iRacing special event - 12 hours of Sebring International Raceway
Time for another of iRacing’s special events, these are endurance races spread out over the year where the normal iRacing safety rating and irating are in effect and are basically treated as a normal iRacing race when it comes to splits, rules, etc. Splits is iRacing’s way to make sure that everyone races someone on their skill level, where your irating is used to divide all the registered teams into splits, where each split drives their own race, independent of the other races that are ongoing at the same time. A special event of this type typically draws a couple of thousand racers and since all cannot compete in the same race, they are divided so that each race has 50-60 racersteams. This year of 12h Sebring had around 1500 teams participating, and 27 splits in total.
As many others, this endurance race is a multi-class event, and we were racing in the class with the most fierce competition - the GTE class. The two other classes were the Daytona Prototype class and the GT3 class. Since no one in Hellracers has a really high irating (we are working on it!), this meant that we ended up in - the fairly low - split 6 and 7 with our three cars. However, due to the split system described above, you usually end up with competition around your own skill level.
With that background out of the way - how did it go? Well, our only car in split 7, a Porsche 911 RSR driven by Stellan Lindeberg and Niklas Hjelm, won their split with a good margin down to second place. Well done!
For our two cars in split 6, the second Porsche 911 RSR driven by Magnus Vallström and Philip Johansson had a good pace but did a mistake on one of their fuel stops costing them too much time to be able to compete for the win and they ended up in a not-too-shabby P4. This split also had a Ford GT GTE driven by Andreas Olsson, Marcus Simonsson and Hampus Baaz which had a tough day at the office and were involved in a few too many things to be hopeful for a podium finish. However, they pulled through and managed a P7 in the end, which was great work considering the incidents along the way.
We are all working on our irating in order to be able to compete in the higher splits, where at least we think we belong. But until then, we will continue fighting in whatever split we end up in and try to win it. We are very happy with being able to start three competitive cars in this event, and not only that but also finishing all three cars in high positions.