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iRacing Endurance Series Race 3 - Barcelona

Time to follow up the winning performance at Silverstone with another race in the iRacing Endurance Series, the third out of four races. Once again, the trusty Porsche 911 RSR was the weapon of choice and once again, we were to battle it out over 12 hours with three other car classes. Same old, same old.

With the summer weather finally reaching Sweden, only Wilhelm, Magnus and Marcus were representing the team in one car while the rest of the team were soaking up the sun outside, far from their rigs. The drivers chose to close the blinds and turn up the AC instead and prepare for a few hot stints.

This time, partly because our iRating is slowly creeping up but probably mainly because the series is not quite as popular in the GTE class, we ended up in top split! This means that we were to fight against the best GTE drivers in this event, something that triggered us to perform and bring home a good finish. We started off well, putting the car on pole, with just a few hundreds of a second separating the top four cars. After just a few laps, P2 overtook us and as it would turn out, never gave us the place back. They were just too fast.

The developers at iRacing are constantly updating the simulation software, and one of the biggest topics in the community is the tire model. Since the tire in the end is the only thing connecting the car to the road, the feeling and behavior of the tire in a racing simulator is one of the most important things in how the simulation is perceived by a driver. iRacing has historically struggled compared to the competitors in producing a tire model giving both a good feel when driving while at the same time having a realistic behavior when it comes to tire temperature, dropoff, wear, etc. Well, it isn’t perfect still, but this race gave us a good feeling that the current tire model on the GTE cars is at least the best so far!

Not only is the feeling of the car improved compared to previous tire models, but the wear and dropoff of the tire provided a much needed boost to how different strategies can be used in the race and opened up for different strategies in endurance racing (i.e. when to change tires, how many tires to change, etc). A very positive development to what used to be a pretty thin strategy portfolio, where only one strategy made sense based on the tire development over time when it comes to wear and dropoff.

Soon enough, iRacing will add the possibility to limit the amount of tires available for each race on the road side (it has already been introduced in the oval racing side), which will even further increase the strategy part of endurance racing, something we really look forward to!

Anyway, this was all a long-winded way of saying that we got to see a few different strategies being used in the race due to the latest tire model updates, making it more exciting and unpredictable than usual when it comes to the longer endurance races. We switched places with a car running a different strategy and were either P2 or P3 the bigger part of the race, until the pure pace of the other car put us firmly in P3 with about 3 hours to go. With a fairly comfortable cushion to P4, even though we had a few scares along the way, the last three hours were - to be fair - not that exciting and all about bringing the car home in one piece.

For us, P3 in top split is still a great result, especially when the car didn’t have as much as a scratch on it when crossing the finish line. Well, we might have to give a shout-out to iRacing’s netcode for that, to be fair we had contact with other cars but nothing major and nothing big enough to scratch our beautiful paint work.

Since this is an official iRacing series, championship points are counted both towards individuals as well as teams. With only one race to go in this series, we top the overall championship in the GTE class both individually and as a team and now the goal is to bring home those first places!