Category: Drive Faster

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Day 2 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row

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My goal today?

Well a pre-goal, was to actually drive.  The changes I made (stopping OneDrive from syncing, installing the latest updates so they weren’t downloading in the background and not having a video uploading on another device) all resulted in no performance issues at all.  Yay!

The real goal: Drive like I do in real life – putting down a string of consecutive and consistent laps.  I’ve found in the past in iRacing that I go off A LOT more than I do in real-life, usually having multiple incidents with walls in a given practice session.  That’s not what happens in real life and while I am not driving anywhere near the same car, I believe I should be able to drive in the virtual world as I do in the real world; safe, consistent and somewhat fast.  🙂

After a day more focused on setup and updates on the machine, my goal was just to put down a true initial baseline of what I can do in the Mercedes AMG GT3 and Road Atlanta.  Ideally, I wanted to drive the entire 60 minutes without an issue but I was only able to make it just past 30 minutes with no crashes. The good news was that I improved my personal best AND I put down several laps within .5 of my personal best, clicking off a consistent string of 1:22.xxx lap times and while trying different things.

I wanted to use this baseline of data to be confident in what I could do when analyzing the data with Virtual Racing School data packs.

22 laps without crashing! Not bad for not driving as much as I wanted to the past 6 months.

Lessons Learned

    • Pareto lives!  I am down 2.197 seconds from my reference lap and one segment alone accounts 0.809 seconds, almost half of the lap time.  Two segments (4 and 7) account for almost half of the delta.

  • By default, in testing, a car starts with a full fuel load – in the Mercedes AMG GT3, it was 30 gallons.  The car in the reference lap was running with about 10 gallons and 9 gallons in the lap I am using for reference.  That is a ~15 gallon and 90 lbs. difference.  THAT IS HUGE – though, I still have much more work to do aside from losing car weight.
  • The data exposes all – the major theme of comparing the two laps is clear.  I am braking too hard for the most of the significant turns where I am losing time and then getting on throttle sooner and harder than my rabbit.
    • I need brake slightly sooner, lighter and carry more speed through the corner and this will require coming on throttle softer.
    • This is consistent with what I’ve seen in real-life, comparing my data with a super fast driver like Olivier.

One thing I am going to work until I can get it

Segment 6, which includes turns 6 and 7.  Brake sooner, lighter, carry more speed in, know that mid-corner will be not as planted and I will have to be more gentle with throttle application on corner exit, because I’ll be carrying more speed.  The goal is still to get to throttle as fast as I can but I’ll be more at the limit.

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Day 1 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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Alright, so after getting all the updates installed, it was time to drive for the first time on this 30 day challenge.

Three, two…. [FREEZE] …one, go!

Well, it didn’t get off to a great start.  Almost immediately as I loaded up the Mercedes AMG GT3 and Road Atlanta, I noticed that it took a long time for the server to connect and the actual sim environment to load.  Alright, no worries – it’s early for me too, maybe the internet needs some coffee.

Once I got into the car and started heading out, within the first 30 seconds of a lap, I got a freeze/stuttering experience but the car would come back and I could keep going.  Ok, that sucks but let’s stay focused and keep going.

But then it happened again, and again, and again.  Time for evasive actions.

Step 1: Check video quality settings

I remember at one point last month, a big Windows update wiped out my settings and driver stuff for the NVIDIA graphics card and in my attempt to fix stuff, I made a bunch of changes in the iRacing graphics settings.  So I reset them all to somewhat default settings, while still allowing for three monitors.

Went back to racing and… still had issues.  No perceived change.  Frustration level: 4

Step 2: Check background processes and other things that could be using up the internet connection

I shut down iRacing and checked out what other processes were happening that might be using internet bandwidth:

  • OneDrive – it was syncing 9GB of stuff, of which I should just not sync anything on this computer since I only use it for iRacing.  Sigh.
  • Other browser windows – there were a couple other browser windows, like Virtual Racing School, so I closed those down.
  • Steam console – it was connected and I tried to close it but it kept popping back up.  🙁

Result? A somewhat perceivable difference so I decided to keep going and just get as much seat time in as I had already burned through 40 minutes of my hour.

Result: Limited quality track time

This was really frustrating.  I got about 6 or 7 clean laps and most were ruined by the stuttering.  My son was awake and I decided to figure it out later and at least see if my data was being logged by the Virtual Racing School system and while the lap times sucked, at least that worked.

Aha! Found the culprit!

Just as I was about to get out of the sim rig, I decided to search on the web for other people who have had this issue.  Pages were loading slowly but loading and then suddenly, everything stopped loading.  WTF?  Did my internet go down?  Checked networked status and no, packets are still being sent and received.  I was about to get up to reset the router and modem when I looked over and saw my phone that I had used to record the part 1 of this day 1 video blog and it was uploading the HD video to YouTube.

I paused the upload, turned off the WiFi on the phone and looked at the PC.  Suddenly, the pages were loading again.  Then literally a few seconds later, I see a pop up from Windows that it was getting ready to install the Windows 10 Creators Update.  Great.  So two big upload and downloads were essentially eating up the internet connection.

Lesson learned? Make sure your internet connection is clear and prioritized for your iRacing.  Having someone else uploading something, streaming a movie, having a Skype video chat, will not do you any favors.