- iRacing.com Announces iRacing 2.011,355
- iRacing.com to create virtual McLaren MP4-12C GT38,006
- Scanning What’s in Store for iRacing with Tony Gardner6,012
- Dave Kaemmer Comes Clean on Dirt5,497
- Improving the Sound of iRacing4,825
- iRacing 2.0 Debuts in 2011 Season 34,765
- Preview Shots of HPD ARX-01C, Ford GT & Suzuka4,742
- Two New Cars and Two New Tracks Coming to iRacing Soon4,253
- iRacing Pro Race of Champions Gets Green Flag Wednesday3,304
- Gooden Plenty II2,942
- Towler, Wood Suspended from Upcoming iWCRR Events 66
- Coming Soon, the iRacing Driving School 41
- iRacing.com Announces iRacing 2.0 41
- SFI Decertifies All Impact Racing Products 27
- Dave Kaemmer Comes Clean on Dirt 27
- iRacing Announces Added Features, Lower Prices 26
- iRacer Profile: Sandeep Banerjee 25
- The Customer is (Nearly) Always Right 17
- iRacing Simulation Gives NASCAR Hall of Fame Guests Authentic Driving Experience 17
- Improving the Sound of iRacing 15
- iRacing.com2134
- NASCAR 1753
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FPS is Still King
by Ray Bryden on April 24th, 2010
Well, Black Friday came and went and left me with an Eyefinity upgrade project which I finally was able to tackle a couple of weeks ago. Unsurprisingly I found it necessary to upgrade the CPU as well since my frame rates in testing were, shall we say, challenged. Of course, I can only really notice slow frame rates during testing when it dips below 40 or so, but anything slower than 60 is prone to have some stuttering during race conditions which makes control a big problem. Smoothest performance and lowest lag happen with the frames uncapped and running stable above 80 fps. To me, I find the graphics quality always come a distant second to having a high enough frame rate. As an aside I have to say that [...]
Sim Racing’s Code of Uncertainty
by Ray Bryden on March 27th, 2010
A cop pulls over Heisenberg, and asks him “Do you know how fast you were going?” and he answered “No, but I know where I am.” It’s a geeky scientist joke about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states the more precisely you know the location of something, the less you know about its velocity, and vice versa. I often think about that when I am fighting for track position, because there is always an uncertainty principle of sorts at issue for online sim racing. Since all iRacing events are online over the internet, there is always a certain amount of uncertainty about where everyone on the track actually is at a given time. The reason is simply that although your computer knows your virtual location and trajectory well enough, it [...]
Book ’Em, Dario
by Ray Bryden on February 27th, 2010
When I was a kid I wanted to not only drive a race car, I wanted to design and build it. I was fascinated with the story of Bruce McLaren who not only achieved those feats but excelled in all. There were no racing-related resources where I lived, but after a five hour trip to visit my brother, he brought me to Atlantic News, a magazine shop that not only carried Formula 1 magazines, but also real books on racing, and I snapped up a copy of Racecar Engineering & Mechanics by Paul Van Valkenburgh. I was completely hooked even if I only understood a fraction of it at the time. Coincidentally, I eventually went to university a block away from Atlantic News and began to bolster my racing library [...]
Grassy Know
by Ray Bryden on February 6th, 2010
We may argue for centuries about who killed JFK, but if there was someone suspicious on the grassy knoll, I can guess he didn’t make his getaway in a car with lots of torque. Given my online racing experience with iRacing, he likely would have been another easy target for Jack Ruby since he’d be spinning his wheels on the grass while the car was stationary. I remember cursing the slippery grass at various tracks and praying for the wizards at iRacing to “fix” it. After all, going off track at high speed at a place like VIR with wide fields next to the track means you could be in for a long excursion before you can collect your bearings (in every sense of the word), and turn on the [...]
Second Shift
by Ray Bryden on January 16th, 2010
Alright, I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a retraction, but let’s call it a little clarification of the last article I wrote on the optimum shift RPMs for the Skip Barber car. Based on the calculations of horsepower and RPMs, I put together a prescribed set of shift RPMs for each gear change. But like all theories, it doesn’t hold much value until it is put to the test. The proof is in the puddin’. So I set out to confirm if my shifting advice would put a driver at an advantage as they scream off the grid towards turn one. To do this I ran a number of starts at the beginning of an 800m long straight stretch and tried to hit a variety of shift [...]
The Power of Skip Propels You
by Ray Bryden on December 19th, 2009
Lately I have been running the engine so hard in the Skip Barber F2000 that it wails in such a way that I think I need to call Father Karras. In the past I was kind and gentle to the powertrain, but now I’ve learned that it needs to be pushed closer to the limit to be faster. As hinted in a previous tech tip, I ran some tests at Indianapolis to determine approximate power and torque curves. This is easiest to show using the Skip Barber since it is a straightforward test in this car, as the car is very easily brought up to full speed and handles very neutral with few complicating setup factors. If you have a telemetry logger like vbox, this testing involves starting the car [...]
iRacer Christmas Ideas
by Ray Bryden on December 12th, 2009
Let’s face it, if you’re angling for a great gift this year it’s probably a big-ticket item like a monitor or three, or a high end CPU, pedals or video card. But if the budget is tight or you just want to tack-on some extras, here are a few items you can give to yourself or an iRacer friend for not much more than the money you’ll find between the seat cushions. 1) Optimize your system Any extra vacation time would be well spent doing some preventive maintenance. Spending a half an hour cleaning the dust out of your system, particularly the fans cooling off the CPU and video card, can prevent unexpected problems, especially when the weather heats up.” Also, removing any unused bloatware, or disabling unneeded apps that [...]
