After racing online and offline with games like Papyrus’ NASCAR Racing 3 all throughout high school, a busier schedule and cramped dorm rooms in college forced me to take a break.

But after graduating, I felt the desire to race again, and my interest was piqued after seeing a new game – er, simulation – advertised on Marcos Ambrose’s racecar in the August 2009 race at Pocono.

Less than a week later, I was an iRacing member and, it turns out, an early adopter of the platform just one year into its own existence.

In my first days on the service, I passed up chances to spend time with friends after work so I could log more laps on track by myself. Later, I worked up the courage and consistency to compete in official sessions against other drivers.

While my driving wasn’t very polished, I still look back on those early days with fondness, remembering how nervous I’d get about every off-track or how excited making a pass even against the slowest backmarker would make me.

That nostalgia was reignited during iRacing’s recent 15th anniversary celebration, which included a special four-week series featuring some of its original cars running on its oldest tracks.

With an opportunity to rediscover some of my sim racing roots, plus a small chance at winning a $1,000-credit grand prize for competing in all four weeks, I strapped in for a ride down memory lane.

A Roadster Remembered

The Pontiac Solstice was the rookie-level car when I first joined iRacing, and while its lack of power is obvious compared to the GT cars I race now, at the time, it was a good car for a beginner to learn braking points and racecraft without punishing the inevitable mistakes too severely.

Back then, the rookie series alternated between just two tracks – Lime Rock and Laguna Seca – and during my first week driving the Solstice, Laguna Seca was up as the host.

My first race was solid if unspectacular, finishing in third place, ten seconds away from the next closest car. After that, I had the typical incident-riddled rookie-level race that left me eleventh out of twelve competitors and a little unsure about this whole iRacing thing.

I followed that up with a string of podiums, all while shaving tenths off my fastest lap times, and during a Saturday afternoon race on August 29 – just three weeks after joining iRacing – I earned my first official victory.

I remember little to nothing about the race itself, but the results show I won from the pole with a final margin of 12 seconds and only a single off-track incident in the 11-lap race.

Fourteen years later, I knew my return to Laguna Seca in the Solstice wouldn’t be that easy. But after joining a Tuesday night race session, I thought the same result was possible. In this race, I was the #1 car, and as I learned all those years ago, that carries an expectation to win as the highest-rated driver in the field.

Suddenly, I felt the same nerves as in those early races with the Solstice, and those only increased after qualifying, where I took the pole by three tenths of a second.

At the start, it was clear that the draft was strong enough and the driver behind was quick enough to stay with me, so I’d need to dig into my bag of tricks if I wanted to get away.

The first of those came into play on the second lap. In slower cars, I have often found a shallow entry and hard, late braking into the Andretti Hairpin is an effective way to keep the car on a tight inside line – the shortest distance around the corner – and rotating to set up a fast exit.

The driver behind me took a wider entry but still tried to cut back for the second apex like I did – and he was going too fast and ran wide. That bought me a buffer of about a second, but he was still within draft range.

The following lap, I took a wide exit out of turn 3, kicking up gravel beyond the kerb. The driver behind again tried to follow in my tire tracks, but he ran even wider, sliding through the gravel and back onto the circuit.

As he entered a battle of his own with third-place driver, I was finally in the clear out front. But just as I’m sure I did in my first ever races here, I held my breath every lap through the Corkscrew and exhaled whenever I came out the other side with all four tires on the road.

After a short but well-executed seven laps of driving, I returned to victory lane in the same car/track combination where it all started for me fourteen years ago. It was a rewarding result, but I couldn’t rest just yet with three more weeks of throwback racing ahead.

(Re)living Legends

Despite coming from an oval racing background with the NASCAR games I grew up playing, I was slow to try the oval side of iRacing. In fact, it took more than nine months after I joined the service before I ran my first official oval races.

Those came in the Legends car, which like the Solstice was underpowered but ideal for learning the dynamics of side-by-side short track racing.

My earliest races at South Boston – a track I knew from NASCAR Racing 3 – were again a mixture of progress and pandemonium, but my biggest hurdle was putting a complete race together and not fading or slipping up in the closing laps.

A Wednesday evening race in May 2010 seemed to be going the same way, as I led laps early but fell back to second place by mid-race. But this time, the car ahead slipped up and I retook the lead in the closing laps.

However, another car had followed me through, and he was all over my rear bumper and not making any mistakes. As we took the white flag, I made one of my own, pushing too hard on old tires and opening up the bottom lane for him in turn 2.

We ran side by side down the backstretch, all with a lapped car just ahead. I held my higher line through the final corners and we nearly crossed the finish line three-wide, splitting the lapped car. But my momentum around the top paid off, and I won by just a tenth of a second.

