There’s Daytona 500 rookie sensation Trevor Bayne, contrasting with Dale Earnhardt and his 20 years of trying.

The pack of four-time Indy 500 winners – Foyt, Unser, Mears, and Castroneves – have enjoyed a wealth of riches in the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, while the Andretti family is a collective 1-for-78 behind the wheel.

And Formula 1 world champions such as Nigel Mansell, Jim Clark, and Nelson Piquet never celebrated on the top step of the podium in Monaco, even as underdogs Jean-Pierre Beltoise, Olivier Panis, and Jarno Trulli earned their only career wins in the marquee event.

I have experienced a bit of each in my sim racing career. I won the Indy 500 and 24 Hours of the Nürburgring in my first attempts, and earned victories in the early years of the 24 Hours of Daytona and 12 Hours of Sebring.

But one endurance race has proven much more elusive than the rest, not just to find victory, but any semblance of success. And it’s at my favorite track in the world.

Our Bathurst Background

The Bathurst 12 Hours is contested over the undulating straightaways and menacingly quick roads carved into Australia’s Mount Panorama. It’s a brilliant circuit, and one on which I’ve done well in other events, getting my road iRating above 5,000 in official races and taking an unexpected podium in the Bathurst 1000 with my longtime teammate, Karl Modig.

However, our past efforts in the 12-hour race have been a struggle.

Our first try in 2019 ended on the first lap when I clipped the wall at Forrest’s Elbow and badly damaged our Mercedes. 

Last year, we lasted less than two hours before tangling with a fellow Lamborghini team, still trying to recover from my poor qualifying effort – another characteristic of my disappointing history in the event.

Our only time reaching the finish was in 2022, but in that event, we finished five laps down after being caught up in another early crash deep in the field. The rest of the race was just a matter of running laps, staying out of the way of faster cars, and scavenging positions as teams fell out.

Karl and I were yet to finish without any unscheduled pit stops or prolonged repairs, so we set a modest target for this year’s race: a top ten with a clean car would feel like an accomplishment.

We practiced for almost a month leading up to the race, testing each car before settling on the Ferrari 296 GT3 for its overall stability even in the hottest conditions that could make the mountain much more treacherous on a simulated sun-soaked summer afternoon down under.

We both logged hundreds of practice laps, studied the telemetry to identify areas for improvement, and made minor setup tweaks since even small changes that made the car faster or more consistent would add up over 12 hours.

A Rocky Start

When race day arrived on Saturday, we were better prepared than ever before, and armed with a plan to reverse our early-race misfortunes. This time, Karl would qualify the car, with hopes of giving us a better starting position than I had previously earned.

That part worked – he lined up 26th on the grid, compared to my starts of 34th and 35th in the previous two years – but accidents in front of us dropped us back to that familiar position, and just ten laps into the race, contact while racing side-by-side with a BMW sent our car into the wall and out of the race.

We both remembered the helpless feeling after our early exit last year, knowing we’d have to wait a full year for a shot at redemption. But in this case, our next opportunity was only a few hours away, during the final timeslot of the day.

We took out one click of wing to help the power-starved Ferrari better keep up on the straightaways, and just hoped to survive any chaos at the start and wait for the hotter weather that we expected would favor our car, our setup, and our preparations.

But when the registration for this less-popular timeslot ended, we realized that we might be in for more than we bargained for. We had barely made it into the top split with the fastest teams, among which the racing is often ruthless in a full field of closely matched GT3 cars.

In this situation, all of our past concerns – poor qualifying results, first-hour incidents, and moving up through the field – would be magnified. Frankly, I couldn’t help but feel like another early exit was in the cards, as we would face a literal uphill battle on the mountain.

His confidence shaken by the previous race, Karl nominated me to qualify and start again. This time, our starting position wasn’t much better than I was used to – 33rd – so I hoped for mere survival in my opening stint.

Moving On Up

The start was clean, but almost frustratingly so, with little attrition in the first hour and only three positions gained by the time I made our first pit stop.

As Karl settled into a double stint, he was met by unflinching lapped traffic ahead that cost us almost ten seconds to the next pack of competitors farther up the road.

He eventually found clearer track and better pace, moving up to the 24th position, but by then almost a full lap down to the race leaders. While we had no sights on winning this race, the big gaps ahead of us just three hours in were already daunting, and the track had been slow to warm up until that point.

That all changed during my double stint that followed, which was both one of the most surreal and the most fun I’ve ever driven. By myself on track and able to log laps with metronomic consistency, I listened to Karl’s commentary over our team radio as if it was a battlefield news report.

Oh my, the number 21 car has major damage and they’re in for repairs.

The team in ninth place has crashed now and they’ve fallen out of the race.

Watch out for this Ferrari going slowly; he’s been in the wall and is limping back to the pits.

Over that two hours of driving, we climbed up to 12th place, benefitting from the crashes around us and also gaining ground on other teams as they cycled slower drivers into their cars.

Not quite at the halfway point, and the hottest part of the day, it seemed like a top ten finish was not only possible, but probable if we could keep our car on track as other teams continued to run into trouble.

The Battle Begins

By lap 163 – just past the 1000-kilometer mark over which we’d previously found success in the V8 Supercars – Karl put us into the top ten for the first time with an on-track pass of the #11 SimVision Ferrari.

I took over the car in the same position, and with that same team breathing down my neck with a new and faster driver in their car. While he eventually got past me, we picked up a position over a slower Ferrari during that stint, which was one of the best I’ve ever driven in an endurance race.

With track temperatures at their warmest, I was running laps in the 2:05s – times I’d struggled to hit in testing on worn tires – and never put a wheel wrong on a slick track, all while facing pressure from a faster car around us.

Everything I’d practiced, studied, and refined in recent weeks – braking points, speed optimization in the downhill slalom through Skyline, tire management – was being tested, and it felt like I was passing that test, even if I wasn’t the best in the class. 

As Karl and I continued alternating single stints, we traded positions with the #11 car and kept tabs on the even faster #211 Ferrari, which started 14th and had been steadily closing in from behind while recovering from a second-hour collision.

When I got back in the car for a race-ending double stint, I was 12 seconds behind the #11 and 12 seconds ahead of the #211. Catching one, or holding off the other, would be a huge challenge, but I couldn’t help but try.

Pushing as hard as I ever have in this race or on this track, I again managed remarkably consistent lap times, and even cut into the gap ahead. The only blemish was a scrape of the wall at Forrest’s Elbow that caused minor left-side damage but didn’t seem to hurt our car’s performance.

Unfortunately, the pace of the car behind was just too much, and by the end of the stint, they were only 2 seconds back.

Despite physical and mental fatigue more than 16 hours after our first race effort began that morning, I prepared myself to dig in and defend our tenth-place position over the final hour.

But that battle was never to be.

A Dark Cloud, and Silver Linings

After making our final pit stop with what we thought would be a shorter fuel fill than our opponents, they cycled out 3 seconds ahead of us – a five-second swing that we could only assume was from a combination of fuel saving in their previous stint, a faster in lap while I struggled to get my tires up to temperature on my own out lap, and their overall speed advantage.

Back to eleventh place, our only hope was for one car ahead to have an issue in the final hour.

“I hate to wish bad luck on anyone this far into the race,” I told Karl, “but I’m wishing for it.”

Despite all the attrition earlier in the race, the top teams were too fast and too resilient, and none dropped out over the final five hours. As our closest competitors pulled away in front of us, I held together my fractured focus and aching fingers to bring our car across the finish line in eleventh.

For Karl and I, it was a bittersweet result. In a perhaps undeserved second chance at this year’s race, we had finally reached the finish with no crashes and no unscheduled pit service or repairs, but came up one spot shy of our goal.

Each driving to our limits, we had a solid pace – and, as one of our opponents reminded us about after the race, an impressive 22 positions gained – but couldn’t quite match the fastest top-split talent.

Our all-time mark at the Bathurst 12 Hours now pushes to 0-for-5 without a top ten finish, and this year’s races are a microcosm of our history in the event: one with an early crash, and another with a nice improvement from a deep starting position that came up just short.

We can take some solace from this race, of course.

We finished just one lap down to the winners, who were driving the BMW that got the better of the pre-race Balance of Performance adjustments.

We both reminded ourselves that survival, especially early on, is possible, and often the only option when mired in the midfield.

And as teams dropped out all around us while we kept motoring on, we saw that good things come to those who wait.

We can only hope the same is true as our wait for success in Bathurst’s longest race stretches on another year.

It’s true for race fans, who often long for the way things once were while ignoring the fact that across the world of motorsports, the racing is closer and more competitive now than it has ever been.

To a lesser extent, it can even be true for sim racers. While the constant advancements in technology, graphics, and content mean racing games keep getting better, there can also be a sense of wonder with remembering the old days, like your first race, your first win, and your best strategy moves from years past.

This weekend was a perfect storm of nostalgia on iRacing as they hosted the Road America 500: an endurance race with the IMSA sports cars from the late 1980s. It’s one of those bygone generations that racing fans remember fondly, between the power-packed GTP prototypes and the diverse GTO class, with cars like the Audi 90 – an all-wheel drive crossover from the rally world that dominated sports car racing on debut in 1989.

Both cars are difficult to drive, no doubt. I discovered that during my Summer Road Trip in 2018, when a week driving the Audi featured missed shifts, off-track excursions, and collisions with out-of-control prototypes.

Because of that challenge, this event wasn’t met with the same popular acclaim as iRacing’s other featured events. Rather than the thousands of teams that the Daytona 24 and Sebring 12 Hour races attract, just a few hundred brave souls – many running solo – tried to tame these classic cars during the weekend.

Among them were me and my longtime teammate Karl Modig, with whom I’ve enjoyed a number of successes in our endurance racing history together. When we first teamed up eight years ago, iRacing was still a somewhat niche sim, and a long way from its post-pandemic boom.

In those days, it wasn’t uncommon for us to end up in the top split of big events, competing alongside the fastest drivers on the service. While we’ve since been relegated, often in the fourth or fifth split against drivers very much our own speed, a chance to return to the top split would be a throwback of its own, and a chance to see how far we’ve come over all these years.

And so it was. With a lower turnout for this event, even in the most popular Saturday morning timeslot, our car took to the virtual racetrack against the top-split talent. We had to wonder: would we be totally outmatched, or would our years of experience in endurance racing – despite our combined lack of experience in the Audi 90 GTO – offer the secrets to success?

A Weary Warm-Up

In the week before the race, Karl and I had put in some practice together, but as I learned the hard way in my last time driving this old and unforgiving car, there’s no substitute for actual race experience.

During those moments when a close battle heats up, or prototypes pass on all sides, or fatigue sets in, it’s easy to lose focus and make mistakes. So it was better, I thought, to get those mistakes out of the way in a one-off sprint race than wait until the 500-mile, nearly four-hour enduro, when the pressure would surely be even greater, top split or not.

On Wednesday night, I joined a well-populated Kamel GT race session, filled with both that series’ small group of passionate regulars along with moonlighters like myself who wanted some extra reps before the main event over the weekend.

The first step was qualifying, where I’ve had tough luck lately. In the Bathurst 12 Hour races over the past two years, mistakes on my qualifying laps left our team starting deep in the field. Last year, it put us in the path of a mountaintop track blockage, although we soldiered home many laps down. This year, an erratic mid-pack Lamborghini forced me off the road and out of the race in the second hour.

