It’s the most difficult car in iRacing, and as I arrived on the scene this week, its future erupted in controversy.
It wasn’t my fault, I swear!
The iRacing Grand Prix Series, home of the McLaren MP4-30 2015-spec Formula 1 car, is by the very nature of its A-class license level the pinnacle of road racing outside of the pro and world championship ranks.
It’s meant to test drivers’ skills like no other cars. But is it too tough? Declining participation even within this season have driven the series to the edge of unviability, and perhaps its drivers to the brink of exhaustion.
In an attempt to save the series, iRacing announced earlier in the week that iGPS would use a fixed setup for the coming season.
The reaction from the community was swift and mostly negative. Within the series, drivers immediately threatened to break away and start their own league to continue racing with open setups.
Outside observers alternated between disbelief, confusion, and frustration over the thought that a fixed setup would fix the series’ participation problems for any more than a few weeks.
Lapping in practice with just one other car on the track.
And iRacing staff chimed in among the cacophony to say that they just wanted to try something different to see if it helped a struggling series.
With the community buzzing about the news and how it would affect iRacing’s top road series, it seemed only appropriate that this week’s iGPS venue was a circuit with its own share of controversy.
The Indianapolis road course may be best remembered as the site of one of Formula 1’s most infamous races: the 2005 United States Grand Prix, in which only the six cars using Bridgestone tires competed after the Michelin-shod cars all parked due to concerns about tire blowouts in the banked final corner.
The aftermath of that race included Michelin’s eventual withdrawal from Formula 1, the reintroduction of in-race tire changes for the 2006 season, and a four-year hiatus for the US Grand Prix after Indy was dropped from the calendar in 2008.
I couldn’t help but think that while this week at Indy may not shape the long-term future of iGPS, the upcoming season very well could.
A race field winds through the Indy infield.
Circuit Training
While the debate among the community continued, I couldn’t lose sight of my task at hand: figuring out how to drive this car again.
Even though I raced it last summer, I felt my evaluation was incomplete since I couldn’t join any of the weekly strength-of-field races. In returning to it this year, I wanted to give it another try in hopes of experiencing a close wheel-to-wheel battle rather than just lapping by myself all race.
Before then, I had to prepare, largely by… well, lapping by myself for hours of practice. And despite having driven this car before, I found that a change of venue plus some changes on the car in the past year made getting up to speed a challenge.
In fact, it seemed like every time I made some progress, I just ran into new hurdles.
The first step was coming to grips — or the lack thereof — with the track itself. Its contentious past aside, the Indy road course otherwise doesn’t have much character. Instead, it’s largely a winding procession of tight, pancake-flat corners with few overtaking opportunities and often no reference markers. In precisely engineered Formula 1 machinery, leaving braking points to guesswork isn’t ideal, and it made finding consistency even more difficult.
Once I was able to put together some laps, I realized that my lap times were more than a second off the pace of Virtual Racing School’s driver coach, two-time and defending iRacing world champion Martin Krönke. While that’s not a lot of time at most tracks and I was comparing myself to the leading expert in this car, at a circuit with lap times under 70 seconds, one second is still a sizable chunk.
Working the steering wheel around one of Indy’s flat corners.
With more time behind the wheel, I eventually closed that gap to about one second, which pushed the limits of my abilities in this car. Doing a longer run was about to push them even further.
Since I last drove this car, iRacing increased the tire wear at the urging of the community, which wanted more realistic fall-off and pit strategies especially in the shorter races like this week’s, measuring in at two-thirds of the standard 305-km F1 distance.
Even though it wouldn’t be as long as my full-length race last year at Monza, preparing for this year’s race felt even more demanding at the physical Indianapolis circuit. After 20 laps, my first long run in practice ended when I crashed in what should be one of the easier parts of the track — at full throttle coming onto the oval.
I was shocked to see the tire wear after that run. The left front tire had just 36% tread remaining — probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced in a road car on iRacing. It was no wonder that I crashed essentially on a straightaway. Even a slight kink in the road was more than the threadbare tires could handle at speed.
In subsequent runs, I managed slightly better wear by avoiding brake lockups and sudden steering inputs, but even in my mock race run on Friday night, I couldn’t push the tires much further than 22 laps — two shy of halfway through the 48-lap race distance — without the risk of a crash returning.
Perhaps I wouldn’t need to worry much about racing other cars. I might have my hands full merely trying to survive for myself.
Pushing the car past its — and my own — limits in practice.
Slipping Back
Just eight drivers showed up for this week’s Saturday morning race. It’s a low number, but not surprisingly so given the trends this season. In the first four weeks, multiple weekend time slots regularly split. Since then, participation has been steadily declining to the point of even the strength-of-field races barely going official.
With so few cars, the chances of having any close competition were slim. Qualifying on the pole only further seemed to deny me the chance to experience a true battle in the F1 car for the second straight year.
To my surprise, what followed was an intense fight during the first half of the race that rivaled this season’s closest racing in the real-world Formula 1 championship.
It began with a slow getaway for me from the standing start — a phenomenon that was once common in these Summer Road Trip races but that I’d improved upon in recent weeks.
After a drag race down the Indy frontstretch, we were three-wide entering the first corner. Rather than pushing the issue around the outside, I backed off and settled into third place. Over the next few laps, the leader stretched out a nearly three-second lead, but I had my sights set on the second-place driver ahead of me.
Three-wide for second place into turn 1.