A photo finish like that was a dramatic way to take my first oval win, and I still credit that as the moment I became truly hooked on iRacing and convinced it was unparalleled for online sim racing competition.

Getting back into the Legends car after all these years, the buzzing hornet sound was the same but I could immediately feel improvements to the handling thanks to many iterations of tire model development. The car is now much more predictable when driving close to the limit, and instead of immediately spinning, slides can be anticipated and saved.

Of course, I hoped I would never have to deal with those in my race, which was early on a Thursday morning. I was again the highest-iRated driver in the field, but with many rookie drivers in the 12-car field, it seemed like survival rather than speed could be the key.

I qualified on the pole and got a good start while chaos unfolded behind me. The third-place car got loose exiting turn 2 and collected nearly half the field behind him. While that could have thinned out the field, it could have also meant many off-pace or damaged cars returning to the track during the 30-lap race.

As I stretched out a gap over second place, I started taking it easy when lapped cars filled my windshield, giving a little extra room when passing them.

I was also careful to manage my tires, because even in a 30-lap run in practice, I noticed that pushing early on resulted in some severe falloff by the final few laps, which turned the normally nimble Legends car into a dump truck. Whether I was in a close battle or negotiating lapped traffic, I couldn’t afford that loss of handling in a late-race situation.

This time around, though, I was comfortably alone out front, aside from a few courteous slower cars around me in the closing laps. The best battle on track was for second place, nearly nine seconds behind me.

While my return to the Legends car lacked the drama of a photo finish, it still brought the success of a victory, bolstered by consistent driving and years of experience with tire and traffic management.

Skipping Back in Time

After competing in the Solstice, my next step up the road racing ladder kept me on the tin top side of the service, running cars like the Volkswagen Jetta and Ford Mustang.

But on the open-wheel side, the Skip Barber Formula 2000 car stood out as one of the most popular cars on iRacing, and one that probably should have caught my interest sooner.

After all, in June 2007 – a year before iRacing launched – my dad and I took to the track at Virginia International Raceway in similar Formula 2000 cars as part of the Bertil Roos Racing School.

Looking back, I can only imagine that having iRacing then would have dramatically sped up my learning curve – and my lap times – in that racing school.

Alas, my starts in the Skip Barber have been few and far between, including some as part of my Summer Road Trip at Silverstone in 2017 when I infamously bump-drafted my teammate Karl straight into a crash.

To get another taste of the Skippy and my own real-world racing experience, I took to the track at VIR, running the same south course layout my dad and I drove together 16 years ago.

In my first test laps, I certainly felt a sense of familiarity – although the comfort of my office was a much different atmosphere than the sizzling 95-degree weather on the day of the racing school.

Mainly, I remembered how tricky of a track VIR’s south course is. While it’s just 1.65 miles long, it packs plenty of challenging corners, including the appropriately named Bitch – a tight hairpin at the end of the frontstretch
– followed by a blind entry to the downhill esses, and concluding with Oak Tree. All these years later, the namesake tree itself is gone, but it remains a difficult corner to get right.

However, I could tell that my experience on iRacing – plus a little from real life – helped me get up to speed. I was able to pick out the fastest lines through the corners, sense the grip level in the tires, and do what I have always done best on the sim: string together consistent, clean laps.

Those skills would all come in handy during my Thursday night race session, where it was clear my biggest opponent might be myself. I was again the highest-rated driver in the field and nearly two seconds quicker than the field in qualifying, so as long as I could stay on track, the win seemed easily in reach.

As at South Boston, I got a helping hand early in this race, as the cars behind me piled up in the first turn while I drove away.

After the first lap, I had a six-second lead and was gapping the field with every corner. Those races can be some of the most challenging as a driver, since your mind wanders and you tempt yourself to hotlap, running close to the limit to extract more pace.

But I remembered back to the racing school, when they warned us even dropping a tire in the grass would warrant a pit stop, and convinced myself not to go too crazy searching for speed.

After a few cautious encounters with lapped traffic, I completed the 10-lap race with a 30-second margin behind me. That left me three-for-three in the 15th anniversary series with one week to go.

Better Late

While my first year or two on iRacing were spent primarily doing road racing, my early oval experience was enough to draw me back there from time to time, and one of the most popular oval cars to drop in and race was always the Late Model.

That car was even featured in one of iRacing’s first big events. In September 2011, they hosted a two-night tournament at Iowa featuring heat races, semifinals, and a 30-driver main event.

I took part and did much better than expected, qualifying in 30th out of 434 drivers and making it all the way to the finals. Along the way, I competed head-to-head against the likes of former ARCA and NASCAR driver Stuart Kirby, and gridded up for the feature alongside a who’s who of future eNASCAR stars including 2013 series champion and tourney winner Tyler Hudson.

