Barely a month ago an ironic update was announced by FIA for the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend consisting on an electronic system to detect driver offtrack at corners 4 and 11. These were corners where going wide is was posible to gain some time due to a well paved runoff. I said it was ironic because Steve Myers took credit from Twitter for iRacing incidents system working in a similar way since 2008.
“Track limits are easy to enforce from a sporting point of view, you put higher kerbs on the track and nobody goes over them, but this gives us safety concerns when the car hits the kerbs.
So as a result, kerbs are getting thinner and thinner and lower and lower and we do eventually get issues with track limit management.
What we are doing is to try to have a broad approach at this issue and look at how we could combine new kerb solutions with electronic solutions and see if a combination of these two things can help.”
“During the race, and in accordance with article 27.4 of the sporting regulations, any driver who is judged to have left the track three times at these corners (when counted cumulatively) will be shown a black and white flag,” said the FIA in a note to the teams.
One further crossing will result in a report being made to the stewards for not having made every reasonable effort to use the track.
As discussed, this is likely to result in a drive-through penalty for any driver concerned.”
In a nutshell, system consisted in three warnings to every driver before giving a drive through.
Hockenheim (Germany), next GP in the schedule, was going to abandon these penalties and a thoroughly monitoring due to its lack of conflicting corners but only in the first practice at least 93 offtrack issues were recorded in corner 1, so the Hungarian GP rules were in effect again. These two experiences were a nice test case and valuable experience to expand policies in the rest of the tracks in the schedule.
Going back to the post title, if Myers took some credit for his efforts, Spa 24 hours weekend was a great disappointment, even embarrassing sometimes and should make iRacing staff think about how to handle some track-car combinations.
Spa 24 hours was an endurance event, and as every endurance event was free-incident limit leaving to the drivers decide if the SR price was worth to pay to fulfill their goals even losing licenses. There were some flagrant cases.
Every split had teams racing this way, not scoring a clean lap in the whole event and therefore anger and rage spread across many threads in forums. People ask for changes, like were in Daytona 24 hours event last year, for this not happening again. We are talking about media impact of a product trying to show itself as a professional training tool and a simracing reference in e-sports. Spa has been a blot, with collusion of teams and iRacing staff. Many doubts remain now open about e-sports management and Sporting Code.
Forums and social networks were places to admonish all these attitudes the day after.
“Was excessive? Yes, we acknowledge, but we were not racing better time laps, just keeping a constant pace lap after lap. We wouldn’t lost any position having 800 less offtrack incidents.”
With the following response:
“This should be a kind of a joke. You keep talking arguments to defend something indefensible. Shameless to say not losing position and not racing better time laps. If you find yourself trapped you just find another excuse. iRacing was clear and you keep saying anything but: yes, we did it, we took advantage of a system fault. We did it on purpose and to get the best position.”
More people talking about the event:
“did about 160 laps at the 24H Spa and 19 inc. For my feeling still 3 to many. And wasn’t the slowest in that split.”
“As stated before… if you go wide so often like the majority of the fellas did then it is obviously on propose… why should you go offtrack so often, if not for gaining time and being too fast? Do you want to tell me that these guys do not know the track limits?”
“Why can they respect the limits in qualifying but not in the race? Because in qualifying you will be punished appropriately but not in the race… that stinks”
“the thing for me is that on the mentioned tracks everyone can “abuse” the track limits and use the better line, but on spa drivers who try to avoid offtracks are at a disadvantage compared to drivers who don’t give a shit and go full throttle through blanchimont for example. it’s simply not very sportsmanlike.”
On the bright side many users agreed in the need to split offtrack and another kind of incidents. It is a huge change and maybe a too important one to develop as a response for an isolated event, so maybe we should think how to apply solutions for this problem.
7.1.1.8. Drivers can only use the racing surface for qualifying and racing. The apron is not defined as racing surface, example Daytona Road Course. Cars may not use the apron to gain an advantage in qualifying or racing. Any advantage will be determined by iRacing.com. This section may be protested.
No matter what action or solution should be applied but I consider two principles must be enforced.
Situations like these are those which iRacing has to manage in a very different way from the rest of the sims and games and stay away from possibles issues that could lead to a bad image or wrong association of the target group they want to reach.
I wish it was the last time we have to talk about it but sadly I don’t think so. Next, Le Mans in two months. We’ll see what happens.
Note: “Biscotto” is more specific in the sense there need not be an exchange of money, because the secretly-agreed-upon result is of mutual benefit to the agreeing parties.
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