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AMR DANI3L has been back to his sim racing events and streams, This community racer is about having fun with like minded racers and boy was last week a blast. If you like a good laugh but also some focused racing, Dan is all about it.
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AMR DANI3L SimRace247 Weekly Blog #3 – I’ve Missed This!!
Hello one & all. Welcome to my 3rd blog of this brand-new year. Doesn’t the time just fly by? Doesn’t seem 5 minutes since I wrote the last one!
Compared to the previous two blogs that I have produced, we have some racing action to talk about which is something I’ve been longing to do for a while now. But now that I’ve finally made a return to streaming on my Youtube channel, now would be a great opportunity to discuss my 2 main events and 2 fun streams during this past week.
So, was I able to succeed, or did I falter & crumble? Well, let’s find out!
To kick things off, we had the opening round of the BoA eSports GT3 Championship around the very tight, twisty but absolutely thrilling circuit that is Oulton Park.
With this being an organisation that I had never competed with and drivers I’ve never raced with before, I went into this event with a completely open mind and was waiting to see what was about to unfold. Would I be right on the pace or was I going to play catch up? Again, this is one of the beauties about sim racing or even our real-life counterparts, the unpredictability of it all.
In this series, there were 2 categories represented with the Pro & Pro-AM’s. I entered the championship in the PRO section and wasn’t expecting an easy ride. Also, with Oulton Park being such a difficult circuit to race on because of the narrow nature of it, track position was absolutely crucial.
Going into qualifying, I knew the sort of pace I could execute and needed to deliver in the session itself. In private testing, my best hot lap in the same conditions was a 1:33.1xx. So, if I could reproduce that, I had a feeling that it would have been enough to be placed highly towards the sharp end of the grid.
However, to my amazement, not only did I go quicker than my previous personal best, but I produced my first ever lap time around Oulton Park that was under the 1 minute 33 range. A 1:32.945 to be precise which was enough to bag pole position by just under 2 tenths of a second.
So, you could imagine the huge relief of being at the front of the grid at Oulton as well as the satisfaction of achieving such a lap time. It’s right up there with the very best pole position laps I’ve ever done in my sim racing history with ACC.
MY QUALIFYING LAP AT OULTON PARK
Having claimed pole position, it was time to get down to the main business of the 60-minute race. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a slow start off the line and lost the lead heading down to turn 1 to the 692 McLaren of Matt Whitburn.
So, the game plan in my head was to try and keep up with Matt and see if I could capitalise through strategy. All throughout the first stint, I was losing out by as much as 4 tenths of a second a lap and the gap grew as large as 3.2 seconds.
I couldn’t understand why but for the majority of the first stint, I couldn’t close the gap at all. But then, in the final 10 minutes of the stint, I noticed that I was closing again. It seemed that my tires were hanging on a lot better compared to Matt’s and the distance had shrunk to as little as 1.5 seconds.
With just over 30 minutes of the race remaining, I made the bold move on the strategy to pit early because we were hunting down on the Pro-Am field. So, I knew that if I boxed early, had a fresh set of tires and then exit the pit lane on a completely clear track, I could push as hard as possible on the out lap to try and overhaul the McLaren.
When I exited the pits, the 7th placed Pro-Am Ferrari of Silvain Pastoris (who hadn’t pitted yet) was alongside me heading down to turn 3, Cascades. If I didn’t pull ahead of Pastoris, the strategy would have failed. But thankfully, I managed to get ahead and by the start of the next lap, I somehow turned a 1.5 second deficit into a 4 second lead. So, just on the out lap alone, I gained nearly 6 seconds.
Once I gained the race lead, I stayed there and managed to claim victory in the opening round by 14.6 seconds! The event wasn’t as straight forward as the gap suggests.
I literally had to work hard all throughout, and I was determined that when I lost the lead at the start, I was never going to give up on it! Which is why it was very satisfying and special to claim the victory on my first event back from having taken a break for the past 2 months. It was amazing!
After this great triumph, it was time to move onto the next stream with something a little more casual and chilled compared to Monday’s event with the latest instalment of my “Pedal To The Metal” series. This time, piloting some rather interesting mods/cars that exist in the world of Assetto Corsa.
Just to give you some idea of the vehicles I drove, we had 3 different Lego cars (2x hot rods & 1x Audi Quattro S1), a Honda Racing Lawnmower, a jet powered 2-seater sofa/couch, a Mercedes Transporter, and of all things in a racing simulator, a plane.
Also, as you can see from this little clip from my stream, I may have accidentally killed Batman and Robin whilst I was speeding around Paddock Hill Bend in the 1960’s Batmobile. So, if I’m in hiding, you know why! Ha Ha! This was an extremely fun live stream to do.
Short Video Clip
Then on Thursday, it was time to get back into my serious, racer mode. Or in this case, into rally driver mode as it was time to tackle the first of my community rally events in DiRT Rally 2.0 around the snowy stages of Monte Carlo.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, I wanted to change my fortunes. It’s one of my ambitions this year to become a much better rally driver and be more consistent. And in the first 3 stages of the Monte Carlo rally, things were going accordingly and very smoothly. Leading the rally by just shy of 35 seconds.
