iRacing: After the Checkered

Let me tell you about the time I won a race… and still felt like I lost.

Laguna Seca, pouring rain, GT4 class. I’d driven one of the cleanest races of my life. Not a single off-track, not a single contact. I was laser-focused, patient in traffic, and when I crossed that finish line, I let out the kind of exhale that comes from 30 minutes of holding your breath.

I pulled off to the side—middle of Turn 2—to let the adrenaline settle before exiting the session. I was still smiling… right up until someone barreled into me full throttle, post-race.
4x.

Zero incidents to 4x in one hit. My Safety Rating? Took a nice little dive.

And you know the worst part? I didn’t even know the guy. No drama in the race. I’d lapped him cleanly on the last lap. That was it.

I thought, “Alright, that’s just bad luck.”
But then… the tables turned.

A few weeks later, I’m cruising past the finish line in another race. I glance over at my second monitor for half a second—just checking my email—and bam, I rear-end a guy who had randomly locked it up and stopped dead center on the straight just 100 feet after the line. Apparently, he protested me. And you know what? I got hit with the fault.

That’s when it clicked for me: the race isn’t really over when it’s over.

See, iRacing doesn’t hand you a trophy and a cooldown massage. It leaves you in the car, still surrounded by people who may or may not be paying attention, calm, or even reasonable. And that’s the moment—after the checkered flag—when we’re most vulnerable. Because mentally, we’ve already let go.

But the track hasn’t.

I started asking around. “What do you do after the finish line?”
And the veterans? They all said the same thing:

“Do a cooldown lap. Go back to the pits. Keep driving until the session ends.”

Turns out, those extra corners still count for Safety Rating. And more importantly, they keep you out of the post-race chaos. Out of the path of wreckers, email checkers, or that one guy trying to practice Tokyo Drift at 200 mph into the corkscrew.

At first, I thought it was overkill. I had just won the race. Why should I have to keep driving?

But then I realized: this isn’t about pride or ego. It’s about control. I can’t control what other drivers do after the race—but I can control where I am, and how I handle it.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway. iRacing, in all its simulated glory, taught me a lesson that applies far beyond sim racing:

Just because the storm passed doesn’t mean you should stop checking the road.

So now, I do the cooldown lap. Every time. Not out of fear, but out of respect—for the race, for the system, for myself.

Because sometimes, how you finish matters just as much as how you drove.

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Happy Racing!