That qualifying carelessness carried over into this race as well. A missed shift at the end of my first lap ruined both laps and put me tenth out of 16 cars, and right in the middle of the pack, where any mistakes – by me or others – would be magnified.

Fortunately, this race had a clean start among the Audi field, and I settled into ninth, at the back of a five-way battle for position. Occasional missed shifts kept me from making much forward progress, but I was able to save fuel while riding behind other cars, which I hoped would save me time in the pits later on.

By the midway point of the one-hour race, the cars in my pack began to make their pit stops, and eventually, it was just me with clear track ahead and only occasional prototype traffic zipping by from behind.

In those less stressful conditions, the mistakes seemed to vanish, and after I made my stop, I was two seconds ahead of the cars that led my group earlier. But the race wasn’t over yet – no, not by any means.

As those quick cars closed in on me, the mistakes returned, threatening to throw away my advantage earned in the pits. The costliest was a missed shift with two laps to go that let another Audi get alongside into the turn 5 braking zone.

But instead of folding, I focused. I held strong around the outside over the next two corners and got back in front by the turn-7 kink. After a side-by-side battle for position, all while Nissan traffic filled my mirrors, I had come out ahead with a top-five finish to show for it.

As if a switch had flipped, I had proven to myself that I could handle the pressure of those hectic situations. If this spur-of-the-moment race was a pop quiz, it had given me a cheat sheet to use for the weekend’s final exam.

A Promising Start

When race day arrived, I felt a sense of calm and confidence, even after we discovered our top-split fate. While we certainly didn’t expect to win, a top five felt within reach if everything went our way.

And if that sounds like overconfidence, then it may be because we also had a secret strategy in mind. While it was a 500-mile or 124-lap race, only the Nissan prototypes would cover that distance. I calculated that the top Audis would likely do no more than 108 laps, which could be evenly divided into four 27-lap stints.

As I learned during my midweek warm-up race, 27 laps was possible, but only with some disciplined fuel saving throughout a run. However, Karl and I were committed to saving fuel and cutting out a late-race pit stop, and we hoped for a repeat of our last big endurance race success in the 2021 Petit Le Mans, when our GT competitors seemed to miss the obvious strategy and gave us the upper hand en route to a second-place finish.

Of course, before we ever had to worry about executing our race strategy, we had to qualify, and I was eager to put my Bathurst blunders and misshift missteps behind me. An off-track at the Kink on my first lap felt like history repeating itself, but my second lap was within a tenth of my fastest practice lap of the week, and it was good enough for 12th on the grid of 24 Audis.

Thanks to some contact in front of me on the first two laps of the race, I found myself inside the top ten, and from there, I settled into a rhythm in my first stint, not overly concerned about my pace as long as I could hit our fuel number.

As our competitors made their first pit stops a lap or two before us, Karl and I remained quietly confident, while also confused at how so many teams had miscalculated – or, perhaps, not calculated – the quickest way to the finish.

No matter, I continued through my second stint climbing up to sixth place and riding just behind a couple of cars that we knew would have to make an extra stop at the end.

But as the race neared the halfway point, I was rudely met by a throwback I had hoped would stay in the past: a Nissan gone wild.

Entering the final corner on lap 48, I hugged the inside of the track, hoping to discourage the prototype behind me from passing there, or at least forcing him to take the long way around.

However, he seemingly expected me to fade to the outside and forced his car into a gap that didn’t exist, spinning us both into the gravel trap. (His status as a prominent league steward who typically hands down punishments for avoidable contact was an irony not lost on the race’s broadcasters.)

Our car was damaged and slightly down on top speed, but the handling was still okay, so I completed the final few laps of my stint before pitting for some quick repairs and handing off to Karl.

Fighting From Behind

In his first ever racing experience with this car, he got off to a hesitant start, prompted in part by me telling him about all the slippery corners on the hot track.

But after ten laps or so, he was consistently running lap times in the 2:07s, just as I had in my previous stint, and on par with the cars around us.

Although we had lost time during my spin, we were still running a solid seventh and thinking a top five was in reach as long as our strategy played out as expected. Later in Karl’s stint, an Audi ahead of us crashed out – also at the hands of a wayward Nissan – which only boosted our once-shaken confidence about our potential result.

During our final pit stop, I got back in the car and settled into one of the most unusual battles a racer can experience.

I wasn’t bumper-to-bumper with anybody. In fact, the next closest cars were more than 20 seconds ahead of me. But knowing they would have to pit one more time, it was a fight for positioning that we hoped would play out in our favor.

Even though I couldn’t see them on track, I still felt the pressure, and as Karl shared the gaps between us – growing by a second every few laps with faster drivers behind the wheels of our opponents’ cars – I began driving even closer to my own limits, pushing the car deeper into the braking zones and getting back to the throttle sooner to pick up the pace.

It’s the sort of situation that would have almost certainly forced a mistake out of me earlier in the week, but this time, I stayed cool and consistent.

That approach was rewarded when the first car ahead of us made their final stop and emerged more than five seconds behind. Our top five was in hand, but could we do even better than that?

Karl and I both figured it was unlikely, as the fourth-place car had built a nearly 30-second gap that seemed safe given the scant splash of fuel they’d need. But when they pitted with three laps to go, Karl narrated their slow trek down the pit lane… all the way until we passed them.

They also came back on track several seconds behind us, and in this race, I didn’t have to worry about those faster cars bridging the gap to my back bumper in the closing laps.

Our strategy and clean driving – that one mid-race incident aside – had elevated us to an impressive fourth-place result. Karl and I estimated we missed maybe three shifts each all race, which was a huge improvement from where we started earlier in the week, unpracticed and rough around the edges.

While it wasn’t our best ever result together, I told Karl on the cooldown lap that it was one of my favorite races we’ve done, right up there with our surprise podium in the Bathurst 1000 and our lone GoT Endurance Series victory in which we also used a sneaky strategy play to get up front.

The nice thing about nostalgia is that as time goes by, we tend to forget the negatives and preserve the positives of those memorable moments. A few years from now, we might not even remember our spin in this Road America 500, and instead celebrate our strategy and speed in a return to top-split endurance racing.

Who knows if and when we’ll be on such a big stage again, but for now, I’m happy to keep a rosy remembrance of this week and this race when old cars became new again and, at least for a while, my own mistakes became a thing of the past.

More recently, the Hypercar class felt more like Overhyped, with only five entries in this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, including a grandfathered-in LMP1 from Alpine.

That’s about to change with the introduction of the LMDh specification, which a half dozen different makes have committed to, including the likes of Porsche, Cadillac, and Lamborghini. Critically, these cars will be able to compete head-to-head against the Hypercars, which should make endurance racing’s top class look less like a private track day.

It’s a big enough shift in the racing landscape that even iRacing — notorious for multi-year delays in updating its prototype content — has already announced its plan to build the BMW LMDh car, likely the first of several giving their existing relationships with other LMDh makes.

That will also mean the end of an era for the LMP1 class on iRacing, removed from all official series in favor of the fresher LMDh machinery. That announcement set the clock ticking on a bucket list item of mine: to try to tame the LMP1s in racing competition.

I’ve been on track with them plenty of times, most notably in the NEO Endurance Series, where they typically showed up as a blur while blasting by on the straightaways.

They also created some inopportune moments, such as when my teammate Karl was spun by an over-eager LMP1 car in the esses at Circuit of the Americas – not exactly a prime passing zone – in the early laps of a six-hour race.

Those on-track experiences, along with their unfamiliar hybrid systems that might as well come from a spaceship and my own preference for driving GT cars, had generally left a sour taste in my mouth concerning the LMP1s, so I never planned to compete in them myself.

And yet they had a tempting allure, as something so different from what I was used to driving, and as the top class in endurance racing, my favorite genre of motorsports. I also remembered my fun one-offs driving the old HPD prototype and the hybrid McLaren Formula 1 car, so I couldn’t help but crave a sample, just to see what surprises they might hold.

A (Red) Bull in a China Shop

Last week, the European Sprint Series – definitely not a direct copy of the World Endurance Championship, wink wink – headed to the Red Bull Ring. Its long straightaways and tight corners seemed like an ideal venue to try the LMP1s and their energy harvesting and deployment systems.

My initial practice laps were mainly spent learning how to use that hybrid technology. iRacing offers two deployment modes – automatic and manual – that don’t seem to have much detailed documentation available. Ultimately, the lack of any “beginners’ guide” was one challenge to trying these cars for the first time, and as I’d soon see, I had a lot more to learn about them.

The limited information I could find suggested that the Audi R18 tended to be quicker than the Porsche 919. That made my car choice even easier, since I have always been amazed by how quiet – and still how fast – Audi’s prototypes are.

After about an hour of practice, I entered the first official race of the week. With only 18 entries across all three classes, it seemed like a good way to get my feet wet in the LMP1 without diving head-first into a competitive race full of LMP2 and GTE traffic.

In qualifying, I surprised myself by earning the pole position in a field of five LMP1s. As I gridded up and prepared to lead the field to the start, I was imagining how I might settle into a rhythm up front, pace myself through traffic, and perhaps score an easy victory in my first race.

Not so fast. Literally.

My first lesson about driving the LMP1 in action was that you can boost before crossing the start-finish line and deploy stored energy from the pace lap. That realization hit me as three other cars passed me on either side, leaving me in fourth before we even reached turn 1.

The next lap started even more disastrously, as I half-spun in the first corner and was T-boned by the car behind. That was a rough reminder about the danger of cold tires on otherwise nimble prototypes.

Somehow, the car was largely undamaged and still drivable, so I continued and even caught one of the slower cars in the class. I discovered just how slow he was through the infield turn 7, where I caught him from three car lengths back under braking and bumped him straight off the track.

With blood on my hands, I was now the sort of LMP1 driver I despised. What happened next, then, felt like justice, even if it came at my own expense.

Exiting turn 4, I clipped the gravel beyond the kerb, which sent my car straight across the track and into the wall. Damaged, embarrassed, and disabled on the edge of the track, I quit after just five and a half laps of racing.

A Turn for the Worst

Although that first race was a clear failure, I tried to learn from my mistakes and practice a bit more before trying again a few nights later.

My second attempt came in a more populated session, with 28 cars including 10 LMP1s. This time, qualifying wasn’t such a success. Off-tracks on both timed laps doomed me to start at the back of the class, and from that failed qualifying session, I learned another lesson: despite their downforce, LMP1s can’t stop on a dime, and it’s still possible to overdrive corners and ruin a good lap.

This time, I at least knew the secret of the start, so I boosted coming to the green flag and gained a position. A spin for one of the leaders at turn 3 was worth another spot, and I made sure to take care of my tires to avoid making a similar mistake myself.

One more spin in the early laps opened up the track in front of me, so I set about running laps and trying to close in on the top five while working through traffic.

Just past the halfway point, I was preparing for the mandatory fuel stop and finishing another round of lapping GT traffic. But their class leader literally stopped me in my tracks after an apparent miscommunication.

Exiting turn 1, he was about a second ahead of me, and as the boost deployed, I made up that deficit in a hurry. I headed toward the right side of the track, just as I’d done for every car I had passed out of that corner. But the GT driver was also moving from left to right, and as I got alongside him, he clipped me in the left rear and sent me flying into the fence.

He cued the mic and questioned why I tried passing on the right when there was more room to his left. I noted that I was already on the right side when he was still in the middle of the road.