Drag’n Slayer
by Ray Bryden on December 5th, 2009
I was working on some acceleration tests at Indianapolis with various cars to determine their power curves and stumbled upon an interesting idea. I figured I could estimate the drag coefficient from the cars by capturing some telemetry data. I wanted to remove the aero drag and rolling resistance forces from the data in order to grasp the values of the power to the wheels, and to do that the best approach is to collect speed data as the car coasts down from a high speed. But I realized I could also extract the aero drag values for each car tested. When you plot the deceleration rate (change in speed/change in time) and curve-fit using Excel, you can estimate the aero drag and rolling resistance force since: F = m [...]
V-Sunk
by Ray Bryden on November 15th, 2009
In the past, when I configured my video each time I upgraded my system, I made sure to check-off the box for V-Sync under the graphics options because the resulting effect on the sim was quite smooth and produced the best moving image quality with little or no stutters or “artifacts”. So I have been quite happy with this and what I would describe as intermediate settings (no shadows) on an intermediate quality video card and CPU/motherboard. But although the graphics quality is more than sufficient for my needs I have plateaued in my driving skills, which I always blame on lack of available time to devote to practice and improvement. But after reading a couple of recent forum threads related to graphics settings (specifically V-sync) and input lag, I [...]
Type A Race Debrief
by Ray Bryden on November 8th, 2009
I’m a Type B personality. I don’t over-plan my vacations, I don’t make lists, I let things happen. But I concede that there are advantages to the type A personality – not forgetting to pick up things at the grocery store, not scrambling to deal with a lack of available hotel rooms, etc., so I’ve come to adapt some of the Type A lifestyle just to make some things a little less troublesome and disorganized. When it comes to iRacing, I am beginning to believe that the precision of the system and the constancy of the racing environment – not to mention the level of competition – make it a place more suited to Type A people who can take lots of notes and apply what is learned from one [...]
Who Has Pot to Cell?
by Ray Bryden on October 24th, 2009
It’s time for an intervention. I read with interest many forum posts on pedals and how different brands, constructions, and components can yield a big gain in performance on track. Every such proclamation made me quite skeptical. My belief has always been that it’s the poor writer who blames his pen, and if ‘aliens’ were using my low-end equipment, they could adapt quickly and easily beat my times within a couple of laps and likely also match their best times achieved on high-end equipment. My nine year old pedal set was starting to go sour with worn out potentiometers in the summer time, so I was forced to use a much maligned two-pedal set that came with my wheel while I struggled with repair problems on the old set. I [...]
Camera Editing Primer
by Ray Bryden on October 17th, 2009
Editor’s note: 2009 Season Three saw the introduction of dramatically enhanced camera functions to the iRacing service. “inRacingNews’” Tech Tip guru Ray Bryden was kind enough to put together the following camera editing primer: To Activate the Editor Hit <Ctrl> <F12> on the replay screen. This brings up the Camera Edit box. You can edit either car cameras or track (including blimp and chopper) cameras. For now, you can add cameras to any group, except for on car camera groups. For example, you could add a second chopper camera to the chopper camera group, but only the TV1/TV2/TV3 groups will save anything but the first camera in the group. Next release we will have full control over what the groups are called and how many cameras are in each group. [...]
Schlemetry
by Ray Bryden on September 23rd, 2009
I’m no stickler, but ‘telemetry’ is not the right word for collecting data from a simulated car. I’m not holding my breath about a change in nomenclature, but I’ll just note quietly, that the true meaning of the term ‘telemetry’ is something like “far off + measure.” True if applied to a real racecar, but not when your computer is measuring the bits flying around on the same processor. But that’s enough on that – I’ll use ‘telemetry’ for expediency. There is a great value in using telemetry in iRacing to understand several things. First, how the car behaves in relation to other cars offered on the service; second, how changes to the car setup can affect that behavior; third – and most critically – what you are doing right [...]
Skidpadman – Effect of the Rear Anti-Roll Bar
by Ray Bryden on September 5th, 2009
When iRacing threw in the free skidpad to the list of goodies in the recent update, I decided it was time to learn things about car handling systematically starting with a car with only a few setup variables – the Skip Barber F2000. I checked four different rear anti-roll bar (RARB) settings, and at least 3 different spring perch settings. You may rightly question why I did not measure the effect of tire pressure which has probably the greatest effect on the handling of the car, but I was limited in how much I could do in one experiment and the number of permutations added by varying tire pressures was too much to handle. As well, I had a fairly good understanding of the impact tire pressure: the generally accepted [...]
Lotus (79) Stew
by Ray Bryden on August 28th, 2009
I had an embarrassing start in the Lotus 79 and was far off the pace in my first online practice at the Glen. It was due to a couple of reasons – I’d never tried Watkins Glen in iRacing, and I was using the baseline setup. I was doing okay in the fast sections but through the medium and tight turns it understeered noticeably. I figure that making a good setup is not unlike making a good stew, and only people with a lot of knowhow, experience and some special combination of ingredients can make it palatable. So I envision the setup gurus to be some talented chefs cooking up tweaks to make their car’s handling a perfect balance of flavors/traits. With the help of the new skidpad, I have [...]



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