I took part in a 24 Hour Le Mans race a couple of years ago at a SimRacing venue with 16 simrigs set up in a room. The more experienced sim racers were put in GT cars, and the less-experienced were given the LMP1s. There were 5 of us on our team, and as a team of Motorsport Engineering students we went full sweat on everything. We took it waaaaay too seriously, but that's exactly the right attitude for something this long.
We has planned out our stints from the start, as with 5 of us there was always enough time at night for three people to have a good few hours of sleep. We brought a whiteboard with us to use as a pitboard to pass information to the driver, and had got our fuel strategy mapped out perfectly as well to maximise the amount of laps we could do between stops. Of course, being the sweats we were, we managed to eke an extra lap out of each stint and enter the box with 0.5L or less each and every stint.
The race was frought with the glitches and chaos you'd expect with a long race in a virtual world. The kerb on the inside of Indianapolis was especially bad, as pretty much every team got sent into orbit from it for no apparent reason, always bouncing across the grass behind the barriers and losing countless minutes as the coordinators tried to find a way to get them back on track. The exit of the Porsche curves had an equally evil set of kerbs that were at least visibly bad - even if the extent you went into the sky seemed too much. However, pretty much every team got screwed over by these glitches that it equalled out in the end.
There was one poor guy in the LMP category who wasn't expecting anybody to turn up from his team for a few hours, so he was looking at doing the first half of the race by himself. As such, he put out a plea for anyone else who was interested in doing a stint for him. In one of my gaps I spoke to him while he was in the pits, and he was happy for me to take over after his next stop. At that point I took over and had a great time in the LMP. It was so much quicker, and it was fun to actually pass cars, rather than be passed by the faster. Being an "experienced" driver in the car for the lesser drivers, I ended up setting the fastest lap for the race on about my 4th tour, which wasn't beaten until about Hour 22, and had a great time. Lots of drivers in the LMP category ended up sat behind watching me to see what lines and stuff I was doing (I ended up taking the entire Porsche Curves section flat out because the power was really down on those cars for some reason. Everyone went mental when I did that because they were all going through in 5th or 4th gears even). It was also a cheeky chance for me to help my team. I may have overtaken my rivals in an inopportune spot that would have lost them a little bit of time, while sat behind my team's car until a long straight and used the extra power of my car to bump-draft them down the entire run to the first chicane! (even if they said it scared them sh**less because they didn't realise it was me doing it). A cheeky bit of subterfuge is always a bit of fun.
The other thing I remember about that race was that track limits were supposedly being looked at, but nobody ever saw them being punished, so it took us about half a stint to work out they could be completely ignored. Tertre Rouge was supposed to be a big brake and down 2 gears, but it became a lift off down to 5th and try not to hit the tyres on the inside you aim at. The Force Chicanes also ended up becoming a kerb-hopping dance through the tyre walls. The best bit though was the double-chicane pit entrance which I just took flat out and gained about 5 seconds on our rivals.
All-in-all, it was an epic adventure and experience which I both learned from and thoroughly enjoyed. I think we came 4th in class by the end, but the result didn't matter (lol of course it did, but we just didn't have the pace of the guys in front so it was a fair result) so we left happy.