From my view, it was a similar incident as Mike Rockenfeller suffered, ironically in his own Audi R18, at Le Mans in 2011, when the Ferrari driven by Rob Kauffman faded across the track through a right-hand kink.

Given my GT experience, I also tried to see the incident from my competitor’s perspective. While I still think he made an ill-advised move, I can at least sympathize that the closing rate for LMP1 cars is high at that part of the track, and even a GT driver’s best efforts to signal his intentions may be too slow for a boosting prototype to sufficiently react to.

No matter the blame, I entered the weekend with two DNFs, 214 iRating lost, and not much confidence in my ability to complete a race in an LMP1.

Third Time’s the Charm?

After a few days of reflection, but not much additional practice, I got ready for another race attempt on Sunday afternoon, with one of the most competitive grids of the week in a rare multi-split session for this series.

I qualified in third, a second off the pole and just ahead of a group of cars with similar pace. It seemed like I’d have a good race on my hands if I could just survive.

After a clean start, I settled into third place and a battle that was brewing around me. I even moved up to second – for all of about 100 feet. The car ahead of me ran wide exiting turn 4 and I briefly overtook him before following him straight off the road and into the gravel. After getting back on track, I was still in third but with a new car ahead to chase as we maneuvered through traffic.

It was in close fights like that one where I realized just how important traffic management is in an LMP1 car. Catching a GT car mid-corner can easily cost a second or more, between their slower apex speed and delay in getting back to the throttle.

As such, our battle ebbed and flowed, with my opponent’s lead stretching out to more than two seconds and tightening up to a bumper-to-bumper slalom between GT cars.

I even overtook him around the race’s midway point, which put me literally in the driver’s seat to navigate through traffic and attempt to stretch out an advantage before the pit stops.

As that moment approached, I realized I had never made a stop in this car, thanks to my first two races ending early. When that moment came, I slowed down exiting the penultimate corner, made a hard right turn for the pit entry – and apparently crossed a line, at least in the eyes of iRacing’s officials.

The Red Bull Ring requires drivers to have all four tires inside of the white line separating the pit entry lane from the track. I had cut across it, which was worth a harsh 40-second stop-and-hold penalty after my pit stop.

That dropped me from a battle for the podium into an also-ran fifth place. It might as well have been purgatory, with no cars near me and little hope of making up any positions. The final minutes of that hour-long race therefore became about just making it to the end and keeping my car on the road.

Even that proved difficult, as I occasionally tried to boost past GT cars to clear them before a braking zone, then failed to compensate for my extra speed and drove straight off the track in the following corner.

For the first time all week, I had reached the finish, but it was a result marred by mistakes that I couldn’t let be my lasting memory of the LMP1s.

So I got ready for one more attempt: a final opportunity to put all of my experience to the test and right the wrongs from three rough races. It would be my last, best chance to prove I could handle these cars before they’re phased out in favor of the shiny new things.

Putting it All Together

This session got off to a rocky start reminiscent of race 2: an off-track in qualifying invalidated my best lap and left me starting at the back of the eight-car LMP1 field.

The pace lap boost again paid off, and I exited turn 1 in third place. The top two had already opened a gap, but one of them soon fell into my clutches.

On cold tires, he overdrove a few corners and climbed the kerbs, which let me get to his rear wing. A few laps later, he clipped the gravel exiting turn 4 and spun across the track. This time, I avoided following him off and dodged his sliding car to take second place.

In the laps that followed, I noticed he continued losing time and positions in a mistake-filled start of his own. Been there, done that, I thought.

The early trips through traffic, including a thick field of 15 GTE cars, again proved crucial to the evolution of this race. While the leader stretched out a nearly ten-second gap, I was caught and passed by a Porsche 919 after catching traffic in all the worst spots.

We spent the next half-hour until the pit stops in a yo-yoing battle together, just as I’d done in the previous race. At times, that meant making some risky maneuvers to limit our time losses, including taking to the kerb to get past one of the GT leaders, which rightfully earned me a headlight flash of frustration – one I’ve given plenty of prototypes in the past.

In this race, I was prepared for the pit entry, and I even had a pit strategy ace up my sleeve. In all of my years of GT driving, I’ve gotten used to checking the traffic coming from behind, and sometimes ducking onto pit road a lap or two early to avoid being swallowed up and slowed down by an impatient pack of prototypes.

I did the same thing this race, but by looking out my windshield instead of in my rear-view mirror. As the Porsche ahead of me caught the back of a group of slower cars, I ducked into the pits – legally, this time – and took my splash of fuel before emerging onto a mostly clear track.

After my Porsche opponent finally pitted a few laps later, he was more than four seconds behind. He complimented me on my successful undercut, but both of us knew the race was far from finished.

With ten laps left, I would have to drive smart and safe, but also be speedy to stay ahead. That meant putting in my fastest race laps of the week, consistently in the 1:12s. I had some luck with traffic as well, catching most GT cars on the straightaways, where the LMP1’s boost makes quick work of multi-class passing.

By the end, not only had I kept my closest competition more than four seconds behind me. I had also held the gap to the leader steady at just under 10 seconds, and come within a tenth of matching his fastest lap of the race.

It was all thanks to an error-free – and incident-free – hour of driving, a bit of keen pit strategy, and a better understanding of the LMP1s, informed by my failures in the three races beforehand.

A Powerful Prototype

I certainly can’t say that one week or even one race makes me an expert with these cars. I still never figured out the nuances of the manual deployment mode, for instance, and I never tuned on the setup aside from adjusting the qualifying fuel load.

But as the LMP1 class takes its final laps on the iRacing service, I can at least claim a bit of proficiency behind the wheel with a solid result, and the praise from an evenly matched opponent, to show for it.

This experience also doesn’t change my own preference for GT cars, although it does give me a greater appreciation for the skill needed to drive a top-level prototype. That may have been my most pleasant surprise about the LMP1s: they’re not just spaceships glued to the road with infinite hybrid power at their disposal, as it often seems from the cockpit of a slower car.

They’re high-performance race cars for sure, but it takes a refined multi-tasking ability to drive them quickly without overdriving, manage traffic, and make sure boost levels are sustainably regenerated and deployed at the right moments for the right duration – for instance, boosting past a slower car before a braking zone without carrying too much speed through the corner.

All week long, through my mistakes and my eventual success, I was reminded of an old saying: with great power comes great responsibility.

I can think of no more apt description of an LMP1 car than that.

Initially, it seemed like too much power for this lowly GT driver to control. I was even on the verge of giving up, cutting my iRating losses, and forgetting about these complicated cars after the first race.

But I’m glad I kept at it, because even after the LMP1s are retired from competition, I’ll be able to say I earned a step on the podium and tamed the top prototypes from this epic generation of endurance racing.

An offhand remark that hurts a friend’s feelings. A secret revealed that breaks someone’s trust. Or in the sim racing world, a slight miscalculation that shatters your own confidence.

For my teammate Karl and me, we’ve each dealt with the latter, and at the same track, no less. Mount Panorama in Bathurst, Australia, is known around the world as one of the most difficult circuits due to its extreme elevation changes and blind corners, all surrounded by unforgiving walls that punish even minor mistakes.

If hotlapping around the mountain is madness, then running an endurance race there must border on insanity. And on multiple occasions, we’ve been crazy enough to try – and human enough to fail.

My big mistake happened three years ago during our first attempt at the Bathurst 12 Hours. After a top-twelve qualifying run, I threw away a promising start on the first lap, clipping the inside wall at Forrest’s Elbow on the way down the mountain. That 12-hour attempt lasted barely one minute.

Karl’s Bathurst bobble dates back even further, to the Masters of Endurance Series’ six-hour finale in 2015. After taking over the car halfway through the race, a moment of oversteer exiting the tricky turn 9 sent him sliding sideways and into the inside wall, ending our best run of the season with a crumpled car.

We’ve also found success together at Bathurst, finishing on the podium in the 2019 Bathurst 1000. However, success – and survival – in a GT3 car during a longer endurance race remained elusive. Entering last weekend’s Bathurst 12 Hours, we set out to change that and soften the sting of past mistakes.

In our previous endurance race, we earned a surprising second place in October’s Petit Le Mans with limited practice and setup work ahead of time. But such a casual approach wouldn’t work well at Bathurst, which requires inch-perfect precision committed to muscle memory and an acute awareness of the likely trouble spots.

It’s why we failed in our previous endurance attempts, getting overconfident and overaggressive on the savage slopes. And it’s why we succeeded in the V8 Supercar, treating that unfamiliar equipment with extra care around the punishing Mount Panorama circuit.

In the lead-up to this year’s race, we focused on finding both speed and stability, decreeing that we were racing the track rather than any particular team.

We identified the corners most likely to cause problems, including the high-speed turns 9 and 10 atop the mountain, where the outside kerbs can easily send a car spinning; the downhill descent through Skyline, where getting behind on braking is almost a guaranteed crash; and the wall-lined Forrest’s Elbow, where cutting too much or tracking out too wide can be a race ender. I should know.

I promised Karl I wouldn’t hit that inside wall again. But despite all of our preparations, I couldn’t promise much else entering the race.

This time, qualifying was a struggle, and I managed only 34th in the pre-dawn session. That would put me in a precarious position at the start, as any accidents ahead would likely lead to an unavoidable pile-up.

With a shot at redemption driving a starting stint at Bathurst again, I had a low bar to clear. Just completing the first lap would be better than I managed last time. Even that was a challenge, as multiple spins and crashes ahead partially blocked the track on the narrow road over the mountain.

At times, I had to slow to a stop and wait for a lane to open. In the process, I dropped back ten positions to 44th. By completing the first lap with no damage, though, our calculated caution was already paying off.

Between dodging other spins and methodically passing cars ahead, I had already recovered to my original starting spot within the first half-hour. The rest of the first stint brought more gains, and after the first pit stop, I found a comfortable position to run in and log laps as darkness gave way to morning.

Unfortunately, then came an obstacle for which we had no plan. Midway through my second stint, a car just ahead of me spun at the Dipper and blocked the road.

As I arrived on the scene, even slamming on the brakes wasn’t enough to mitigate my momentum. I center-punched a fellow Lamborghini in the door, which flattened our front bumper and ripped off our hood.

The extent of the damage was slow to reveal itself thanks to the draft that initially buoyed my lap times. However, after being passed and facing clear track ahead with a snow-plow front end, our top speed disadvantage became clear.

Karl and I resigned ourselves to making repairs, but hoped a new hood would at least curb any aerodynamic disadvantages. After falling two laps down during our next pit stop, Karl rejoined the track, only to find the car was still off pace.

With any hopes of a high finish gone, we resolved to take the full 5 minutes of remaining repairs and try to claw back positions from attrition alone as some of our competitors inevitably crashed short of the finish.

Four laps down and in 29th, the thought of driving nine more hours out of contention made climbing the mountain feel like a truly Sisyphean task. But while success would again elude us on this day, we could still manage survival and exorcise those bygone Bathurst blunders.

Through the hottest part of the race, our slow advance continued. A Porsche in the wall at Skyline? That’s a position. A BMW with suspension damage? That’s a position. A Ferrari face-planting at the final corner? After a few clean laps to claw back lost time while they made repairs, that too was a position.

By the six-hour mark, we were up to 23rd. With less than four hours to go, we entered the top 20. We picked up our final position with an hour and a half left, when a collision on the mountain sent a highly placed Ferrari into the wall and back to the garage.

