Lockdown Motorsport

So 2020 is going to be the year when everything got put on hold as the coronavirus spread across the world. While here in Australia we are still running limited events like track days with small attendance numbers and no spectators, our race and rally seasons have stopped before they even really started.

If you’ve seen our last post you’ll know we ended the 2019 season on a flat bed truck after an off at the Adelaide Rally. The crash did a fair amount of damage to the car and while repairable it’s going to take a long while to get fixed so on the one hand the motorsport hiatus has actually come at a good time for us as there is plenty of time for the repairs to be carried out.

But where to get a bit of a race fix?

The National competitions like Supercars have moved onto a SIM racing platform over the break to give the fans something to follow and while initially skeptical about the spectacle I’ve actually really enjoyed watching the weekly live streamed i-racing events. And SIM racing is quite accessible to everyone, all you need is a computer or a console.

In my youth I was a dab hand at Daytona and Sega Rally and when the Playstation and Grand Turismo combination brought quality racing games to the home player I joined the home racers and hit some famous race tracks.

But in those days the online racing component was non-existent or the Australian dial up internet didn’t support the traffic and I never progressed past the casual race against myself, never bought a steering wheel setup either just relied on the old hand controller.

And then when the on-line PC racing started to get popular and home SIM cockpits became all the rage I just spent my budget on the real live racing rather than the online world and then just kind of ignored it.

A few years ago I did get to have a play on a professional $20k simulator for V8 Supercars and while the SIM was incredibly realistic, that also made it bloody hard to drive. It’s one of those things that you would need months of practice (not to mention $20k spare cash) to get any good at. Great for a pro driver but not a fun weekend game.

But now that we can’t drive in the real world the lure of SIM racing has popped up again, the budget won’t stretch to a full SIM rig but just maybe the old computer is up to the task. It seems that iracing is one of the better platforms and they even have a handy “is my computer ready for iracing” button on their website. FAIL - computer says no, not up to spec apparently so I guess I’ll just have to break out the playstation after all. I’ll just have to enable beginner mode so I can win some races…..