Tag: fanatec

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Day 4 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row

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Fooling my mind even more

One thing that I noticed over the first few days, even on Day 3, when clicked off a session of nearly 20 laps in a row, was that I wasn’t sweating as much as I usually do when I drive in real-life.  One reason might be that usually before I get into a real race car, I get all suited up and then do light plyometric exercises, stretches and even a planned jog to and from the bathroom.  9 times out 10, before I get into the race car, I already have a healthy sweat going.

Right now we live in an apartment, with people above and below us.  I am doing my simulator driving between 5:30 and 6am, of which most people are still sleeping, so I haven’t been doing my warm up exercises but what I started were two things:

  1. Meditating: This is something I’ve taken up over the past 8-10 months, using an app called Headspace.  This is for a different post but I can’t be a bigger proponent of meditation and how it’s improved my overall quality of life.
  2. Wearing a racing suit: I got a new racing suit last year and that meant I had my original racing suit just lying around, so I decided to bring it back into service by wearing a full layer of clothes underneath (to mimic the fire retardant underwear I wear in real life), the suite itself, a pair of karting gloves I got for Christmas and ideally, my original racing shoes (of which I keep forgetting to get out of my RV).

Did it work? Yes, I think but definitely did not hurt.

I think so on a couple levels, first – I was definitely warmer and built up an actual sweat.  Not like the sweats I’ve built up in actual iRacing races but enough to know my body is working to stay cool.  I can’t say that I felt more or less in the zone but it sure as heck didn’t hurt.

I also decided to strap on the Next Level Racing 4-point harness that came with cockpit and while I don’t love it, the other day I was moving my car on our new property with no seat belt on, and that felt weird.  So I can definitely tell when I don’t have a harness on and by putting it on, that is one less variable that might crawl into my brain as I’m driving.

This year the harnesses in my BMW PRO3 car expired, and a new set of Schroth harnesses were installed, so there is a used set that I will eventually install on the rig, along with some metal mounting bars and plates so that it feels the same as in the car and I actually have an old Sparco seat, that I used before getting this cockpit.  I am not a huge guy, so it feels like I am not as secure as I am in my racing seat.

Two steps forward: Another .5 second drop!

So how did the actual driving go?  My goal was to keep doing the same things I learned in Day 3 and be able to hammer out regular 1:21.xxx lap times, versus the regular 1:22.xxx times I had on Day 2.

Success! Literally, on the first flying lap, I was able to get back near my personal best and then I improved it again, dropping to a 1:20.628, another almost .6 second improvement.  HOLY CRAP!!

Another big improvement and only the last lap was a ‘dirty’ lap, where I crashed. 🙁

I didn’t do anything really different, I just decided to apply that technique of braking sooner, lighter and rolling more speed into the corners to all the corners.  Here’s where the gains were made:

See the highlighted areas to understand the story.
  1. Look – no brakes! The first thing is that the s-curves, I found a way to get the car pointed on the downhill section of ‘The Esses’.  Huge gain there.
  2. Less brake, the line? I am actually not sure what happened in the chicane there but I think it might be a combination of just ever so slightly less brakes, more steering input to get the car turned and going.  Thoughts?

One step backward: Consistency at the limit

That’s awesome but I took a break after that stint from the excitement, recollected my thoughts and went again to try and just replicate this new 1:20.xxx lap times but it didn’t happen.  I was making mistakes all over the place and the worst section was Turn 3.  As I was carrying more speed out of turn 1, through 2, I wasn’t getting the car straightened before braking and that caused it to either get sideways at the top of the hill or even worse, to cut the corner too hard on turn 3, which would upset the car horribly.

Ugh… 6 of 7 laps were dirty and a crash. That’s not good or cheap.  Glad I’m in the virtual world.

I tried multiple times and just felt myself getting frustrated, so I decided to call it a day as my hour was up.  Tomorrow’s goal?  Come in with a cool head, focused and not looking for more time, just a solid run of high 1:20.xxx and low 1:21.xxx lap times.

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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 0 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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I’ve seen several articles on taking on a new thing by doing that thing for 30 days in a row, such as running a marathon (30 marathons in 30 days), stretching 10 minutes a day for thirty days, meditating, doing 15 burpees per day for thirty days and so on.

Why?

Usually it’s help start a new habit, kick a habit or accelerate development in something.  No difference here, I’m doing this to get faster and have fun!

The goal: 1 hour of racing per day, everyday, for 30 days.

While I wish I could race a real, physical race car  each day, I don’t have that kind of scratch or logistics setup but I do have a pretty sweet sim racing setup and iRacing.

So everyday, usually in the early AM’s, I’m going to practice and/or race on iRacing.  Through the next 30 days, I’ll also have at least 2 full race weekends where I’ll be racing in the real world.  So for those days, I won’t be on the simulator but instead on a race track, in my race car!  Yeah!

What do I expect to happen?

I’m not exactly sure but I am at least hoping to get noticeably faster in the virtual world, hammer out details on my sim setup and be better at learning to get fast.

To stay focused and reduce variables, I am going to focus on just one car and one track.  The Mercedes AMG GT3 and Road Atlanta.  Why?  Having a rabbit to chase.  I’m a huge believer and advocate in the power of data + video.

Literally thousands of virtual laps of this track but have yet to actually drive it.

Here is a good review of the car, right before it was released by the crew at Inside Sim Racing.

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There is a new service that recently launched, Virtual Racing School, and while I’m new to it also, I am in love with the premise and potential of what they are doing.  With a simple download and activation, VRS logs all of your iRacing data and video and saves it to your profile.  No downloading, uploading or anything to deal with. Just install, activate, drive and you’re all set.

As part of the service, they also have data packs for certain cars and track combinations and even setups, that you can automatically use as a reference point to work towards.  This is massive!  Having someone else who is much faster than you, in the same car, same track and similar conditions is one of the best ways to learn and learn fast.

Getting ready

So I decided to start the journey, one day ahead and get my day 1 as smooth as possible.  I booted up my computer, installed updates to Windows, iRacing and NVIDIA.  My goal was to be able to simply wake up the next morning, do my morning routine and be up and running, in a race car within 15 minutes of getting out of bed.

I’ll create a post later on with the details on my current sim setup, so you all can get the full details then but at a high level, here is the setup:

So, while I technically have a motion simulator and I have an Oculus and have used them for iRacing, I will most likely not use them very often over these 30 days.  Main reason: we live in a tiny apartment and I’ll be doing most of my daily racing in the early AM, while my wife and 2 year are asleep, 15 and 40 feet away, respectively.  The motion simulator isn’t super loud but it makes noise and my wife has complained about it before.

The Oculus is AWESOME but I sweat easily and have found that when I’ve worn it for 20 minutes plus of intense driving, I sweat pretty bad and the lenses start fogging up.  So I’ll be using the triple monitors and headphones, without motion.