Tag: road atlanta

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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 3 – 30 Days of Racing in a Row Challenge

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Progress!

What a day!  So yesterday, I had found, thanks to the Virtual Racing School service, that the biggest place for me to make up ground was sector 6, which includes turns 6 and 7, leading to the longest straight away on the track.  As was once covered in Speed Secrets weekly (also, highly suggest signing up for this – incredibly cheap), there are generally two ways to prioritize which corners or sectors to attack first:

  1. The corner that leads to the longest straight away.  Why?  Because any speed lost coming out of that corner, is magnified by the length and amount of time you spend accelerating or at top speed.
  2. The scariest corner or section of the track.  Why? It’s scary.  🙂 If it is scary, than there is a higher probability that most sane people will want to check up and give themselves some room and time to correct for mistakes (and not crash).  If you can be less scared or ignore your bodies natural urges to be physically safe and/or alive, you can have an edge!  Easy, right?

Sector 6 is not particularly scary and has plenty of run-off AND we’re in the virtual world, so there is less of a fear for life.  This is a plain, #1 scenario – it is a long straight away, so don’t screw it up or you’ll pay.

A track map of Road Atlanta, in Braselton, GA

The approach I took

Most of my preparations for this change were mental as I didn’t drive much on Sunday.  In fact, we lost track of time in the AM and missed church.  🙁  So I just realized that in my braking for Turn 6, according to the Virtual Racing School data trace, I was using near 100% of the braking force, when I actually needed to brake more like 50% and trail the braking in longer and a similar situation on Turn 7.

Look at the differences in the brake pressure used. I am the red dotted line. Good-ness!

So I visualized applying the brake more gently, and holding it longer, anticipating the rear end to come around and being able to get on the throttle.  I visualized the same for Turn 7 and long behold – literally, on the very first flying lap, made it work!  ON THE VERY FIRST LAP!  Unfortunately it was a dirty lap because I dropped a tire elsewhere.  iRacing is pretty strict in terms of clean versus dirty laps.  Even dropping one tire can have a lap not count or worse, count against you in a race.  I’m glad that officials in real world racing aren’t as strict.

A little too excited.  Change the setup and carry on.

I’ll admit – I got a little excited and screwed some laps because of how I excited I was at the progress and then realized I hadn’t even changed the setup on the car to the same setup from the reference lap on VRS.  So I took a break to collect myself and load the setup.  In doing this, I realized I didn’t know how to do this.  I was able to easily download the setup file (.sto) but I had no idea how to load it.

Here is a great and simple video I found on how to create, save and load setup files on iRacing.  Old but it still works!

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Back to progress!

After taking a few breaths to chill out, I got back out on track and proceeded to hammer out a string of 1:21.xxx laps and one point even having a 1:20.8xx lap going. I screwed it up by over-slowing for the chicane but I felt like ‘I got it’ and there’s still room for improvement.  My new fastest lap time is 1:21.382, almost one whole second faster than the day prior.

New fastest lap time! 1:21.382 and room to grow!

Tomorrow – more of the same.

My goal tomorrow and possibly the next day is to be able to make this new way of driving the norm.  I am going to try to do 30 minutes or more of 1:21.xxx lap times.  If I can be within .5 seconds of that fastest lap time, consistently – I will feel confident that I’ve adopted these learnings and then can transition to another segment of the track.  I love data (and video)!

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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.