But then, on stage 4, through no fault of my own, the game crashed! I was absolutely gutted about that. The good news about that situation was that the game allowed you to re-join the rally without resulting in a DNF which was brilliant.
The bad news though, and this wasn’t very subtle, I was placed onto the 5th stage and was given a rather hefty 21-minute time penalty. I though “OH SHOOT”. Victory was definitely lost and there’s no way that I could claw all that time back.
In the end, I decided to take the rest of the rally more casually and catch up with everyone that was watching the live stream. But, to my own cost, it was reading a comment by one of my subscribers, “Donk”, which caused me to climb a small bank, over a wall and down the mountainside.
So, not to my surprise, it resulted in my demise from the event! Yet another DNF from a rally. But I still had enormous fun which is the important thing. Even if an event doesn’t go well, it doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it. But an important lesson has been learned here; you can’t read the live stream chat and drive a rally car at the same time! Ha Ha!
The Monte Carlo rally is still ongoing and finishes on January 31st. So, if you want to have a go yourself, please be sure to click on the link at the bottom of this blog to join my rally club. I’ll post all the results on social media as well as my future blogs here on SimRace247.com
Finally, to conclude this first week back to content creating, I hosted the first of my “Friday Night Convoy” events in Forza Horizon 5. I started hosting these in the latter half of 2021 with the previous title, FH4, and it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed doing.
It’s always been an enormous pleasure because it’s not only fun but also a way of giving back to my subscribers to thank everyone for their support all throughout my journey on Youtube.
I want to personally thank Joshua and Toby Vanstone, Evlax & Rhydian (ShotgunNoire) for joining me in the convoy for a good couple of hours, participating in many seasonal events in the landscape of Mexico. I cannot wait to host the next installment this next week.
I plan to host a convoy every Friday in Forza Horizon 5. Everyone is welcome to join in. So, if you would like to participate, then please be sure to do the following:
- Add me to your XBOX friends/followers list. My gamertag is “AMR DANI3L”
- Send me a message on XBOX live to inform me that you would like to join my Horizon convoy
To conclude with blog number three, I thought it would be an idea to briefly talk about the streams I have lined up for this upcoming week.
We begin on Monday 17th January with the second round of the BoA eSports GT3 Championship from Barcelona. This event won’t be as straight forward because the race is predicted to be wet which will even out the field.
To be honest, I haven’t driven that much in the wet in ACC so it’ll be interesting to see how we fare in the race. Can we keep our good momentum up from round 1 by claiming victory again around a slippery Barcelona? Let’s hope so!
UPCOMING ACC STREAM
On Wednesday 19th January, I’ll be starting a brand-new live stream series. Something which I haven’t done on the channel for a long time, but I’m bringing the “What If” series from the dead!
The idea of this is to try and see what certain global championships would be like if they were to be hosted at venues they’ve never raced at before. The championships I’ve covered in the past were British GT & the FIA WEC.
However, this time around, there’s going to be a bit of a twist. You see, there’s many different disciplines and categories from the world of motorsport. Everything from Le Mans Hypercar, LMP1, LMP2, GTE, GT3, GT4, TCR and various one-make series. So, I wonder what would happen if you placed all of them together on the same piece of tarmac at the same time? Well, that’s what we’re going to be finding out.
This series will comprise of 10 episodes and I’ll be using 2 sim racing games in Assetto Corsa and a title which I haven’t ventured into…..until now with Automobilista 2. This will be an interesting set of experiments over the next 10 weeks. We’ll kick things off at Oulton Park in AMS 2.
UPCOMING STREAM
As part of the theme of “Rallying Thursday’s” on my channel, I’ll be venturing back into WRC 10. I did start streaming with this game just before I went off for my 2-month break at the end of last year. I began a brand-new career in the game, but I couldn’t continue with it for the very reasons which I’ve explained in my first blog.
So, I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to start all over again. But this time, now that I’ve returned to streaming on the channel, I’m fully determined to carry on with the career and stick with it. And it all starts with this first upcoming episode.
UPCOMING STREAM
Finally, to embrace the start of another weekend, we’ll have another edition of the Forza Horizon convoys with my community/subscribers and partaking in more fun and adventures around the picturesque landscape of Mexico. If last week was anything to go by, there will be more fun and excitement in store. I cannot wait.
UPCOMING STREAM
Just before I conclude with this blog, I would like to personally thank everyone who tuned into my streams last week & also to the one person who wrote to me to wish me good luck on my return.
If I’m completely honest, I was feeling in a low mood (due to my depression) and was also feeling extremely nervous about my return to content creating. But you all made things very easy for me and it was an absolute pleasure & a tremendous privilege to be back streaming & be in your company.
I’m very grateful as always for the conversations and your support! This return has been a great one. Thank you all.
That’s pretty much everything folks. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this third blog. I always appreciate it. Take care, stay safe & happy sim racing!!
Follow AMR DANI3L
- Youtube: AMR DANI3L
- Instagram: instagram amr_dani3l
- Twitter: Twitter AMR_DANI3L
- AMR DANI3L’s DiRT Rally 2.0 Club: Dirt rally 2.0 clubs