Locked less than a second behind him, I was able to use one of the McLaren’s in-car tools — the drag reduction system — to open my rear wing flap on the straightaways and close in even more. On lap 6, I had a big run and made a move to his inside, but he pulled a late block that forced me to back off and stay in line.
It was probably best that I didn’t force the issue since we were both closing in on the leader, and also being caught from behind by leader’s teammate, who started fifth.
Midway through the first stint of the race, we all converged and enjoyed an epic battle that lasted for several laps. Four cars — fully half of the starting field — were separated by less than a second and fighting for position.
Tire wear had become a factor by that point, and it showed. On lap 11, the driver I’d battled with earlier in the race who had since taken over the lead nearly spun reentering the oval, much like I’d done in practice. I had a similar bobble a few laps later, which cost me my third-place position.
Although I had dropped from the pole to fourth, I wasn’t too worried. With the worst of the tire wear still to come, plus pit stops and a full second stint, there was plenty of time for things to change. And they soon did.
A four-way fight on the oval.
Moving On Up
On lap 20, the car ahead of me spun in one of the tight infield corners, which elevated me back to third. However, driving cautiously past his spinning car dropped me out of DRS range from the second-place car, so for the first time all race, I was all alone on track.
Feeling some additional instability on my worn tires, I ducked into the pits on lap 22, just like I’d practiced, and the two leaders pitted right at the halfway mark. My undercut gained me a position in the pit stop cycle, but I lost it again as the early race leader, who was obviously at his best on new tires, drafted past me on lap 31.
I hoped to hang onto the back of his car and follow him as he caught the leader, who by that point was three seconds ahead, but once again in this stint, he was too quick for me to keep up with.
It seemed I had the third-fastest car and was destined for a third-place finish. But the wildcards of this car and circuit soon had something to say about that.
Encountering a spinning car on lap 20.
With 14 laps to go, the second-place car spun through the grass after getting onto the throttle too soon exiting turn 3. While he recovered, I moved into second place and briefly seemed to be chipping into the gap to the race leader.
However, after a near-spin of my own and several laps where I could only match the leader’s times, I decided it was best to push a bit less and simply make it to the finish.
I exhausted the last of the car’s stored energy reserves coming to the checkered flag, chipping the gap to the winner to just under three seconds. As in the 2005 US Grand Prix, it was a Ferrari-liveried car taking the win, but this time, he had to work for it.
iRacing Grand Prix Series - Race
Saturday, August 25 at 8:00 am EDT • Strength of Field: 2832
Finish Start Interval Laps Led Fastest Lap Incidents Points iRating Safety Rating
2 1 -2.951 sec. 0 1:07.722 1 129 5174 (+12) A 4.99 (+0.12)
Series Status
While I was relieved — and probably a bit lucky — to finally find a tight battle in the Formula 1 car, that one good race certainly doesn’t mean the problems facing this series and its future are solved.
On the contrary, this race and its eight-car field was the latest sign of the series’ declining participation, which isn’t likely to rebound without a change being made. Whether or not current drivers like the proposed solution, iRacing had to do something.
The good news is that they’re treating the upcoming fixed-setup season as an experiment, and they’ll be watching the stats and listening to feedback from the community to decide what happens next.
And for all the criticism they’ve gotten so far, in iRacing’s defense, I can see why a fixed setup would be one of the first things they’d try. It has worked well for other series including the Ruf GT3 Challenge, which I praised earlier this summer for its close, evenly matched competition.
Of course, as many have countered, the F1 car is a different beast. It’s inherently difficult to drive regardless of the setup, and choosing a poorly balanced or unstable setup could have the opposite of the intended effect.
The back end of my car steps out late in the race.
This car tends to amplify the slightest instabilities, and even drivers with the fastest reflexes and most experience may not be able to consistently correct the car if it steps out. A bad setup could both drive away series regulars unable to control the car over a full race distance and discourage would-be drivers from trying it out in the first place.
Of course, that may be putting the F1 car before the horse since we don’t even know which setup will be used next season. Regardless, though, it’s tough to imagine a fixed setup being the permanent solution to this series’ lack of sustainability.
So what is the answer?
One idea that has gained a surprising amount of agreement on the forums is to create two separate series using the F1 car. One would be a B- or C-class fixed-setup series running Monday through Friday, while the existing A-class iGPS would still use open setups and run exclusively on the weekends.
The two series would use identical schedules and only differ in their setups and possibly race distances, with the fixed series potentially using shorter races. Such a format would create a natural ladder system to funnel drivers into iGPS without further diluting the road racing landscape since the two series’ race sessions wouldn’t overlap.
Close racing at the front of the field.
To help address another common complaint both from the iGPS community and drivers outside the series — that there aren’t enough incentives to encourage drivers to endure a season-long grind in this car — perhaps iRacing could borrow some ideas from two other series it has hosted using the MP4-30.
Last summer, the World’s Fastest Gamer competition helped McLaren choose its new simulator driver, and this year’s ongoing Shadow Project qualifying series will earn one lucky sim racer an invitation to try out for McLaren’s eSports team.
While offering such rewards would be financially and operationally unsustainable for four seasons per year, giving some sort of compensation — even additional credits for season-long participants — may be more feasible.
The good news is that iRacing is paying attention to iGPS while it still has signs of life and while its community is actively engaged in finding a solution. Just this season, I’ve encountered a case of a different series — the GT Challenge — that’s seemingly dead with little community interest in resurrecting it.
If Formula 1 could survive its farce at Indianapolis in 2005 and I could survive my return to the tricky F1 car at the same circuit, then I’m confident that the iRacing Grand Prix Series will also live to race another day.