.... last weekend, I did something I hadn't done in nearly a decade... I went WAY out of my depth racing-wise and competed in a big sim racing event, and wanted to share with you how this whole ordeal went.
I entered, along with my buddy Jared Meade, as a modest, probably even delusional 2-car team of thirty-somethings, in the "NDR GT2 Challenge". The field of drivers were some tough customers... in fact, one driver on the grid, Isaac Price, is an official F1 'eSports' driver for the Williams F1 team!
Given the talent level, even qualifying for this event wouldn't be easy, so Jared and I dove in head-first to see what would happen.
(We entered as team 'Angry Angus Racing', both sporting this snazzy green paint scheme)
As it turns out, I was slow
Just to give you some idea of the difficulty level : We knew the fastest lap in qualifying would be roughly a 1 min 52 second lap.
On the first night of testing I accomplished 2'00. Oh dear. Not exactly stellar, 8 seconds too slow. But, two more nights of getting my racing lines and braking points right I managed to bring it down to a 1'57 lap.
If I wanted to avoid making a fool of myself and/or missing the cut, I needed to bring that down to a 1'55 lap.
Thankfully, my more experienced team-mate Jared gave me tips later in the week (I have now exhaustively clocked 10 hours of practice at this point) and I can manage to pull off a qualifying lap in the 1'55.9 range. We then try and tweak my car setup. Remember that 1'55 is the bare minimum to even be respectable in this series. The slowest drivers can probably set 1'54 time trial laps if they really needed. Holy christ. I still need to work on this.
Eventually, my talent ran out and I maxed out somewhere at a 1'55 laptime. Thankfully, on qualifying day, I set my best lap ever of 1'55.10. That would be about as good as it would get. This doesn't sound like much, but man, I worked hard for 2 weeks to even get there and was PUMPED. Since my practice time ran out and race day approached, that's the best I could do.
Yes, I qualified 22nd in a field (penalty-adjusted) of 30, but I am pretty darn excited to have even accomplished this.
Here is the official starting grid, including me on Row 11 , starting 22nd, excited beyond belief by my modest 1'55.10 lap :
Here is a music montage of the event :
Here is the full broadcast of the event :
In the end, I started 22nd, and finished in the same respectable spot (out of 30), in a field and talent level I had no business being in. I'll take it!
