steve myers

iRacing 2018 Season 2 Update From Tyler Hudson, Steve Myers, and Tony Gardner

February 27, 2018 by Jeff Kendrick Leave a Comment

The iRacing Dirt Cushion – Click for Full Sized Image

Here are some interesting updates relating to iRacing dirt that are coming up from 2018 Season 2.

The Dirt Track at Charlotte Motor Speedway and Limaland Raceway Park have been confirmed for 2018 Season 3 by both Steve Myers and Tony Gardner.
iRacing has created a cushion or berm for all dirt tracks. Lots of testing went into making the cushion more lively and feel more like a real cushion. More dirt can build up and the height at which it can build up has been increased significantly. Along with the cushion, there’s a slight overall track grip adjustment for all tracks.
The Street Stock rev limit has been increased to 6800 RPM.
The Winged Sprint Car suspension adjustments from this season will be reverted to the initial specification (HOORAY). Also, the nose wing angle will now be adjustable in the iRacing Garage.
The Dirt Late Model Cars are getting significant suspension updates. Improvements continue. Setup rebuilding continues.
Dirt Oval Classes C and up will all include heat races.
The iRacing Dirt World Championship Qualifying Series will begin on March 19. These races will include 3 heats and 2 consolation races. Both the Late Model and Winged Sprint Series will be open to all dirt licenses. More details here and here.

Steve Reis also came forth with some more information on the Dirt late Model updates.

Updated front bumpstop rate curves with more accurate data
Updated shock lengths and positions using more accurate data
Trimmed nose valence and door skirts in the model to more typical lengths and adjusted collision elements accordingly
Adjusted collision elements in the nose and tail to allow closer racing per member suggestions and feedback

Per Reis: “The net result is a more realistic attitude/stance in terms of how the car stays up on the bars and how things look from the driver’s seat. The left rear hikes up more and the right front travels more. The car feels softer and more lively in general and is just a lot of fun to drive. We had a ton of help from a few real life drivers, and everyone is pretty excited about it. I hope everyone likes it as much as we do. I don’t think the update feels night and day different than the current member’s build, but everyone agrees it is a pretty solid improvement overall.”

AI will not be released in this build but is still on track for a 2018 release.

Caution Laps Count on iRacing… Period

March 27, 2017 by Jeff Kendrick 1 Comment

Somewhere in the depths of the new iRacing dirt discussion forum, there lurks a thread regarding caution laps. One long-time iRacing member and defender, fanboy and supporter, asked that dreaded question that all of us short league owners, administrators, hosts, and racers have been asking ever since we started racing short tracks on iRacing: Will caution laps count in dirt racing?

So I just grabbed my popcorn and sat back to watch. I already knew the answer to that question. It’s a question I asked about three years ago, or suggested in the suggestions forum. I don’t remember.

First come the typical answers… “I hope not,” and “I guess we will have to wait and see.” Then it starts to get a little bit interesting.

To be honest sounds like for now the series are going to be mostly R, and D so it shouldn’t really matter if those don’t have cautions anyways.

I guess a lot of people haven’t realized that a lot of us don’t give a rat’s ass about official races. Okay, maybe I’m overstating it. I don’t care too much for official races unless I can find one that has clean, respectful racers, cautions on, and enough laps to offset the caution laps. It’s rare to find those when all you run is short tracks.

Moving on, somebody else had a response to the above oh-well-hem-haw-too-bad. It was the OP with this:

Then what about the 10,000 leagues that are springing up or have sprung up that intend on running legit races?

Hard to hold peoples attention if you have a 50 lap feature, that 42 laps are run under yellow….. And no ones going to give a rats ass about a league that runs 50 lap features with no yellows. That’d just be… I cant even describe how awful….

Now it started to get even more interesting. The OP is speaking my language now. But I already knew the answer to the original question. I’ve watched the development of iRacing dirt closely and that question had already been answered… way back in April or May of 2016.

The next reply comes from another long-time iRacer, who simply says, “uuuuuuuuuuugh.”