As darkness again fell over the mountain in the final hour, we had no sneaky strategy plays to gain another spot, nor any fears about being caught in the closing laps. We just kept driving and eventually came home in seventeenth – five laps adrift of the leader, more than a lap behind the next finisher, and four laps in front of the car behind.

In total, 25 teams, or exactly half of the starting field, finished the race. On this day, being part of that group would be our only achievement, but it’s one we had waited years to finally realize.

While we each had a couple of brushes with the barriers, we had no additional repair time after the first two hours. Our cautious approach had paid off to the point that neither of us worried about the other person crashing at those potential trouble spots we identified before the race.

It wasn’t our best result – far from it, actually – but we could still be proud of completing 336 laps in 12 hours around Bathurst with no self-inflicted damage, and not giving up even after our early setback.

Of course, that also left us wondering what if that loopy Lambo hadn’t blocked our path in the second hour. Perhaps we would have continued our climb all the way into the top ten. Or maybe the pressure of close competition would have gotten the better of us, tempting us to eschew our more measured mindset in favor of a faster but riskier one.

We can only hope to have that opportunity next year. As for this time, despite a less-than-stellar result, I kept my pre-race promise. I never touched the Elbow wall all race, and in the process, I made that years-old mistake a distant memory.

A crash at the hands of a wayward prototype ended our Sebring 12 Hours attempt in March within the first hour, while my own crash in the Daytona 24 Hours this January meant we were dead by daylight.

Add in an early crash in last summer’s Spa 24 Hours to make it three strikes, and it truly felt like we were out of touch with the survival skills that once made us such a dependable duo in endurance events.

With both of us taking a summer break from iRacing and the short Road Atlanta circuit promising to test — or taunt — our rusty racecraft, the Petit Le Mans event threatened to extend our streak of failure unless we changed something drastic.

So that’s exactly what we did. It didn’t necessarily happen on purpose, but as the week played out, we realized that we were taking a wildly different approach for this race than in those others that ended much too early.

Our preparations were informal, brief, and untechnical. And oddly, that didn’t seem like a bad thing. Taking a page from the Seinfeld sitcom scripts, “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”

A Race Week Reversal

It started with practice — or a lack thereof. Unlike this year’s Daytona race, for which we started testing more than a month in advance, we ran our first Road Atlanta practice exactly six days before the race.

Since each of our work schedules made it tough to find time during the week, our joint practice was limited to a couple of hours each on Sunday, Monday, and Friday afternoons, and whatever warm-up we could manage on Saturday morning.

Of course, that left little time for setup tweaks, so we initially downloaded a race setup from Virtual Racing School and left it untouched all week. That’s also a sharp contrast from our typical approach, repeatedly tweaking the most minor setup components in search of any extra speed.

All that fine-tuning tends to inspire confidence, and entering the recent Spa and Daytona races, we truly expected to contend for the victory, or at least a strong result, only to be disappointed when we started deeper in the field and lacked the pace to match the top teams.

With time not exactly on our sides, we also took the complete opposite approach to setting expectations for Petit Le Mans. This time, we figured that just finishing would be a success.

Our recent races also left us frustrated by an inability to craft the correct strategy. Whenever we assumed tire wear would be too harsh to double-stint, half the field would use that strategy and force us to either adapt or absorb a time loss to take fresh tires every other pit stop.

Those failed strategies and early exits were particularly embarrassing because of the hard work I put into crafting detailed spreadsheets for each race outlining a planned driving schedule with the projected pace and fuel usage throughout the race.

So for this race, we kept it simple. With a bit of fuel saving, we could stretch our stints to about an hour each, and we’d run five double stints to cover the ten-hour length. Our most exotic adjustment was doing a driver swap after Karl’s opening stint, just so we’d each have the same amount of driving time.

With that plan, there was no need, nor want, for some advanced spreadsheet, which had begun to carry a curse for our races. Earlier this year as our struggles were still growing, Karl and I had joked that creating a new spreadsheet was the first true sign of doom for an endurance race.

I even avoided creating a custom paint scheme for us, mostly due to time limits but also because crashing a sharp-looking car race after race made me wonder if the hours spent designing a livery would have been better used by squeezing in some additional practice.

And a final decision that truly exemplified the “do the complete opposite” approach was perhaps the most important any team makes for a race like this: what to drive. Among the GT3 class, the BMW and Porsche clearly seemed like the top choices, leaving the little-loved Lamborghini Huracán mostly on the sidelines.

But after my season-opening IMSA win at Homestead and with Karl’s own affinity for the Lambo, we decided to go with the least-popular option for the fun factor alone and accept whatever competitive disadvantage it carried, sticking with our casual approach to this race.

The qualifying session offered the first signs that despite our choice of car and lack of preparations, we were better off than we expected. Karl’s clutch second lap landed us ninth — dead center in the seventeen-car GT3 field in our split, the fifth of 20 for our timeslot. With the race’s other Lambo starting just behind us, it seemed that our expectations for being off-pace could have been incorrect.

All According to Plan

As the race began, it also seemed to take the opposite progression from our usual fate.

The opening stint promised to be our first hurdle, as it’s when our most recent Spa and Sebring races ended before I ever even had the opportunity to get behind the wheel. But my trust in Karl’s abilities in heavy traffic, at least more than my own, has never wavered, and he guided us through the first hour while protecting our position, and more importantly, our car.

Sticking with our strategy, I took over at the pit stop, inheriting his slightly used tires and our undamaged car. At this point in a race, we often find ourselves scrapping for positions and slowly crawling up the running order. But this time, a combination of our double-stinting strategy and attrition throughout the field seemed to suddenly vault us inside the top five during the second hour.

In fact, in my opening stint, I only passed one car on track — a BMW that was a bit too hard on its tires — but we were still up to third place by the end, unexpectedly in podium contention with a car and a pace that we assumed would be confined to the rear of the field.

As the race played out, we were also shocked not only that our strategy was working, but that other teams hadn’t used the same simple approach. Some changed tires at every pit stop, losing nearly 30 seconds while we double-stinted. Others cut their stints short, forcing them to add an extra pit stop later in the race.

Regardless of strategies, at some point in every race, I inevitably end up locked in battle with another team or driver of similar pace. In last year’s Sebring race, for instance, I seemed to have a magnetic attraction to another Mercedes team, and we spent the better part of six hours chasing each other and fighting for position.

This time, though, the gaps opened all around us, and we rarely saw another GT3 car for the rest of the race. The two early leaders had exceptional pace and pulled away, while Karl and I found unexpected consistency and rediscovered our time-tested skills in managing traffic to slowly drive away from the cars behind us.

Many of our races have at least one dramatic moment, like a brush with destruction that leaves us damaged or displeased. But this race was mostly drama-free. During my first double stint, a prototype drove me off the road entering the esses, and Karl had a later spin after bouncing off a kerb at turn five, but neither incident was particularly damaging or time-consuming.

As a result of our steady driving, along with a slower driver on the erstwhile second-place team who also accrued at least two drive-through penalties for exceeding track limits, we found ourselves in second place by the midway point.

The challenges that we usually expect around us never came, as we held a 40+ second gap to our next-closest competitor through the final hours. A rendezvous with the tire wall, à la Daytona, never happened as nighttime fell on the track. And we saw the checkered flag in an endurance race for the first time in 18 months, securing a solid second-place finish in our return to the podium.

Karl and I agreed that it was our best endurance result in at least two years, since an unexpected third-place result in the Bathurst 1000 back in September 2019. We also entered that race with lowered expectations amid a field of drivers more familiar with the car than us, so perhaps the pressure we apply to ourselves is the ultimate jinx in an endurance event.

Both races had something else in common as well, though. In terms of pace, our team had no weak link or clearly slower driver in either race. And in that respect, yesterday’s Petit Le Mans affirms a change in how I perceive my own driving, which may be my biggest takeaway from the weekend.

The Search for Speed

For many years, I naturally compared myself against Karl, and our light-hearted observation that he was always a half-second quicker than me began to feel less like an overcomeable deficit and more like my inescapable destiny. Continually unable to match my teammate, I felt like a drag on our team’s performance, even if Karl would never admit as much.

Throughout our practice for this race, Karl may have still had an advantage, but it was much smaller, measured in hundredths or even thousandths of a second. We were close enough to be considered even, although I still had something to prove under race conditions.

While the changing time of day, track temperature, and traffic can make it tough to compare drivers’ pace in a long race like this, the iRacing results simplify it into one statistic: the fastest (clean) lap.

In Karl’s second stint on fresh tires and low fuel, he managed a quick lap of a 1:19.461 that stood as our team’s fastest time for most of the race.

As night fell over the virtual track and I was the last driver in the car, I knew I’d have a chance to eclipse that lap time, but it wouldn’t be easy.

First, I’d have to burn through most of the fuel weight so I wasn’t losing time down the long backstretch. And over a limited stretch of laps late in that run, I’d need the cars around me to cooperate, along with my own driving to be aggressive enough to be fast but not careless enough to ruin our race in the closing hours.

Eventually, I had an opportunity. Two prototypes passed me at the beginning of the straightaway, and with their draft, I was on a flying lap. But an over-eager entry to the final chicane yielded a plume of dust into the air, an off-track incident, and invalidated that otherwise fast lap of a 1:19.291 from being our team best.

With the stint winding down, I conceded defeat to Karl in our good-natured fast lap rivalry, but I’d soon be given a second chance. The GT3 class leader exited the pits just in front of me, albeit a lap ahead in the standings. While their overall pace was much stronger than mine, on low fuel, I could barely keep up with them.

With just five laps remaining in my first stint, I nailed the start of the lap and lined up in the leader’s slipstream down the backstretch. This time, I took a slightly more conservative approach to the chicane but still finished with a 1:19.305, which was good enough to set a personal and team lap record for the race.

I’m certainly not prideful enough to suggest that one lap means I’m now the faster driver on our team. Quite the opposite, I’m always learning speed secrets from Karl’s driving lines and telemetry whenever we prepare for a race, even as haphazardly as this one.

Data crunched by Torque Freak Racing shows that by all major metrics — median lap time, best 20 lap times, and top 50% lap times — Karl still had a slight edge in this race. But that gap was close, at no more than four hundredths of a second for any statistic. And we were both among the top half of the GT3 field in our split for all categories.

In races like this, I no longer feel like a liability to our team, and that makes our pairing even stronger — effectively a one-two punch that punishes the weaknesses among our competitors with relentless consistency, no matter which one of us is driving.

Perhaps that’s one of the biggest reasons why this race was so anticlimactic en route to a straightforward second-place finish. Despite our recent frustrations and time away from sim racing, Karl and I are still experienced enough to know how to drive and manage an endurance race.

When I add in a bit of confidence — but not overconfidence — in my driving, remove the pressure to achieve a specific result, and stop micromanaging strategies while executing a simple race plan, it’s easy to see why the opposite approach may be the optimal approach.

With our string of bad luck now behind us and a newfound way to get ready for endurance races tested and approved, the dependable duo may be even stronger in all aspects.

And we don’t need some spreadsheet to tell us that.

My sabbatical was borne mostly out of real-life relief, with Covid restrictions lifted and a long-awaited return to quasi-normalcy after a year of lockdown. This spring and summer, I attended in-person hockey games, vacationed with family at the beach, and generally enjoyed time away from my three monitors that double (triple?) as a windshield.

