iRacing released Patch 3 for the season today and there are some Dirt Late Model updates. I haven’t had a chance to try them yet. If you have leave a comment, or maybe I can post my thoughts here later today.
Here are the changes that apply to iRacing short track drivers:
Dirt Incidents – The car-to-car incident detection threshold for generating 2X contact penalties has been increased. This means that a stronger hit will now be needed on Dirt Tracks to generate a 2X penalty. I know a lot of people think dirt participation is low because there is no dirt license. I doubt that. It really doesn’t matter. When dirt was released, iRacing basically cut the incident points from paved ovals in half. Now they have raised the threshold on what it takes to get a 2x penalty. You will have to hit the other car pretty hard (or the other car will have to hit you pretty hard) to generate a 2x penalty. I don’t even see a need for a dirt license. One may come in time, but I will speculate that we won’t see a dirt license for at least a year.
Garage – iRacing fixed and issue where the ride height adjustments would continue to “modulate” while sitting in the garage. This affected the iRacing Dirt Street Stock car more than any other of which I am aware. There was really no way to know what your ride height would be until the car “settled,” and that took a full minute. It also had a very noticeable effect on the iRacing Winged Sprint Cars. Personally, I’m very happy to see this fixed. I build a lot of setups and this is one thing that took more time. In the case of the Street Stock, I just took a shot in the dark by getting the cross weight about where I believed it should be and letting the ride heights fall where they may.
EasyAntiCheat – Now EAC will give you a reason when it removes you from a session, you cheater. 😆 Just kidding about the cheater part. Sometimes EAC has some issues.
And now for the good stuff:
Dirt Late Model
- Rear differential model changed from locker to spool. Well now we get into the technical stuff about rear ends. I’m not going to sit here and BS you, I don’t know that much about it, but I am pretty decent at finding information online. I’m sure somebody else could explain this better, but here is what I understand about this from what I have read online.
Despite it’s name, a locker will actually unlock in the turns, allowing the rear wheels to turn at different speeds. The right rear wheel will turn a bit faster than the left rear wheel in left hand turns, always, unless maybe you’re going backwards and that would just be silly. This has a pretty dramatic affect on what your rear stagger setting should be if real world physics is applied. We will see how it affects rear stagger in iRacing. I can imagine that it will also affect the way the car behaves when cornering and when exiting the corner and going to a straight line. Let’s hope it’s a positive effect because the DLM needed some work in this area.
A spool keeps both rear axle shafts locked together, which I guess behaves pretty much like a solid axle in the rear. Again, this should affect rear stagger and the way the car grips in the corners and, to some degree, on exit, as you still have the wheels turned and you’re rolling back into the throttle.
- Reverted changes to aero balance from the Season 3 update. I have no clue what this will do to the car or how it will feel, but I’m all for anything that reverts any changes made to the Dirt Late Model in the Season 3 update.
- Reverted changes to torque curves from Season 3 update. Same as above although I have a very vague idea about what changes to the torque curve are.
In addition to that, the setups have been updated for the Limited and Super Late Models. I haven’t tried the things yet, but this is an indication that the old setups for those cars won’t pass tech, or that they are total crap now and you might as well start over from scratch. It’s not good news unless the cars are significantly improved.
New iRacing User Interface
There were a lot of updates to the new UI. I saw one update that I suggested in there. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one:
When creating a Hosted Session, all cars and tracks are now sorted alphabetically by display name by default. Thanks for that, it sure makes it easier to find what you’re looking for without having to go sort them by clicking on the column header.
This was a big patch. I only listed what is relative to dirt and short tracks. If you’re interested in the many UI updates, or any of the updates to other cars and tracks, etc., you can find the entire list in the official iRacing Forum.
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