a weird way I enjoyed the underlying feeling of dread in the couple of days leading up to each race, the peaking in the laps before I took over the car, and then in longer races, the way the fact it didn’t go away after my stint as I knew I had to get in the car again later on! Then when we’d cross the line, there was always such great relief knowing that I wouldn’t have to get in again.
That would’ve been an awesome experience!
It’s definitely a great way to form friendships. Le Mans is definitely one that’s on my list and the N24! Any tips for preparing?
I’m trying to improve my SR in iRacing but I’ve a long way to go I fear!
I love the team aspect also, being able to sit in chat and have a laugh in between stints and plan out your next move is always a lot of fun. Especially in a race with changing conditions where you’re trying to figure out the best point to pit for tyres and so on. It’s one of the things I love about ACC with having to deal with rain and so on which can really mix things up
I found getting teammates to sit in the server with me and analyse my driving / give me live feedback was really helpful! We would rotate and give feedback to each other. Often it wasn’t just what they were telling me, but the fact I knew someone was watching made me more focused on what to improve.
This is probably too specific to be helpful, but because the VEC had 3 divisions at the time, in the few days before a race the practice server would have 70-80 cars on at peak times, which was absolute chaos. That was pretty useful for practicing traffic, for sure! But any way to practice with real drivers definitely helps.
Definitely, I love how dynamic the sims are getting and hopefully this will keep getting better across the sims! It makes it much more interesting when there’s a bit of rain in the mix :)