But I’d be lying if I said my iRacing break also wasn’t partially fueled by frustration. In my most recent endurance races, I crashed out of the Daytona 24h race all by myself, had a shorter IMSA race at Daytona end after one-too-many incidents at the hands of LMP2 drivers, and never even got in our car at the Sebring 12h since that time, my teammate Karl absorbed the KO from an over-eager LMP2 in the race’s first hour.

Those experiences had made me question my own abilities, and those of other drivers on the service. But a long enough time away brought a craving to drive once again, and after testing the latest round of updates that improved the handling and responsiveness of the GT cars, it was time to get back behind the wheel.

The series was an inauspicious one: IMSA, complete with those LMP2 torpedoes, not to mention the potential for off-pace GTE drivers who blend in with the GT3 field about as well as water and motor oil.

The track was an unusual one: the Homestead-Miami Speedway roval, combining the straightaways and north turn of the oval with a start-stop infield road course, not too dissimilar to Daytona.

And my car of choice was an unexpected one: the Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO, built on the same chassis as the Audi R8, for which I’ve never been able to get a grip. But the Lambo has its own character, and the recent updates made it feel like a brand new car.

In the sundown qualifying session, my second-place starting spot came as a relief, both for being that far up the field and for not being first and forced to pace our GT3 class to the green flag, unpracticed as I am at race starts and on a new track, no less.

The first lap brought the sort of calamity I expected from this series, with spun-out Porsches littering the sides of the track through the infield section as if they were searching for curbside parking spots in nearby Miami Beach.

As GT3 leaders, we carved through the carnage as best as we could, and I managed to stay within drafting range of the polesitting BMW, who seemed to have the pace to pull away if not for the traffic we continued to hit.

On lap 7, though, that traffic hit me. A GTE who was one of the first-lap castaways was moving back through the field, and in the final infield corner, he braked inexplicably late, skidded sideways from a second behind me, and clobbered the back of my car with his Big Boi BMW passenger-side door.

After waiting for a half-dozen cars to drive past our accident scene, I managed to get going again, and to my surprise, the car felt mostly undamaged — something a passing LMP2 confirmed for me a few laps later.

But in fifth place and a dozen seconds behind the leader, my shot at the win was surely over. Instead, I focused on clawing back as many spots as possible, which was made easier when a few GT3s spun off course at the tricky turn two, and seemingly capped off by a pass on the banking to take second place on lap 18.

The leader remained about 12 seconds ahead before the pit stop, so while I could match his pace, I wasn’t catching up. Just finishing the race cleanly would feel like a success, I thought, and I’d have to settle for dreams of battling for the win and what could have been.

After the pit stops were completed, though, I got an unexpected call from my robo-spotter: You are the leader! I didn’t think much of it since I was among the last GT3s to pit, so I assumed the lineup just hadn’t cycled through yet.

Besides, I had a battle on my hands, and it wasn’t the sort I’d hoped for entering the race. A GTE backmarker who was running GT3 lap times was right behind me, and frustratingly, he was trying every sort of ill-advised move to get around me.

There were divebombs under braking, for which I simply drove a wider line to stay ahead.

There was a scary side-by-side run into the high-speed first turn — a left-hand flick off the oval that’s hardly a passing zone — with an LMP2 darting between us.

And there was his final attempt: a late-braking, too-deep lunge into the same hairpin where I was clobbered earlier in the race. This time, though, I gave him room up the inside, watched him predictably spin at the apex, and gave a sarcastic “nice move!” on the radio as I drove past.

At that point, I finally had time to process the reality of the race. I truly was first in class, and the polesitter and erstwhile leader was now nine seconds behind. After the race, he told me that a black flag for an unsafe pit exit forced him to pit a second time, and that one mistake proved much costlier than my torments in traffic.

The final laps were thankfully cleaner for me, with only occasional passing LMP2s around me. In my mirrors, I could see a battle between off-pace GTEs who were now mixing in with the second- and third-place GT3s. I feel your pain, I thought, but after my own experiences earlier in the race, my sympathies ended there.

After 45 minutes, 36 laps, two GTEs spinning in my vicinity at the same corner, and one unfortunate penalty for my closest opponent, my race for redemption was completed with a victory.

It’s not a result I would have expected in my first race since returning, and certainly not one I could repeat in a stronger field. But as my first — and best — race since March, I can only hope that this comeback performance is a sign of things to come.

Of course, now that terms like “pandemic”, “quarantine”, and “lockdown” are appearing in the actual news instead of just Hollywood cinema, we may be closer than it seems to a world where it’s chase-or-be-chased by brain-hungry zombies, unwitting coronavirus carriers, or panic buyers looking to swipe your last roll of toilet paper.

But whether it’s in real life, works of fiction, or even simulations, it’s still an interesting question to ponder.

Since my childhood, I’ve always had my own clear-cut answer.

In games of tag during recess or around the neighborhood, I much preferred chasing to being chased. As the scrawny kid who was never as strong or as fast as the others, it was out of self-preservation that I’d want to chase someone else — even if I never caught them — than inevitably be reeled in by one of the big kids.

Over the years, chase scenes have even cameoed in my nightmares, and in them, I’m always the one being pursued, usually Hunger Games-style with my life on the line. There’s nothing like waking up covered in sweat when you haven’t even been running!

I’m sure there is some complicated fight-or-flight psychology at work there, but it must be hard-wired within my brain, because my preference has always carried over to sim racing as well.

The original NASCAR Heat game had a set of “Beat the Heat” challenges inspired by real-world situations, and I was always most frustrated with the ones that required managing old tires or a dwindling fuel load while holding off a snarling pack behind me.

Granted, as my iRacing career progressed, I came to appreciate — and even embrace — the art of fuel saving as a sneaky strategy call. I stole a few wins that way during my oval racing tenure, and I’ve generally been a loyal footsoldier of fuel saving for my team in endurance events.

But heading into last weekend’s iRacing 12 Hours of Sebring, my long-time teammate Karl Modig and I decided we’d run the race just for fun, aiming for perhaps a top-five finish, and the thought of saving fuel or tires didn’t seem like much fun to either of us.

In practice, we had tried double-stinting tires but found our Mercedes AMG GT3 was so abusive on the rubber — down to 60% tread remaining on my front tires over a run — that it just didn’t seem like a viable option for the race.

In any case, being on fresh tires every stint would let us do the chasing if one of our foolhardy opponents, we figured, was bold enough to stay out on old tires.

A Shaky Start

Race day arrived and we found ourselves starting thirteenth in class after my steady but not spectacular qualifying effort. But with 12 hours ahead, we had plenty of time to move up, and Karl did exactly that during the first two hours.

Problems in traffic particularly for some of our competitors in the Audi R8 — seemingly the quicker of the two GT3 cars — as well as an improved race pace relative to our qualifying speed helped us snatch up several positions and even move into the top five.

However, a pair of spins by Karl inside the final three laps of his second stint cost us around fifteen seconds and dropped us to seventh. While the rear wing damage after he eased into a tire barrier was insignificant, we worried that such an unsteady car on older tires, even that early in the race, could be troublesome for the hotter hours ahead.

Next was my turn in the car, and to my relief, I found myself with mostly clear track ahead and a surprising lack of traffic from behind. That let me settle into a consistent rhythm, although my pace still left me wanting more in our competitive class that seemed to have no slow drivers inside the top ten.

In particular, one of the cars Karl had managed to pull away from in his opening stints, the #9 Kinetic Racing Mercedes, had changed drivers during their second stop like we had. Their new driver, Marc Torres, was running three to four seconds behind me, and he was matching my pace or even exceeding it with no signs of making a mistake.

In the battle between our teams that would end up raging for the next six hours, I was the one who blinked first.

Late in my first stint, a Daytona Prototype was passing me through the tight, high-speed Bishop kink. He completed the pass into the braking zone for Le Mans, but as I tried to fall in behind him, I realized he wasn’t as far ahead as I expected and I clipped his right rear.

That sent him spinning, thankfully not into the wall, but unfortunately back onto the track and into my car, where he returned the favor — unintentionally, it seems — and we both spun.

In this incident compared to Karl’s earlier ones, the time loss was much more significant. Between getting the car pointed in the right direction and waiting for traffic — including our newfound opponent in the #9 — to pass by, I had lost around 20 seconds and more than erased any subtle gains I might have made on the cars ahead during the traffic-free start to the stint.

As I handed off to Karl, we were toward the back of the top ten and more than half a lap behind the pair of leading Audis. But with more than eight hours remaining, we simply had to take it one stint, one position, and even one lap at a time.

That started with him chasing down the #9 car again. Although he didn’t complete the pass on track, during the next cycle of pit stops and driver changes, we managed to get past them, but only just.

As I took the reins once again, the gap back to Marc was less than two seconds, and on the warmer track, he seemed to have a pace advantage, so he quickly closed the gap.

Still shaken from my incident in the previous stint and with a fast driver chasing me down, it was literally the stuff of my nightmares.

Thrill of the Chase

Traffic worked for and against each of us; every time he seemed to get slowed down and I opened a margin of a second or so, I would catch a bad break with a lapping car and lose all of my advantage.

However, he never got close enough to make a pass, and as the first half of that double stint ended with me still in front, I was both shocked and proud that I had held him off for so long.

After each of our pit stops, the battle resumed with me barely in front, but this time, I could only hold the position for a few corners. All through practice, the hairpin at turn 7 seemed like a potential trouble spot, since a late downshift to first gear before turning in gave some extra, and at times unwanted, rotation.

Just after Marc exited the pits, still on my back bumper, I nearly spun at the hairpin and only saved the car by diverting it onto the grass. That let Marc get by and put me about three seconds behind him, although after my second confidence-shattering mistake of the race, he might as well have been three minutes ahead. Either way, I figured, I’d never catch him.

As Karl stepped off the pit box to take a break — a necessity when duoing a race this long — I’m sure he expected to come back and see Marc driving off into the distance. Frankly, I did too.

But instead, like the protagonist in so many blockbuster movies, in a moment of weakness — behind and frustrated — I suddenly found strength.

Maybe it was just being back inside my comfort zone, giving chase instead of being chased. Or maybe getting passed offered a chance to regroup after one of my hardest stints of endurance driving ever, at least that early in a race.

In any case, with little help or harm from traffic, I slowly began closing the gap. It might have only been a tenth or two per lap, but after a handful of laps, the gains were clear, and like any good hunter, I began to identify the strengths and weaknesses of my opponent.

As Marc told me in our cordial post-race discussion, he noticed them as well.

“It was gripping to see the delta teeter back and forth depending on the corner,” he said. “I would typically gain a tenth or two in the first half of the lap, and you were quick to gain it back towards the end coming onto the back straight.”

Half a stint of recovery, reconnaissance, and reducing the gap put me within striking distance of Marc, and when traffic finally interrupted our battle, I was prepared to pounce.

Entering the hairpin, a late-diving GTE car and an approaching Daytona Prototype forced him off-line and onto the marbles accumulated after more than 200 laps of racing. His bobble let me get a run into Cunningham corner that followed, and in my predator-like aggression, I drifted a bit wide of the apex and we briefly banged doors.

He managed to stay in front after that encounter, but later in the lap, I used my strength — and his weakness — through Le Mans to get a run and pass him down the backstretch, which he seemed to facilitate.

Perhaps he was worried a more damaging encounter might ensue if we continued such close-quarters battling. In the moment, he said it was a time of frustration, although he later took a more positive view of our fight.