While an early crash around me ruined any hopes of a strong finish, even making the finals over more than 400 other drivers was a proud achievement.

Returning to the Late Model in this final week of the anniversary series, there was a twist: the car itself was different, with the old Monte Carlo replaced earlier this year by a CARS tour Late Model Stock.

It is a car, though, in which I’ve got some recent experience. Together with my friend Bradley – one of those work friends whose company I eschewed to race fourteen years ago – we have been racing against AI opponents while simulating the mid-90s stock car scene.

We began our mock career mode with the Slim Jim All-Pro Series, a southern late model tour for which we used the new Late Model Stock.

During our race at Concord Speedway, a now-defunct triangular half-mile preserved digitally on iRacing, Bradley and I battled side-by-side for the lead, but contact with the simulated Shane Hall slowed me down and I had to settle for second place.

That left me wanting another chance with that combination, and with Concord on the Late Model’s 15th-anniversary series schedule, I knew I had to race – and win – there to finish up this trip down memory lane.

There were only six drivers in my race session, but it may have offered the best competition of any event in my anniversary series experience. One driver ran faster than me in practice, and another had a high-enough oval iRating that I expected he could be quick in the race.

I qualified on the pole and jumped out to a half-second lead, but the fast driver from practice backed up that speed in the race, and he didn’t let me pull away early on.

Eventually, a lapped car limping around the traffic slowed him down and let me open a two-second lead over the pair of quick drivers battling behind me.

With ten laps to go, the higher-iRating driver got the position and was sometimes running a tenth or more faster than me. His speed was undeniable, but with the gap I had built and the laps winding down, my lead was safe until the finish.

While wins haven’t always come easily in my iRacing career – and this was my first official victory in either generation of Late Model – my execution in this race was classic Corey. I didn’t always have the fastest car on track, but clean and consistent driving paved the way to a good result.

Fourteen years ago, I could have never imagined that iRacing would become such a mainstay in my life for such a long time, even knowing my long history of sim racing before then.

In that time, I have assembled a solid and well-rounded résumé of achievements, from oval league championships to an Indianapolis 500 victory to endurance race wins at tracks including Daytona, Sebring, and the Nürburgring.

Each of those were special moments to be sure, but some of my favorite memories are still my very first races, when I’d get anxious and antsy as the session loaded and my emotions would rise and fall with my safety rating.

Reliving some of those combinations over the past four weeks has made me appreciate the adventure so far and excited to see what the next fifteen years – and hopefully many more – will bring for iRacing and my own sim racing ride.

My own abilities and equipment — including a half-broken set of Microsoft Sidewinder pedals — were a bit rusty at first, and with my performance tracked by precise indicators of skill and safety, I was nervous every time I registered for a session to compete against other people.

Over the years, my driving has improved, although those nerves haven’t completely gone away. That’s part of the addiction of iRacing, though. Compared to other games, there’s no reset button when races don’t go your way, and the feeling of accomplishment is all the more satisfying when they do.

As I approach my ten-year iRacing anniversary on August 9, I’ll count down ten of my best drives here on The Driver Diary. It was a tough list to curate, not because I’m a particularly prolific driver, but because I’ve driven a lot — more than 700 official races plus countless other league events — spread out among a variety of cars, series, and disciplines.

This top ten represents a sample of all of those, from my lowly beginnings in the rookie series to the top of the heap in endurance racing.

The countdown begins with the former — one of my first iRacing wins that remains one of my closest ever margins of victory.

10. Rookie Legends at South Boston — May 19, 2010

It wasn’t my first win on iRacing — that came in August 2009 driving the Pontiac Solstice at Laguna Seca — but it was the race that convinced me iRacing was worth a second chance.

My first entrée into iRacing in the summer of 2009 had been eye-opening. It was a big change from the last titles I had driven, such as Sports Car GT and F1 Challenge 99-02. But running mainly on the road racing side, it hadn’t managed to hold my interest for more than a month or two.

The following spring, I decided to give it another shot, this time on the ovals, which is where I’d done most of the online competition in my sim racing past.

At the time, the rookie car was the Legends Coupe — a frankencar with a to-scale 1934 Ford body and a motorcycle engine. Tame enough to avoid spinning from small mistakes but powerful enough to slide through the corners with well (or poorly) timed throttle application, it was an ideal car for beginners, or in my case, sim racing returnees who never quite got the hang of high-level oval cars in NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, iRacing’s predecessor in lineage and physics.

The rookie Legends series at the time rotated between just two tracks, so after getting my feet wet with a couple of races at Lanier, I buckled down for a week of 40-lappers at South Boston.

My first race ended in a crash while the second was my closest brush with oval victory up to that point. After starting second and leading 14 laps early on, I faded late in the race and finished second, five seconds behind the winner.

