In May, our editor Luca competed in his first ever endurance racing events – including the Targa Sicilia Rinascita – and was truly tested.
Hello everyone, thank you once again for taking an interest in my sim racing journey. I knew when I got into PC sim racing, I always wanted to do endurance races. Back in May, I completed my first two.
I had never done an endurance race before. I had to have people talk me through how to do driver swaps, but it was worth it and I’m eager to tell you all about it.
Preparing for Watkins
I had been preparing to compete in the 6 hours of the Glen iRacing Special Event with my teammate at United Sim Team Elz Indriani. To get an idea of how that would be, we competed in a round of the VRS GT Endurance Series on Road America.
At the start, I thought I had doomed Elz to be doing the race on her own. She went to qualify and I was still in the practice server, but I then decided to join Elz in the race server. I backed out, and for some reason it wasn’t giving me the option to join the race server, and I thought I had messed up.
Whilst Elz was qualifying and starting the race (which resulted in her having to dodge a big pileup), I got into a call with one of her Twitch followers. OldManMachi was the real MVP here, helping me out with some very basic stuff on the iRacing UI and I got into the race server.
After getting off the call with Machi, I went to re join the call I had with Elz. Only to see it had expired… and she was racing now. So I just had to wait for Elz to finish her stint, and communicate with her through the Twitch chat.
When it was my turn to take the wheel, I was anxious. But Elz was there talking me through everything, and we were only trying to finish. Also in the race were our United Sim Team managers Yvonne Houffelaar and Sophie Aeronwen, who passed us a few times.
At one point I tried for a move against a competitor into the heavy braking zone after the kink, we ended up touching and I felt terrible about it. But our hopes were truly dashed when Elz took over for the last stint and a competitor cut across her and damaged the car. We spent a few minutes in the pits.
But in the end, we were classified 23rd out of 50 starters. I was genuinely very pleased and had a great time with Elz and her viewers. We’ve since done the 6 hours of the Glen, which I will talk about in the future.
Competing in Targa
Now for the big one. Together with OverTake team members René and Darius, we took part in the OverTake Targa Sicilia Rinascita on rFactor 2, which René streamed to the OverTake channel. It already was quite the leap for Darius and I, we were both still trying to figure out how to do the driver swap and only figured it out before the start. We’ll get back to that.
René took the start in our totally not Porsche 1970s car. He did the first two laps and handed it over to me, and we planned to go in two lap increments. Each lap took around 40 minutes to complete, so it would just be short of 1.5 hour stints.
I was the most prepared out of all three of us. We all agreed to not push too much, although we all still made errors, some bigger than others. But, there were points towards the end of my stint that the commentator David Christie assumed I was doing some extreme fuel saving. In truth, I was just tiptoeing and had more than enough fuel!
After my two laps, Darius was waiting to take over. But then we had an issue and it kicked Darius out of the driver-swap too late, and I was forced to do another stint.
I was already aching all over after my stint, and I was just covered in sweat, but I had to do another two lap stint. That meant I was driving for nearly three straight hours.. it was torture!
When that ended, we got on top of the driver swap issue and I handed it over to Darius, who was kind enough to call me a legend. I then went to have an interview with David Christie, during which Darius nearly ended it for us when he flipped the car upside down.
Darius managed to not end our race somehow, and we decided to hand it back to René for the last lap. We did lose a position on the last lap, but we crossed the line seventh and it was just a joyous experience. The whole experience was amazing, even whilst I was in immense pain and my back was like a waterfall.
I have plenty of endurance events lined up that I’ll be talking about in future. But to have Elz as my teammate in my first long haul event and then to do a unique event with my OverTake colleagues, I loved sharing it with them.
What sim racing endurance events would you want to take part in? Tell us on Twitter at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