“Of course, during the race I spattered something angrily, but during our post-race team chat, I immediately praised you and Karl for giving us a great battle,” Marc said.

Whether by domination or intimidation, I was back in front, and this time, I was able to match or better his pace to slowly open up a gap. But just as quickly as multi-class traffic had helped me take the spot, it worked against me and forced me to lose it.

Four laps after passing Marc, we entered turn 1 with the track blocked ahead of us by three crashing cars. As the first on the scene, my only option was to weave around a sliding Audi onto the gravel and grass.

When Marc arrived moments later, the track had opened up again and he stayed on the pavement to re-take the spot.

It was a split-second letdown after the stint-long buildup to the crescendo of our fight together, and in the remaining laps, I couldn’t get back to his bumper with my tires apparently beaten and bruised by our earlier battle.

Still, there were some inspiring takeaways from my double stint. Despite the undramatic ending, my confidence in my own driving had been restored, and rather than worrying about our team’s pace or standing in class, I was able to focus on a single competitor and at least keep that car within sight, which seemed impossible just two hours before.

Calling an Audible

Nevertheless, approaching the two-thirds mark of the race when Karl got back behind the wheel, we were still in seventh place and without a solid plan for the final five stints.

Worringly for us, while we were at times struggling to make our tires last a single stint, some of our GT3 competitors in the Audi R8 were double stinting their tires.

During the hottest part of the afternoon, it didn’t seem like the best strategy — I would watch their cars slip and slide around, struggling with a lack of grip where the rubber met the road — but as the track was cooling down, their losses on old tires turned to gains and we began to realize that it could be a strategy we’d be forced to try.

At first, I tried to deny that reality. Based on the tire wear we had seen in our practice sessions, attempting to make them last two stints seemed like a suicide mission.

“If we’re just in this race to have fun,” I told Karl, “then I’m changing tires every stop, because driving on old tires is not fun.”

But fun or not, when our race-long rivals from the #9 car — the team we’d likely have to beat for a top five — went for a fuel-only stop, we had no choice but to follow their lead.

“It’s all gonna come down to strategy, lap times, mistakes,” I said.

“Mm hmm,” Karl concurred. “But I’ll leave you to the darkness.”

If we were destined to crash and burn, then at least we would do it together. Karl and I agreed that we would each do a double stint to close out the race, and since his tire wear had been marginally better in practice, he would go first while the track was a few degrees warmer and there was still some ambient light amid the setting sun.

The early results were promising. His lap times on old tires were less than a second off of his pace from the previous stint, and at that rate, we would lose less time than if we’d waited another 30 seconds or so in the pits for new tires.

But halfway through the stint, pushing that old rubber became unwieldy, and Karl overdrove turn 2, sliding through the grass and bouncing off the same tire barrier he’d backed into earlier in the race.

The damage was relatively minor — another kink in the rear wing plus a banged-up right front, which he said might have caused a slight loss of downforce. We assessed that our top speed was largely unaffected, so with our car tankier than Karl’s own self-confidence, he finished out the stint uneventfully.

Before I took over for the drive to the checkered flag, he did give me a warning. The older tires didn’t tolerate much trail-braking, he indicated, and to prevent wear in my first stint, it was probably best to avoid it then as well.

With that advice squarely in the front of my mind, I proceeded with caution and quickly noticed how much I typically trail-brake in a GT3 car, even if I never realized it. In almost every corner, I found myself leaning on the brake pedal after turning in, which was a habit I’d have to break and in a hurry if I wanted to have any rubber left after the final 50 laps.

With a bit of trial and no major errors, I got used to rolling through the corners to keep the load off the front tires, and I even found some speed. Late in my stint, I set an out-of-the-blue, slightly draft-aided lap of 2:00.276, which was our team’s fastest of the race.

Before my stint, I told Karl to warn me if I started lapping too quickly, but in this case, he let it go. That’s because the situation around us had rapidly changed in the intervening hour or so.

Chasing in the Darkness

Our opponents from the #9 team had crashed and fallen more than a lap behind us while making repairs, so fifth place seemed secure as long as we didn’t suffer the same fate. We then set our sights on fourth place: an Audi team who had lost time with a couple of their slower drivers in the car.

With their ringer back behind the wheel and sitting around 11 seconds behind me, we had the advantage on track, but the strategy favored them since they could take much less fuel in their final stop.

In addition, once we pitted, I’d be running slower with more fuel in the car, and I’d have to make my older tires last longer than their team would.

In a sense, it was like entering another chase, but instead of fighting bumper to bumper where I could see my opponent at all times, it was more like a guerilla mission through the jungle, knowing he was out there probably gaining ground, but hoping I could limit my losses and evade him for one more hour in the dark of night.

I asked Karl not to tell me his lap times for fear that I’d push too hard trying to match them and crash. So after taking fuel but no tires, I entered a stint of mostly radio silence, clicking off decent laps in the 2:01s while I imagined my competitor half a lap away was setting PBs in the low 2:00s.

With 12 laps to go, the silence finally broke.

“I guess you’ve seen that the 106 car exited the pits about 20 seconds ahead of you?” Karl asked.

I hadn’t, so the news came as a bit of disappointment. But it shouldn’t have been surprising. With such a short fuel fill needed, they beat us by 20 seconds just in the pits, not to mention the second-per-lap or so that they gained on track.

As their driver continued running quick laps late in the race, it was also clear that I wouldn’t have stood much of a chance in a head-to-head fight against him. That made for an anticlimactic end to the race — no last-lap pursuits or door-banging battles for position — but in a way, that wasn’t a bad thing.

The final gap to fourth place was nearly 30 seconds: more than the time we lost from any of our individual mistakes, whether it was Karl’s detours into the turn-2 tire wall, my own trips through the grass with Marc hot on my trail, or my tandem tangle with a Daytona Prototype.

So while it wasn’t the most flawlessly executed race, neither of us could blame the other or even ourselves for costing us a position.

In fact, I was proud of our performance considering that as a team, we achieved our goal of a top-five while driving the apparently disadvantaged of the two GT3 cars. And as a driver, I had met the challenges of keeping up with and even passing a quick competitor and learning a bit of a new skill in managing my tire wear over a double stint.

One thing this race didn’t change was my preference in a pursuit. I’d still rather do the chasing any day, but I do have a new respect, and maybe some new confidence, when I’m being chased, at least in a sim race.

Marc seemed to agree.

“I’m definitely more comfortable chasing than being chased, but it’s something I’ve been working on,” he told me. “I’m actually happy when being chased so I can keep improving under that circumstance.

“Gotta keep working on checking the mirrors without focusing on them and losing sight of apexes.”

My battle with Marc is certainly the main memory I’ll take from this race, and fortunately, I didn’t have any spooky ones haunting me after the checkered flag.

In a good night’s sleep following the race, I avoided nightmares of being chased by Marc Torres, coronavirus zombies, or toilet paper hoarders.

After the news and events of recent days, that seems like a win in itself.

Admittedly, it was with a small sample size, but good results in my two events still made it a month to remember. 

It began with pre-qualifying for the new NEO-sanctioned 24H SERIES ESPORTS season. I was back behind the wheel for the first time in months, but using a dedicated practice regiment with my teammate Karl and in the comfortable confines of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car, I was up to speed and performing under pressure once again.

We finished tenth, solidly within the top thirteen that would advance out of pre-qualifying in the 991 class. With our spot on the grid secured, our NEO preparations paused as Karl and I turned our attention to a completely different sort of challenge.

Instead of 10 hotlaps around Donington, we would try to tame the famous Mount Panorama circuit over 1000 kilometers.

Mountain Men

In our previous endurance races at Bathurst, we had a checkered past that often ended well before the checkered flag. In the Masters of Endurance series, Karl hit the wall while in top-ten contention just after the halfway point of a six-hour race in 2015. And this February, I crashed our car on the first lap of the 12-hour race — one of my most embarrassing sim racing moments ever.

But Bathurst is my favorite track, and I wasn’t about to let a bad race or two scare me away from trying again. Furthermore, competing in the Bathurst 1000 has been on my sim racing bucket list for years, but it always seemed to conflict with the start of the winter endurance racing season.

This year, that date was open on Karl’s and my calendars, so we set out to right our past wrongs at Mount Panorama. But we knew from the outset that it would be an uphill battle — literally.

In my first few test laps, I tried to drive the right-hand drive V8 Supercar just like I drove the left-hand drive Mercedes AMG GT3 car earlier this year, and it ended with similar results: Clipping the walls in the tightest parts of the track coming over the mountain.

Even after adjusting to the car and its down-under cockpit orientation, it was a struggle to complete a full 23-lap fuel run in practice without brushing a wall or spinning the notorious bucking bronco of a car.

I confessed to Karl that I wasn’t feeling too confident entering the race, and we agreed that we’d almost certainly have to make damage repairs at some point. After all, negotiating a torque-happy torpedo up and down a mountain for 161 laps seemed destined to cross the margin of error at some point.

My only defense was an extra-cautious strategy of leaving an extra foot of space to all of the walls coming up the mountain, and even if I inevitably cut it a little too close, maybe I would avoid hitting anything.

Race day began with a promising start in qualifying. I had put some work into making a setup the night before, so we opted to have me set our time. My first lap was a decent banker — I overdrove turn 1 and played it safe coming over the mountain, but my time would have still landed us around twelfth or thirteenth.

Hoping to get out of the midfield, I made another run and hit turn one correctly while cutting it closer in the fast, wall-surrounded sections of the mountaintop.

Those improvements were worth four tenths in laptime, and I jumped up to eighth on the starting grid.

Not willing to risk another first-lap crash, we put Karl in for the start. He avoided the wall at Forrest’s Elbow on lap one — and I sheepishly reminded him that he had made it farther than I had — and he put in a clean and smart stint, distancing us from the midfield where we might have otherwise ended up if not for the late improvement in qualifying.

We were managing our tires better than our closest opponents, and by the end of the first stint, Karl had moved us up to sixth with the next few positions well within reach.

After exiting the pits, I quickly gained one of those spots to a team who had put in their slower second driver. A few laps later, I picked up another when the car ahead ran wide at turn 1. Before the end of the stint, they had crashed out while we were still motoring along in fourth.

Attrition had started to take a toll, but not as much as expected. The opening laps saw the likes of Nicki Thiim drop out, but crashes weren’t very common after that. Everyone seemed to respect the difficulty of the car and the circuit, and in the hot afternoon conditions that saw track temperatures peak at 53°C, or 127°F, no one wanted to push too hard and risk an almost certain DNF.

Through the middle of the race, Karl and I continued our strategy of changing drivers at every pit stop, and we began running faster as the track cooled off and we each found a safe but consistent pace.

At the start of my second stint, we gained another spot and were in line for a podium. But the team behind us was effectively mirroring our lap times, so we knew it wouldn’t be easy to stay there with more than half of the race remaining.

Our better tire wear was our main advantage, and we slowly extended our advantage to around 30 seconds in the final hour. At that point, I was in the car for a double stint to the finish, and I was running quick laps at a very manageable pace.

There was one car getting closer on my relative screen, though. The race leader was catching me, and in a hurry, which made me realize my own quick laps were nothing compared to what experienced pros in the V8s are capable of.

