Samuel Reiman continues with his sim racing blogs here at simrace247.com. Keeping the community up to date with his events in sim racing. Blog #5
Samuel reiman is that type of guy that you find him in the commentary booth, sim racing or trying out a bit of track driving. Motorsport and involvement in sim racing commentary and racing is a real passion of his.
Bringing us up to speed on what he has been up to, we have blog #5 from Samuel.
It’s that time of year again! iRacing’s official series has come to a close, but don’t worry, they’ll be back in less than a week.
Most of iRacing’s official series last for 12 weeks, visiting a different track each week, averaging your best points scores from each week, and then taking your best 8 out of 12 results for your final points score.
Thousands of virtual sim racers compete in each series, so normally I like to pick two or three series to compete in and see if I can break into the Top 100.
For iRacing’s 2021 Season 3 calendar, I competed in the Ferrari GT3 Championship, Formula 3, and the Late Model series.
The Ferrari GT3 championship features an unbelievable amount of participation, partially due to the fact that the drivers don’t have to worry about setting their cars up. This fixed-setup series features 15-minute sprint races, and 22,840 drivers competed in a race during the season!
Frustratingly, I missed the Top 100 by 1 point, placing 102nd overall. I could make up excuses, but honestly 102nd out of 22,840 isn’t too shabby.
The Formula 3 Championship was a bit more demanding. It was open setup, featured longer races and, of course, the cars were more fragile. As a result, I often opted to start from the pits or the back of the pack just to make sure I could make it through the Lap 1 carnage.
On occasions, I was able to qualify and race up front though, and I did have quite a memorable race at Montreal where I started 6th and finished 2nd after avoiding incidents and then making a last-lap pass. Alas, much like the Ferrari GT3 Series, I fell short and placed 115th out of 8,771 overall.
Lastly came the Late Model Series, in which I had competed before. In 2017 I placed 47th in the overall standings, and so my mission this season was to beat that. The Late Model is a grassroots-level stock racing car that competes on oval tracks, but what makes this series particularly difficult is that there are no cautions.
The biggest nuisance here is that if you do have to slow down for a car that has wrecked, you don’t really ever get a chance to make up for that lost time. Fortunately, I performed strongly throughout the season, even taking a win during Week 5 at Lanier, but alas again I fell short of my goal and finished 58th out of 4,154 in the final standings.
Oh well, time to reset and pick three more championships to go for next season! For 2021 Season 4, I think I’m going to give the Formula Vee, Formula Renault 2.0, and 1987 NASCAR Cup car a spin. Wish me luck!
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To read more about Samuel and his passion for motorsport, read his introductory blog: Samuel Reiman
It is difficult. In the rookie splits you really need to focus more on wreck avoidance/finishing than actually racing unfortunately. There is an art to it, and sometimes you’ve just got to “learn when to fold them” and back down from a battle with a driver who’s driving a bit erratically. The nice thing about iRacing’s championship is it will take the best result for each 4 races that you do (if you do 5-8, it averages your best 2 results and so on) so that is something to consider, that you can get taken out in a couple of races and yet still post a good points score for the week.
Hi Samuel, nice article. I did iRacing too a while ago and also did the Ferrari 488 and F3. Really difficult to combine those.
How do you survive the carnage in the lower splits ? I kept getting bounced back due to all the crashed 🙂
Thanks !