The OP chimes in again:

My sentiments exactly. the fact I’ve posted this at times when the iRacing staff is active (when i posted this, there were 2 staffers actively posting on this forum), and its still ignored, leads me to believe that caution laps are going to be treated as they are currently.

Which leads me to believe the official series will be 30-50 lap races with no yellows. And that seriosuly makes me want to cry. Those races are going to be absolutely awful….

At least on the hosted side we can “account” for it and run longer races…. but thats still going to absolutely suck

Not bad. Keep reading. It gets even better. 🙂 An official voice finally speaks. It’s Steve Myers who finally answers the question with authority.

They[sic] cautions laps will count. It is not a simple change to do this as we have had it on the list for short track pavement racing as well.

Beyond the technical issues I am not sure if this type of race control translates very well to sim racing. Races could really get out of hand if laps don’t count under caution in the sim world. I appreciate that people want realism in our product but sometimes we have to balance usability vs realism as well.

Steve

I knew that was coming, but there are a couple of things mentioned that are worth noting. One is that it is “on the list.” How long is the list? Nobody really knows. I guess it’s somewhere in the plans but it might be a long while in coming. At least it is in the plans.

As far as “this type of race control” translating to sim racing, I call BS. It was done in rFactor mods and it worked fine. For every lap under caution, a lap was added to the race. But that is not the reason iRacing has not implemented this yet, as Myers later says:

Just to be clear I was just giving my own personal opinion on this. Its not the reason why this is not done though. That still comes back to it being a really hairy project and literally way outside of the box of how our entire system works.

Steve

Now the OP seems to get a little upset with this, and I can’t really say that I blame him. Many short track racers share the opinion that this is something important, and that iRacing should have been working on it long ago. But let’s face it. If you want to race ovals in a good sim, where else are you going to go? Here’s the OP’s reply:

If iRacing is not going to strive for realism, then the word “simulation” needs to stop being used, and we might as well start adding AI, and add in some fantasy tracks too (wait.. this is already happening with Dirt USA)…

Aside from the top 3 NASCAR series, and IndyCar, all of your other oval cars are short track cars. The three biggest complaints from the short track community, especially now with dirt, are caution laps counting towards lap counts, no easy/simple way to do heat races within one session (sorry, I don’t want to spend at least $4+ per sessions to make this work with tournaments, never mind having multiple admins available to be in each session to make it work, so instead I just don’t do them at all…), and the track “limitations” with only having inside pit roads.

I get it when it comes to official, but the caution thing is really putting all of the short track leagues in a bind. If we’re being realistic, dirt races should be 30-50 laps or so, but with caution laps counting and let’s say we have a number of cautions, we’re really being limited on the amount of green flag laps that are possible. We could make races longer to account for it, then we’ll need someone to manually count laps and manually score parts of the races, which isn’t always easy, or possible. Then once the race is over, it really screws up some of the back end of what make some leagues work when it comes to points/stats/scoring. I use danlisa for my points/stats, but manually scoring a race really messes with things when the official results from iRacing may show something different. There is simply no easy, or convenient way to making manually scored races work. And with dirt races being relatively short, now we’re stuck with trying to find some sort of workaround, but hey, as long as the usability is there for official, then we’ll have to sacrifice the realism for this game.

The second paragraph above encapsulates everything that is wrong with short oval racing on iRacing. All along, we short track guys have been “doing the best we can with what we got to do with” as my grandfather used to say.

The OP continues after reading Myers’s second post about it “being a really hairy project.”

Then your system is terribly flawed, and after 8 years and now implementing other forms of racing that require certain things, now it’s starting to show.

Get your shit together. I’ve been an iRacing fan boy for 8 years. I’ve defended it rabidly since inception. RIght now I’m finding less and less of a reason to.

And, as of this writing, that’s pretty much the end of the thread. I agree with the sentiments of the OP, but I’m not sure I would have gone that far in the open forum. I really appreciate the dirt content that’s coming. I also wish iRacing would do some work on their dilapidated scoring system.