After a lap of beating down my bumper over the mountain, they passed me on the Conrod straight, but I probably gave them a scare two turns later when I nearly rear-ended them in the final corner and had to lock the brakes and drift behind them to avoid a collision.

It was my closest call of the race, and neither Karl or me hit anything all day. While we weren’t in the same league as the leader, finishing in third place, only one lap down with no damage, was the sort of result we could have never dreamed of.

We ended up as the highest-placed non-Australian team in Saturday’s top split, which felt like a win given our history at the Mount Panorama Circuit and my own mixed results in the V8 Supercar.

Even if we were only the best of the rest, redemption tasted sweet after years of what-ifs at Bathurst.

Sniped at Spa

As the calendar turned to October, we didn’t expect to match our performance from the previous month — after all, our main event would be the much-more-competitive NEO season opener at Spa — but compared to previous seasons, I had more confidence in my own driving.

Whether it was a matter of overconfidence, underpreparation, or underestimating our competition, Spa was mostly a struggle.

It began in qualifying. In my practice runs, I had found that even with higher starting tire pressures, my fastest times always seemed to come on the third lap, and in a 15-minute session, I’d probably only have time for one three-lap attempt.

In my first try, I exited the pits with the Porsche pack and found a gap starting my first lap, which I knew would largely be a throwaway while the tires came up to temperature. Sure enough, it was a clean but slow lap: a 2:23.180.

My second lap was going well but was invalidated by an off-track. And on my third, I pushed too hard into Stavelot and spun into the gravel, costing me my only chance at a three-lap run.

I had enough time to get back on track and run two more laps, and the second of those was on a decent pace, but at the end of the lap, the desire to extract every ounce of performance from the car caused me to overdrive the bus stop and lose several tenths.

The result was a small improvement to a 2:22.939, but we were only thirteenth on the grid.

Expecting we’d have better pace in the race, a top-ten seemed like a reasonable goal, and with Karl again driving the start, it didn’t seem unreasonable that he might get there within his early double stint.

But our best-laid plans were doomed almost from the beginning. On lap two, the driver behind us took a defensive line into La Source but missed his braking point. Unable to slow down, he speared the car ahead of us and Karl had nowhere to go but through the wreck.

While it initially appeared that we avoided major damage, one lap later in the same corner, the engine suddenly exploded, apparently from a radiator punctured in the collision.

Karl coasted back to the pits, and together with our third teammate Ryan Huff, we assessed the damage while our virtual crew went about fixing it over the next 40 minutes.

In my previous NEO races, most of my team’s early crashes have mercifully been race-enders, keeping us from having to limp around for hours with nothing much to gain.

But in this case, the car was completely fine after the repairs, so we decided to keep going and hope to scrounge up a position — and a point — or two if other teams fell out.

While Karl started our comeback effort, I fulfilled part of my in-race reporter duties by talking with the RaceSpot commentators. We discussed the response to the new NEO season — mostly good — my team’s race — mostly bad — and the GT3 crash-marred start at Spa — a bit ugly.

They also invited an opportunity for reflection about how far NEO has come in just six years, from fledgling endurance championship to the official esports partner of the 24H SERIES.

“That speaks to the level of simulator that iRacing has become. Whenever that team endurance racing feature came online, everyone was eager to be a part of that, and I think NEO had already established at that point it was doing a great job with sanctioning events and managing race control. So I think all those things combined to make that interest level so high,” I said, thinking back to the beginnings of the NEO Endurance Series.

“Even then, when registrations for the first season filled up in 15 minutes, I don’t think anyone expected that would lead to a partnership like this a few years down the line.”

From thinking about the past to preparing for the present, it was soon time for me to get in the car. While I had been scheduled for a double stint, but the damage repair time had effectively cut our race short, so I would have just one stint behind the wheel. Before that, I laid out my vision to Karl and Ryan.

“My goal is to be nice to everyone, to not make anyone mad at me, and to not ruin anyone’s race.”

It was tougher than it sounded, not because I’m a particularly aggressive driver in traffic, but because it’s almost impossible to stay out of the way while being in the middle of three classes.

I just tried to let faster GT3 and 991 cars past on straightaways to avoid any tight situations in corners, and stuck to passing TCRs on the straights instead of out-braking them or going side-by-side into any corners.

My lap times suffered as a result, which the statistics assembled by David Barraclough and Sascha Lamp reveal. I was the seventh-slowest Porsche driver based on my median lap time, and the fourth slowest based on the average of my fastest 20 laps.

When I wasn’t laying over for traffic, though, I was generally able to keep pace with a number of the midfield runners, which made me think that we could have been in that fight if not for the early crash. It was both inspiring and frustrating to keep pace with my opponents despite being 20 laps behind them.

Our five hours of cruising around did at least gain us one position when the third-place team had a steering failure at one of the fastest parts of the track.

Finishing in fifteenth, we earned a single point. It was better than nothing, but still a difficult way to start a new season, especially after our September success.

From our performance peak at Mount Panorama to the depths of frustration at Spa, maybe it just goes to show that even sim racing obeys the laws of physics.

What goes up must come down.

Midway through the last NEO season, I decided that it would be my last as a driver. Both writing about and competing in the series proved to be a bigger time commitment than I could make, and when forced to choose, I figured I was a more successful writer than racer.

If I needed any more convincing, the Interlagos race was the final nail in the coffin. I came out of the pits and immediately into the fire, swamped by faster drivers behind me. I couldn’t match their pace, and the unrelenting rush of prototype traffic left me exasperated and venting over the team radio.

After just one of my two scheduled stints, I bailed out, handing the car back over to my teammate Karl and insisting that having him — or anyone else besides me — was our best hope for a decent finish.

My final two appearances of the season at Spa and Le Mans went better, but I had still made up my mind. My driving duties in NEO would end at the checkered flag in La Sarthe.

After barely driving this summer, I was even more convinced. NEO is a young driver’s game, I told myself, or at least one for someone faster and better practiced than me.

When Niel Hekkens, the series director, told me about his meeting with 24H SERIES representatives and that NEO could be moving to a different format, I was intrigued, but mainly as a journalist. New classes, different cars, and an esports partnership would give me plenty to write about.

When one of those cars wound up being the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup — my favorite on iRacing — I felt that competitor’s craving return, but only briefly. Driving and writing about the same series could create perceptions of a conflict of interest, and it was better to do one of them well than risk doing both of them poorly.

As my SRN Motorsports teammates began dividing into pre-qualifying entries — one in the GT3 class and another in the TCR — I wished them well with no regrets about sitting out.

But as a spot in the fast-filling, talent-loaded TCR class began to feel unlikely for them, they called an audible and changed to the 991 class.

And that’s how I got in this position.

Now It Counts

This wasn’t the first season our team faced the gauntlet of pre-qualifying to make the NEO grid. Two years ago, when SRN expanded from one car to two, our GTE team had to find September speed around Silverstone in the Ford GT.

But in that case, I was the slowest of our four drivers and didn’t expect the team would need me. While they did give me a chance to make a 10-lap run, they waved it off midway through when it was clear I didn’t have enough pace to be one of our two fastest drivers.

It was the right decision and I was just happy they gave me a chance.

This season was different, though. Karl and I were our 991 team’s quickest drivers in practice, so I would either have to get up to speed after months of driving nothing, or I’d spend the season on the sidelines as I originally planned, although it wouldn’t be on my own terms.

While the Porsche has always felt like a natural match for my driving style, which was honed in heavy stock cars free from most downforce, the change of venue for this season’s pre-qualifying event gave me a new challenge.

The last time I drove Donington was in my short stint as an iRacing beta tester, when driver swaps were in development and a new circuit was the least interesting feature to be found.

I knew the circuit layout, but learning its intricacies in the Porsche — how much to lift for turn 3 to set up the turn-4 braking zone, or how to carry the most speed through the backstretch chicane without taking a run-ending off-track, or which angle of attack worked best in the two hairpins — was another matter.

And given our team’s late class change, I had less than two weeks to figure it out.

Getting to that point is one of the things I love about racing, though. I saw steady progress as practice paid off. Early on, my fastest laps were in the 1:31.4s. Breaking into the 1:30.9s was a big accomplishment. A cram session with Karl helped us both hit the 1:30.7s, and later, the 1:30.4s.

We both felt like being one of the top 13 teams in class was achievable, but it would take a solid effort — one that we couldn’t second-guess, lest we withdraw one of our times and try again in a later session.

Those scenarios had floated through my mind, but on qualifying day, it was time to face the truth.

Truth in Ten Laps

I woke up early to join the first session, mainly to see what track conditions and traffic were like. Twice, I started a run but had to abandon it after running up on slower cars. Neither time was the fault of the other team, but my frustration was borne out of desperation, with the clock ticking and opportunities to get in a good run potentially few and far between.

I managed a 10-lap run averaging a 1:30.931, but knowing I was capable of better, it was a no brainer to go out again in the second session.

In that one, Karl led off with a strong run averaging a 1:30.696. Earlier in the week, we had discussed our target time, and anything under a 1:30.7 felt like it might be good enough to stand on.

Now, it was my turn to back that up.

My first attempt started with laps mostly in the 1:30.8s. I finished it anyway, mainly as a banker run and to build some speed and confidence. After ten laps, Karl’s voice broke the radio silence, telling me my average. 1:30.856…

My second attempt started better but had two slow laps midway through. A car exiting the pits ahead of me hadn’t impeded me but was enough of a distraction to make me miss a few corners. 1:30.775…

In my third run, I managed a rare lap in the 1:30.4s early on — something I’d only done once before then — but fell off too much toward the end. 1:30.786…

By then, I knew I had the speed over a single lap. I just needed to put ten of them together.

The start of my fourth run was the best yet. Lap 2 was a 1:30.396 — my fastest ever.

After a moment of excitement and disbelief that I’d run such a quick lap, my next emotion was… concern?!

All week, I had been driving against the same split times for my previous best lap, in the 1:30.4s. I knew where that lap was strong — from turn 6 through the chicane — and where I could consistently improve, like in turn 4 and the final two hairpins.

Setting a new best lap erased those reference points, and having to adjust to the new ones could have thrown off my entire rhythm and left me pushing too hard in places where I was no longer making up time.

It caused a brief moment of panic, but I had no time to worry. Instead, I backed it up with another quick lap — a 1:30.499 — and three more laps in the 1:30.6s and 7s.

Just finish the run, I told myself. You don’t need to be perfect. Just don’t screw up.

My times did fall off, mainly out of caution, but one mistake on the final lap was the result of unneeded aggression, perhaps from the excitement of having such a good run going or from the eagerness to finish it.

Entering the chicane for the last time, I braked too late. I missed the first apex and by mid-corner expected I might blow through the second. Visions of that horrible green “Off Track (1x)” text flashed through my mind, but fortunately, not across my screen.

It cost me time — that lap was my slowest at a 1:30.984 — but not the entire run. My 10-lap average of a 1:30.688 was marginally quicker than Karl’s. It’s a fact I’m not keen to let him forget after years of struggling to match his pace.

But on that day, a bit of kind-hearted teasing was secondary to our accomplishment. As I watched the lap times continue to roll in and realized during the final session that our team’s average time was safely inside the top 13 — ranked tenth, after all was said and done — I felt like I belonged in NEO.

Out of practice and seemingly out of hope for continuing my NEO career as recently as a month ago, the irresistible call of my favorite car and a pre-qualifying performance under pressure mean I’ll be pulling NEO double duty once again.

