24 Hours of Le Mans - 10th June 2017 - Start: 13:00 GMT (1 Viewer)

[Nighttiger]

Ah allright. Cmon guys, good luck all! I hope you make it! I envy you, I want real 24h racing aswell.

Will it be in Pcars 2? Handing over your car to another driver?

 

[Dutchtastic]

Quick update on the #66 car.
Just finished my first 2 stints with a very clean start allowing me to find my pace incredibly quick which allowed us to go from P14 to P4. A few small slides, missed braking points and an untested double stint for the tires. Battenberg took over and so far it's smooth sailing in P3.

 

[Cluck]

Outstanding first session from @Dutchtastic . We now have @Battenberg at the wheel and, with a pit-stop imminent, car #66 is sitting in P2. Top driving lads

EDIT : And with the pit stop done, we find ourselves P1 in class

EDIT : Correction, now that the pit-stops have settled down, we're P4. Still top driving from a P14 start.

EDIT : And now back to P2 \o/

 

[m4nu]

Puh, first two triple stints are over. Wasnt my fastest one but we are in the lead with a 52 second gap. Luke took over the car, let's see if we can extend the gap!

Car #64 over and out.

 

[m4nu]

Supporting Car #64 from the kitchen. Gogo Luke!

 

[Tom]

#66 update: We're running in 3rd, and Cluck is in the car for his first ever stint!

 

[Cluck]

That was, erm, far too eventful for my liking

 

[Gxbbs]

That was, erm, far too eventful for my liking

What happened?

 

[Dutchtastic]

That was, erm, far too eventful for my liking

Beginning of the midnight stints does allow for the shenenigans to start, you did great man!

Update on #66:
First midnight stint done and we're securing our position in P6 currently. Pace good, teams infront started to put their faster drivers in Still a long ways to go.

 

[Cluck]

What happened?

Nothing major, just a little too 'exciting' for my first ever stint in iRacing! Some of it was self-inflicted, some was downright scary - anything that makes @Bassetts do a sharp intake of breath counts as scary for me .

We've just re-taken 4th place and I'll be back in the hot-seat shortly for my second scheduled session

 

[Cluck]

That stint was an absolute disaster. Got a game crash whilst spotting for @Bassetts then, literally 50 yards out of the pits from the hand-over to myself, the game crashed . Reload the game, waited over a minute and found myself back in the car in the pits. Off I went. With 1 lap to go before my pit stop, the game crashed again . Rebooted my PC this time and reloaded the game to find myself waiting, again, finally getting into my car after close to a minute of waiting.

I pulled up my socks and set about trying to repair as much of the game's damage as possible. All was going well until 3 HPDs decided to play push-piggy-shove in the first Mulsanne chicane. That resulted in myself hitting one of them and getting rear-ended by another. It was all caused by one of the HPD guys out-braking himself

Onwards and upwards. The car handling was OK but a smidgen down on power. I had nearly 10 laps of fuel in the tank. Set about seeing out my stint with as little trouble as possible. Aside from a 3-wide on the exit of the right-hander leading onto the Mulsanne, it was to be.

We entered the pits, for the handover to @Dutchtastic , in P7 and exited in P8. Currently sitting P9 with a very comfortable gap to P10.

The show goes on

 

[Cluck]

2nd lap into @Dutchtastic's 2nd stint and the game crashed on 3 of us :| . This is beyond frustrating but there's nothing we can do except keep going and fight against the bugs as best we can.

 

[Dutchtastic]

Solid job on @Cluck keeping his cool and pace during disconnection. Hopped back in the car and did some solid laps as a first timer on iRacing

First stint this morning with solid low 55's, high 54's. Got in the pit, wanted to double stint tires. 2 laps later iRacing decided that we were not allowed to do that and disconnected us. Luckily no damage, and a full stop which placed us P11.
Take 2 of my 2nd stint on a fresh pair braking into the 55's and 54's again, avoiding 2 crashing HPD's. Guys mentioned I had 2 laps left on fuel on a odd moment on the track after pushing for a few laps. Fuel was under 0.5L before exiting the Porsche curves and fuel pressure was well down 1.0, with coasting and stuttering got the car in after 16 laps on a fueltank while the competition is doing 14-15 laps on a tank.

Up to @Battenberg in the car for his last stints this race. Clock is ticking down

 

[Dutchtastic]

iRacing is doing some work for us, too bad he keeps getting invalid laps

 

[Cluck]

Fantastic drives from @Dutchtastic and @Battenberg have pulled us back up through the field nicely. @Bassetts is now at the helm for the next 2 hours, leaving me with a short 45-minute sprint at the end to close out the race .

 

[falcon2081]

So what happened? No one is saying anything.

 

[Cluck]

Only just finished the race falcon and having the post race chat in TeamSpeak . I'll do a full write-up in a bit

 

[Cluck]

Well, where to start?!

As of Tuesday evening this week, I had spent a total of maybe 3 hours in iRacing, driving one of the Mazda 5 things, back in November. I had taken out the 3-month trial but found the experience so dull that I never loaded the game again. Fast forward to Tuesday and Manu asks me "Hey Cluck, what are you doing this weekend?"

And so it began.