The reality is, iRacing’s granddaddy, NASCAR Racing 2003, was, as the name implies, a NASCAR game. That carried over to iRacing, and NASCAR counts caution laps. So you could say that the scoring has not changed in this simulation since 2003 and you wouldn’t be that far off. That’s fourteen years.

But I’d rather look at the positive things. We’re getting five dirt cars and four dirt tracks in just a few days. The scoring change is on the list. For now, I’m ready for some dirt racing.

Just remember… if the forum post gets wiped you read it here. 😆

iRacing: Dynamic Tracks Are Here

September 3, 2015 by Jeff Kendrick Leave a Comment

Beginning with the release of the 2015 Season 4 build, all of iRacing’s tracks will utilize the dynamic race track feature. We’ve heard about it for quite a while now, and it’s right around the corner in the new build which will be released Tuesday, September 8, according to iRacing.

Beginning in Season 4, track surfaces will constantly evolve as the race goes on. These changes will be based on the amount of rubber laid down as well as changing weather conditions.

According to Steve Myers, iRacing’s Executive Producer(?) and Executive Vice President, you will actually see the racing groove on the track as the cars lay down the rubber. As more rubber is laid down on the track, the grip level will change accordingly. According to Myers, the tracks will evolve exactly like real world race tracks. We will see.

Myers goes into more detail about track surface models in iRacing, and all the way back to the Papyrus days and the NASCAR Racing titles. Since the very beginning with Papyrus, the tracks were static racing surfaces. The entire track had the exact same grip, according to Myers.

This seems odd to me, since the patches at Thompson certainly don’t have the same grip as the racing groove which is to the right of those patches. On the other hand, I’m optimistic that this will help the racing at tracks like Oxford Plains Speedway, where racing is two-wide in real life, while on iRacing it’s one racing groove, and barely that. If you go to the outside you will be watching a line of cars passing you like a freight train on your left.

Beginning around 2:00 is a good demonstration of the “rubberization” of the track.

Myers goes on with more details about how these dynamic surfaces will work. When you set up a race session, you can start with a green track or a track that is fully rubbered in, or anything in between. Rubber will be laid down by cars running on the track, but it will also be rolled up and marbled, just like the real world. All of this will by dynamically generated by the actions of the racers. If you try to change to a different racing line, you will have to take the time to work the marbles off the track, and your car might feel pretty loose.

Another component to the dynamic surface model is the heat that will be generated by the cars which will change the track’s surface temperature. Hot rubber can get pretty slippery, so a driver may be able to run a slightly different line and find more grip, and more speed.

Gone are the days of spending hours tweaking a setup to get that extra hundredth of a second.

There is one positive thing about dynamic racing surfaces, and even dynamic weather. Gone are the days of spending hours tweaking a setup to get that extra hundredth of a second. The weather is going to change and the track is going to change, so it’s a waste of time to tweak a setup to the nth degree at 78° and partly cloudy. Even private test sessions won’t help because one car won’t cause the track to change like a full field will.

Myers also mentioned some more goodies that are in the iRacing pipeline.

A new particle effect system that includes new backfires, smoke, sparks, and sounds. This is coming in 2016 Season 1 (December 2015).
Incorporation of a new video codec that will allow members to directly export video files from the iRacing simulator. This will make Youtube posts easier. It will also make protests easier.

That’s all Myers had to say about things on the horizon, but he promised a lot of new things just around the corner, saying that iRacing currently has a bigger development staff than ever in its history.

When I first thought about dynamic surface models and dynamic weather, I really thought it was just going to make this game harder in terms of setup building. Now I’m reconsidering. All you can do now is get your setup “in the box” so to speak. You can get the car good for the mid-range weather conditions, what we always called the default weather. When you enter a race, you can make a quick adjustment based on actual weather, then it’s all on the driver in you. You will have to adjust your driving style as the race goes on, based on the changing weather and changing surface.