Two years of Hellracers!
Another year has passed and today we celebrate two years together as Hellracers! Let’s skip the “in these unprecedented times” for now and just shortly acknowledge that sim racing in general took a big leap forward during last year. We noticed it mostly by the way the competition level rose during the year when more and more people of all skill levels entered the sim racing world. And not only that, the prize money, the level of professionalism and the focus on sim racing from the outside all took a leap forward. Competitions where professional race drivers drove races in the sim racing world took place not only once or twice, but full series was shown on big TV channels. We really enjoyed this increased focus and it made us even more motivated.
So, what has happened during this year in the team? We welcomed one new member to the team, Rickard Karlsson, who joined us last summer and has participated in a lot of races representing the team since then. Our biggest racing achievement during the year was probably winning the iRacing Endurance Series overall in the GTE class. That is, we were the fastest GTE car on the entire iRacing service in an official series over 4 races that were 6 hours each! Not a small feather to put in our hat!
We participated in the IVRA Endurance series with three cars but couldn’t repeat last year’s success, we ended up with one car in P4 in the total standings as our best result. We raced in the IVRA Clubsport with our Porsche 911 Cup car and in the 24H SERIES ESPORTS with a Porsche GT4 Cayman. Even though just qualifying to the 24H SERIES ESPORTS was an achievement, neither that nor the IVRA Clubsport ended with a fully satisfactory result overall, though we had some good races. We will come back with a new focus! Apart from those series, we also tried qualifying for the Sports Car Open endurance series, but we ended up too far down in the list of cars to make it.
We have noticed that with families, full time jobs and other things taking time, it is harder and harder to put in the practice needed to keep up. The time where you put in a few laps of practice and then raced with the possibility of ending up on the podium has passed, to get a podium finish in the big series now requires a dedicated effort most of the time. In the team, the slowest driver is really fast and in general, not many laps are required to get up to a speed that is fast in official races. But in these series, the level is just that much higher and most drivers competing in them are really dedicated to practice to find those last tenths or even hundreds of a second. It’s not always that we have the time for that given all the “musts” in real life, but we strive for having fun first and get good results second, and we are having a lot of fun!
Back to the results… Even though we didn’t end up higher than P4 in the overall standings, we did manage a win and several podium finishes in the IVRA Endurance series in some serious competition. We took several podiums and wins in the Club Scandinavia League series, where some of Scandinavia’s best drivers compete. Rickard won the AM Championship in Apex Racing’s TCR series. Philip came second place in the Apex Racing Academy GT4 VRS Super Series (whew, what a name!).
We also competed in the Swedish National Championship in the Porsche 911 Cup, which was mostly a fun experience. However, the competition organization wasn’t on the level that we expected from an official national competition, and the racing just wasn’t as fun as we had hoped for. With that said, it attracted some of Sweden’s absolutely best sim racers and the speed of the drivers was top notch, with a well deserved winner in Carl Jansson.
A new Swedish series started just after the national championship - the Time attack series by timeattacknu.se. Philip in the team managed a great result with P2 overall and the series made Rickard buy a car IRL and he is now competing in the Time attack series on the Swedish tracks in his BMW 135i. Awesome that we are seeing Hellracers drivers out on the real tracks!
Writing it all down made us realise just how much we have accomplished in a year. In every competition where we start, we are usually close to, or on, the podium. We have become good friends in the team, and talk everyday about everything and anything. Hellracers means more than racing to us, it’s a group where we can share things, help each other out, give input on everything from new stuff for the rig to the best type of tonic for your G&T, and above all, have fun together. Let’s continue having fun!