Wednesday evening, I hopped into iRacing for the first time proper. I tried out the Ferrari and the Ford, deciding that the Ferrari was by far the more stable car for me. With a couple of hours under my belt, but still no real feel for "the iRacing style of driving", I went to bed. Thursday was a no-go, due to work, so that left Friday as the only time left to practice. Oh and work out how to do driver swaps. And pit stops. And everything else to do with actual racing. All the while, still needing to work out how iRacing handles.

Saturday. Race day. Up at 9am, breakfast and then onto the PC for some practice. I'm in the team with @Dutchtastic, @Battenberg and @Bassetts. @Dutchtastic is qualifying for us, as the fastest driver and highest rated. Word comes through that we've qualified a solid P14. Worse news was that half of our grid was to be the HPD prototypes. As a newbie, this was the last thing I wanted to hear.

3.05pm

Green
Green
Green

A lovely clean start to the race and once things have settled down, we find ourselves - under @Dutchtastic's hands - up quite a few places. The trend continues through his 2 stints, then through @Battenberg's and then through @Bassett's. It's 9pm and it's my turn to take to the wheel. Surprisingly, my nerves were nowhere to be seen. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Cluck's nerves have left the building".

Well, I've already written about my first experience behind the wheel of an endurance race in this thread but here's a summary.

Bollocks.

A few unforced spins, a few spins brought out of panic at lapping cars and a few too many close calls for my liking. Worst of all, I was a touch too slow handing back the stupidest cut-track penalty

In the world

and had to do a stop-go. Frustratingly, the pit crew carried out a pit-stop when I came in, which was a good 15-20 minutes early. As such, I ran for another hour, putting everything back a little bit. But the car was relatively unscathed and I brought it into the pits to hand back over to @Dutchtastic for the start of the late-night stints.

@Dutchtastic and @Battenberg drove like absolute heroes through the night, handing over to @Bassetts, who continued their good work, handing the car over to me in 5th place. I pulled out of the pits.

What
The
Eff?

The game had crashed

By the time I'd got the game reloaded, there were still another couple of minutes of towing time remaining - the tow couldn't just take me 10 yards back to my pit box of course . Anyway, no use crying about it, there's a race to be run. Oh, except that the game decided to do it again. 1 lap before my scheduled pit stop

Off we go again and all was going well until 3 HPDs decided to play push-piggy-shove in the first Mulsanne chicane. That resulted in myself hitting one of them and getting rear-ended by another. It was all caused by one of the HPD guys out-braking himself and causing the HPD directly in front of me to take evasive action and spin .

With the car seemingly fairly unscathed, albeit a smidgen down on power, I soldiered on. We still had 10 lap's worth of fuel in the car. Aside from a hairy 3-wide entry to Mulsanne, the rest of my session was uneventful, relatively speaking .

I handed control over to @Dutchtastic and off he went, in P8.

That all would have been fun, had @Dutchtastic not then got the same crash as myself (Duth, Battenberg and myself all crashed at exactly the same moment, leaving just @Bassetts in the server). Fortunately, we hadn't lost TOO much, only dropping to 11th.

From there it was a steady race. First @Dutchtastic finished his session, with some glorious laps, handing over to @Battenberg, then onto @Bassetts and then, for the final 45 minutes, I had the reins, to bring the car home. As I took control of the car, I was more nervous than I had been at any other point in the last 23 and a bit hours. My heart was racing. I couldn't screw things up now, not after the amazing work my teammates had done, fighting back against everything iRacing had thrown at us.

Slow and steady.
Slow and steady.
Slow and steady.

Those words echoed through my head.

And lo, that final stint proved to be without any incident, the perfect end to a frustrating race. We crossed the line in P9, happy knowing that we could (should) have been P3 (or P4 at worst).

I never expected it to be easy, though I was surprised at how fresh I felt at the end of my first 2 hours. It is only now, at the end of it all, that my body is reminding me how tired I am, how utterly exhausting that whole exercise was. My eyes hurt. My arms are weak. My mind is tired and exhausted from the constant concentration.

BUT

I raced with the finest bunch of guys I could have wished for. As a team, we pulled together when we needed to. We joked and laughed when the times were right and when we crashed, we crashed together. When we passed cars for position, we passed them together. When I crossed the line at the end, we crossed the line together. We raced as a team and we finished as a team.

I should also like to take this opportunity to doff my hat to the heroes in car #67. To have driven as a 2-man team for more than 12 hours of the race, through the night, is an effort beyond my comprehension. These guys deserve a massive amount of respect.

Was also sad to hear about the misfortunes of car #64 . From such a strong position. But they finished the race and for that they deserve a lot of credit. I'm sure that a lot of lesser teams would have thrown the towel in.

That's it. That's my first endurance race done and, well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to do it again .

Thank you, finally, to @falcon2081 for the Ferrari setup and to @GioVtec for his iRacing account to race with. Hope you like your new rating mate

 

[Martin G Webb]

Sounds like a heroic and mind numbing experience. I have to be honest and say I've allowed my iRacing account to lapse as I don't have enough time for it and all the other stuff I've got going on.

Great job by all involved.

 

[m4nu]

Last race for me in iRacing, thats beyond everything I encountered so far in my sim racing "career"... Frustration level over 9000...