The next day, I was back at it for more races, but despite two top-fives, I was no closer to winning. It took a random dinnertime race on a Wednesday to finally break through.

It began with another second-place start, but instead of charging to the lead right away, I bided my time and moved into the top spot on lap 16.

From there, it certainly wasn’t easy. As the laps wound down, I hit traffic and also faced increasing pressure from behind. It was enough to force me into classic rookie mistakes, missing my marks and opening up the bottom lane for my opponent.

On the final lap, we raced side-by-side as my car four-wheel drifted through turn 2. I was pushing the little Legends car as hard as I could and barely hanging on.

I had a nose ahead down the backstretch but bigger problems out my window. A lapped car was just ahead of us, and we were set to catch him out of the final corners.

In turn 3, I held the middle groove and gave my opponent room — but not much — on the bottom. Sure enough, we caught the lapped car off of turn 4, but split him on either side to take the checkered flag.

Crossing the line three-wide, I was a tenth of a second ahead of second place. I had earned my first iRacing oval win, and with such close, clean, and intense competition, there was no doubt I’d be back for more.

Although wins were tougher to come by on the oval side as I moved into higher splits, few could have ever beat the excitement of that first victory in a short-track photo finish.

9. Sprint Car at Lucas Oil Raceway Park — February 28, 2017

After dabbling with the Legends, late models, and trucks, I largely put my oval career on hiatus as I explored more of iRacing’s depth of road content. When I returned to making mostly left turns, I had a successful stint of five seasons and two championships in the Power Series. However, even those results left me wanting more.

At least until overpowered dirt-racing rocketships like the midget and super late model arrived, the final frontier of oval racing always seemed to be the asphalt sprint car.

With heaps of horsepower and a dearth of downforce, it seemed like a great match for my own driving style, honed in bulky stock and GT cars that rely more on throttle control than aerodynamics. I’d just never given it a fair shake.

That opportunity finally arose in the fall of 2016. During week 13, iRacing held an unofficial sprint car series at Lucas Oil Raceway Park, which helped me get acclimated to the car, albeit in the same way one gets acclimated to the heat in a desert.

My first few races were rough, as this car was everything the Legends car wasn’t. It easily spun with overly ambitious throttle application, or sometimes seemingly if you looked at the gas pedal wrong.

By the end of that week, I was consistently finishing races and I felt competent enough in the sprint car to avoid crashing. I was ready, if hesitant, for my first season of official competition.

My expectations weren’t particularly high since I’d be driving against people far more experienced in the car with better setups and higher iRatings than me. And initially, I was satisfied to be solidly mid-pack — sixth place in my first two races, then a top five in week four of the season.

As I became more familiar with the car, the setups, and the surprisingly close racing in the Sprint Car Cup series, I steadily began reeling off top-five finishes. To shorten my learning curve, I also ran the car in the private JSRL league, and even managed to earn a couple of victories there.

However, I was still searching for my first official-series win, and entering the final week of my first — and only, as it turned out — season driving the sprint car, time was running out.

As luck had it, that week brought a return to Lucas Oil Raceway Park, so it would serve as a measuring stick for how far I had come as a sprint car driver.

A second-place qualifying run was a solid start, but the early laps of the race brought setbacks as I slipped to third and then fourth behind two of the fastest drivers in the series.

As the 50-lap race passed its halfway point, my comeback drive began. I re-took third place in a tight wheel-banging battle that finished with me making a difficult inside pass on a track where the top groove is typically preferred.

Although the two leaders were several seconds up the road by then, a well-timed caution at lap 28 bunched the field back up and gave me another shot.

When the green flag waved again, the racing was close among the top four, but I held my position and waited for a chance to move forward.

With nine laps to go, that opportunity emerged. The second-place driver tried an inside pass for the lead, but I managed to fill the gap to his outside and take the spot.

The following lap, the leader inexplicably changed his line to the middle groove, opening the top lane for me to get alongside him.

After a side-by-side battle for a lap, he got loose entering turn 1 and I sped by on his outside to take the lead.

While the second-place battle raged behind me, I held on to win by a second. It wasn’t as close of a finish as my first on an oval, but the fight to get there was every bit as challenging, if not moreso in the most difficult asphalt oval car to drive on the iRacing service.

I can’t quite say I ever mastered the sprint car — I’m not sure anyone can make that bold claim — but I’m still amazed by how quickly I got up to speed and, eventually, to victory lane.

From unintentionally spinning on the frontstretch at Lucas Oil Raceway Park to celebrating a win there in the course of just three months, my sprint car career — while brief — was a story of constant improvement and some of the most fun races I’ve ever been a part of.

Thinking back ten years, those moments alone made me glad I stuck with iRacing. Apparently all it took to get me hooked was my first taste of close competition and the thrill of victory.