I’m not planning to drive in every race since I still want to devote time to coverage of the series, and I know I’ll never be the fastest Porsche driver on the track. But I do hope being behind the wheel will give me insights about the competition and strategy in the new 24H SERIES ESPORTS season, and I plan to share my first-hand perspective as an in-race reporter.

Look for these posts after my race appearances all season, and perhaps you’ll even hear me on the broadcasts from time to time.

If I’m going to be in an unexpected position, I might as well bring you along for the ride!

It can be your best friend or your worst enemy, and sometimes both within the same race.

It can make or break a strategy. It can show how nail-bitingly close or frustratingly far you came from that next position or, in a championship series, a few more valuable points.

And unlike even the closest opponent or fastest prototype coming up to lap you, time is always there. Always ticking. Always simultaneously staring you right in the face and breathing down your neck.

The best endurance drivers are those who can withstand the test of time, being patient enough, fast enough, and consistent enough to survive and succeed.

Drivers who fail often fall victim to their own mistakes — pushing too hard, for too long, or in the wrong places — or are unwittingly caught up in the mistakes of others. Over time, that sort of bad luck is bound to plague everyone.

In my first endurance racing season, though, it seemed that bad luck was unfairly targeting me and my KRT Motorsport team. In the first four races of the NEO Endurance Series, we gave up positions and points due to computer problems, software glitches in iRacing’s then-nascent driver swap code, and penalties. Our frustrations could have been measured by the time lost to those issues.

Despite having a decent pace and comfort behind the wheel of our Ruf C-Spec, we didn’t have the results to show for it. Our best finish was fifth in the season opener at Sebring, and that came after a faulty modem caused me to lose connection to the server on the first lap of my first stint.

Entering the final race of the season, we were outside the top eight in points — a critical cutoff that determined whether teams would automatically qualify for the following season or have to endure the difficult pre-qualifying format — and quickly running out of time to do anything about it.

My teammate Karl and I knew it would practically take an all-or-nothing effort in the finale at Road Atlanta, with at least a podium as well as some bad luck for our closest competitors.

Determined to uphold our part of that equation and let the rest of the chips fall where they may, we made the most of our last chance and finished with a result better than we ever expected.

Like capturing time in a bottle, it’s a come-from-behind story I won’t soon forget. This is the greatest drive of my sim racing career.

1. NEO Endurance Series at Road Atlanta – March 15, 2015

Time offers a chance for recovery. For preparation. But only if you use it wisely.

All too often in my years of endurance racing, I’ve let that time slip away. Sometimes, I’ve kept my racing schedule too full, balancing multiple leagues and driving several different cars that were tough to consistently jump between.

That was the case in NEO season 1, as I was running in that championship and another, the Masters of Endurance Series, on top of my ongoing oval racing career. With so much going on, time to practice simply slipped away.

In other cases, I’ve eschewed the workman-like task of practice for more glamorous official races or simply taking a break from the sometimes-draining world of sim racing.

Whatever the case, I’m usually never able to meet my pre-race practice goals, whether it’s testing and tweaking setups in different weather conditions, running multiple full stints on a dynamic track, or getting experience in traffic.

I wouldn’t make the same mistake leading into the season finale. Or, rather, I couldn’t. Our team’s fate depended on me being more prepared for this race than any I’d run all season, or perhaps in my entire sim racing career.

It would take an aggressive approach, but Karl and I were up to the challenge. In the days after the previous round, he “vow[ed] to double [his] preparations for that race”.

It wasn’t as simple as getting a setup ready. A new iRacing build would drop the week before the race, and Karl and I debated just how much work we should put in beforehand in case the C-Spec received major changes.

He argued that we should at least get a basic setup ready, and I’m glad he did, because when the build arrived and the physics updates were fairly minor, we only needed to make a few tweaks. Plus, we had both put in a dozens or even hundreds of laps around the track by then, so it certainly wasn’t a waste of time.

The week before a NEO race always feels a bit like cramming for a final exam, and in most cases, I constantly worry I haven’t done enough preparation and I’ll be embarrassed by my own performance compared to my competitors.

The lead-up to the Road Atlanta race was still busy, but in this case, Karl and I both felt prepared. We had done enough testing to have a solid handle on our pit and fuel strategy — something that we realized other teams obviously hadn’t done during the race itself.

We had also both put in several long runs, and Karl had staked out our competitors occupying that eighth-place position in the standings — one spot ahead of us — to see how we fared.

“I must say, we are looking good,” he said, noting their slower pace and frequent practice crashes. “All we need is to not screw up and beating them shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

But just beating one team probably wouldn’t be enough. Another team behind us in the standings brought in a ringer for the race — a driver who wasn’t on their team but was one of the top GT drivers on the iRacing service. With him in the car, they could easily leapfrog us in points.

So we kept preparing and kept tuning. On the Thursday night before the race, we were debating the most minor damper changes in search of the last bit of mid-corner rotation and on-throttle stability.

It’s the most prepared I’ve ever felt for a race, and it showed in our pace. We were lapping within a tenth of each other, so it seemed we were getting the most out of the setup.

“I hope that means we’re both running at a good pro driver pace,” I commented.

We wouldn’t know for sure until the race weekend began and it was time to perform.

Qualifying is the ultimate test of time. It’s a race against the clock that doesn’t single-handedly decide your fate but can do an awful lot to influence it.

We had been consistent mid-pack qualifiers all season, but that wouldn’t be good enough in this race. At the short Road Atlanta circuit, the threat of an incident would be greatest in the middle of the field. Getting ahead of any potential carnage, as well as a few of our challengers, would help our chances of surviving, if not succeeding.

The first NEO season allocated an hour for each class to qualify on Saturday, and with so much time available and a mostly empty track to run on, it took a nearly perfect lap to post a top time.

Throughout the session at Road Atlanta, Karl and I took turns behind the wheel. Entering the final 30 minutes, he had recorded a time that was good enough for sixth place, but we both felt there was more pace in the car.

For my final run, I made a seemingly unorthodox setup adjustment. I added a click of wing to the car, figuring it could help find enough speed in the twisty first part of the lap to offset any losses down the two long straightaways.

Making use of that extra downforce would require pushing harder than I had in all of my practice runs and not making a single mistake. Halfway through my lap, I knew I was on pace to set a good time, and coming through the final chicane, I was physically trembling.

I crossed the line 0.118 seconds quicker than Karl’s best lap, moving us up to fifth on the grid — a position that held up in the closing minutes of qualifying while I was still shaking from my pressure-packed performance.

It wasn’t enough to match the alien-like pace of the top teams, but as a mere mortal sim racer, it was a timely performance that may be the best single lap I’ve ever driven. However, Karl and I both knew it would take six hours of equally mistake-free driving on Sunday before our fate would be secured.

Race day was all about making the best use of our time: going as fast as possible, limiting our losses in traffic, and spending as little time as possible on pit road.

We felt good about the former and the latter. We were both comfortable and quick with our setup, and we had a straightforward plan for a seven-stop race, figuring that saving enough fuel to make it on six wasn’t worth the risk.

But our other challenge, and potentially a make-or-break element of the race, would be traffic. At this track, prototypes would come through early and often, and we knew many drivers wouldn’t be too patient with the slower C-Specs through the narrow esses.

Staying as close to the front as possible would be crucial, and Karl wasted no time moving up even more at the start of the race. As we took the green flag, he made a pass for fourth, and once faster traffic arrived, the gap behind us kept growing.

As a crew chief, spotter, and spectator, time seemed to pass both satisfyingly quickly due to the constant action on track and excruciatingly slowly since there was still so much time — and so many encounters in traffic, especially for me — remaining in the race.

After Karl’s hectic single stint to start, it was my turn to get behind the wheel for a double. With more than ten seconds separating us from the cars in front of and behind us, I didn’t drop into a close battle, so my main job was to hold position.

It wouldn’t be easy, as the car behind us — fielded by our current team, SRN Motorsports — had finished on the podium multiple times that season, and their fastest driver Steve was still driving.

Today, he’s routinely a half-second faster than me even on my best days, but in that Road Atlanta race, I managed to match or even exceed his lap times, slightly increasing our gap to 15 seconds before the next round of pit stops.

Even with our stellar pace, it seemed that catching any of the top three teams would be tough. However, when Karl got back in, we caught a break. The same team ahead of us who employed a GT ringer for this race also had a slower driver in their lineup, and making matters worse for him, they inexplicably asked him to start saving fuel midway through his first stint.

Consistently lapping a second quicker than him, Karl ate up his advantage and passed him just shy of the race’s halfway point.

We were in podium position, but it was far from finished.

Our biggest scare of the race came 12 laps later. Karl was caught behind a slower C-Spec, and the class leader was quickly closing in on him. In the slow-speed turn 7 leading onto the backstretch, we got a bump from behind, and that was only the warning shot.

At the end of the straightaway, Karl ran a bit wide to avoid a collision ahead, and instead, he got divebombed by the leader in a move that driver later admitted was overly ambitious and borne out of frustration with being stuck in traffic — one of those all-too-frequent endurance racing deal-breakers.

Despite the shot across our port side, our ship was still sailing smoothly. Karl found his pace again, and to help our cause, the eighth-place team in the standings crashed while racing for position. Karl’s observation of them from practice felt prophetic, and it was certainly profitable for us.

Feeling more optimistic as Karl finished his double stint, I got back in the car for what ended up being the run to the checkered flag.

Those final three stints taking up two hours and change were my best of the race, and perhaps my best ever. I was matching Karl’s pace, but it didn’t feel like I was pushing. Instead, it seemed effortless. My practice and preparation had truly paid off.

Traffic was still stressful at times, but by the end, I felt like I had even mastered that aspect — at least enough to make in-race jokes about the same purple prototype who consistently got stuck following me through the esses.

As in my first two stints, I didn’t face any close battles, but I didn’t need any either. Our position had been earned through six hours of solid driving at the expense of other teams’ inconsistent pace and strategic missteps.

We were aided by a few on-track incidents as well, the most consequential of which came with an hour to go. The second-place team was twelve seconds ahead and I was only slowly gaining on them, but when they spun all by themselves out of turn 7 and nosed into the wall, that gap suddenly vanished.

That made the final hour of the race feel like one big victory lap, even though we were only in second. That’s not to say I let up on my pace. In fact, I ran one of my fastest laps of the race with just three laps to go.

But driving that quickly never felt risky. Our car was connected to the road, and Karl and I both had so much confidence that we never worried either of us would endanger our chances.

Our six hours of racing — the business-like approach at the start, the mid-race scare followed by the realization that things were working out for us, and the jubilation in the final stints — was all building to the moment we crossed the finish line.

As the clock ran out, it was as if time stood still.

We were second in the race and fifth in the standings, wildly exceeding even our most optimistic expectations.

In the minutes after the checkered flag waved, Karl and I couldn’t quite find the words to express our emotions. Those came days later.

“I would say everything went exactly to plan, but I never planned or dreamed of running as well as we did!” I told him.

“I think this was our best race in terms of preparation, planning, and execution, but I couldn’t have imagined anything like a second place,” he said, reflecting my own amazement.

“I’m really happy that we managed to stumble over each other in the vastness of cyberspace,” he added, also echoing my gratefulness toward a talented teammate who made this moment happen.

In a season and an endurance career that had started with so much frustration, we had finally broken through with a good result, and we saved our best for last.

Like endurance racing itself, it was about time.