Well, maybe. This is *me* we're talking about. ;-)

Despite all my whining I've driven about five races on my night off. The
first three were the usual mixed bag of distinctly average experiences...
a few moments of tension at the start, then a steady trail of hotlaps
with the occasional spinner or lapper to liven things up a little. The
Skippy keeps you involved enough in your lapping not to make it too
boring though, which is probably why it's easy to get sucked into 'just
one more race' when the next one comes around.

It beats doing the ironing anyway.

The fourth race was a farce. My video locked up twice in warmup for a few
seconds, resulting in a crash. I quit and came back, but it happened
again in the race despite ripping the side off my case and aiming a fan
inside. I don't think that video freeze hurt anyone but myself, but it
hurt my SR nastily. I quit & rebooted, then remembered I could rejoin.
Tried again and this time, 3 laps down, I was able to finish without
further problems.

I think, in retrospect, this video freeze might have been caused by
Intel's CPU temp monitoring utility which I'd had loaded to keep a record
of temps during racing. It was the only unusual thing running on my PC at
the time.

Anyway, that was a fairly low point in the day. But another hour passed
and another race lures me in. Somehow the fact that there's only one
every two hours can make it harder to resist than if you had VROC-style
choice of quitting one and joining another straight away. You have a
cooling-off period after a race, and just enough time before the next to
have a drink and forget the bad bits.

Ok, so 26 drivers register and iRacing splits us nicely into two races of
13 drivers (maximum is 14).

Things got off to a bad start. An Aussie (that time of day is littered
with the whingeing, gold-phobic barstewards! ;-) leaves the pits just
behind me, and is obviously faster... or at least less fearless than me.
I pull over politely to let him past after a few turns. He follows me and
I collect a x4 penalty for my manners.

Fortunately warmup SR penalties don't count too heavily, and he did at
least apologise. I'll live, but it already feels like another of 'those'
iRaces.

On the grid there's only one driver behind me, just the way I like it.
The air is full of G'days & G'lucks & polite European silence. Then we're
off, and the guy from behind me is having none of this, "you can't win a
race at the first bend" stuff. He's 3-wide and weaving all the way down
to T1. And yet everyone survives, thanks mainly to the average driver
being a lot more cautious.

Before long though there's an incident. I pass a car pointing the wrong
way, another going sideways, another pulled to one side behaving -- it
seems to me anyway -- a bit sheepishly. I pass them all cleanly,
following fairly closely behind another driver.

For once I'm hanging onto the guy in front, and forget about the racers
I've passed. But within a lap or two my mirror is suddenly full of cars.
They're closing fast, but not so fast I need to pull over yet... after
all, we're just entering the twisty bit of the track where passing would
be suicidal unless I make an obvious mistake.

Wrong! I'm lined up nicely for the turn and before I can react, one
driver's gone round the outside of me, out-braking me by about a
light-year. I slow to prevent an incident, and another driver passes me
on the inside, showing total fearlessness. I somehow hold it together,
and try to relax again as my heart pounds.

But the third driver from the group I'd passed is now in my mirror. Sod
this, I pull well over and let him squirrel off after his mates.

Well, that was certainly exciting, but it was the wrong kind of
excitement. I'm used to a calmer, more conservative type of racing back
among those who're less certain of their talent. I suppose it's a
compliment of sorts though that they thought I could be taken so
predictably.

On with the race. Plenty of time to calm down and get into my slow,
steady little groove of 1:26es. But now I'm slowly getting closer to the
guy in front. We'll call him Alain because, well, because that was his
name. Not an Aussie name, and certainly not an Aussie driver. Slower,
steady, and lapping about 1s a lap slower than myself.

Looks like I've finally -- after gawd knows how many races! -- got a
fairly evenly matched opponent. And I was right.

For seven *glorious* laps I followed him around Summit Point. There were
sections of the track where I could get very close, but they weren't
sections where passing was safe for both of us, and I'd get no
satisfaction whatsoever from pushing hard and causing someone to have an
off. There's no money, trophies or scantily clad women riding on this,
just a few lousy iRating points. So I back off where I'm not sure about
his braking, and I lean hard where he shows confidence. It is both
exciting and rewarding, even though he's slowing me down by about 2s a
lap now.

But what does that matter? Nearly everyone else is way off in the
distance. So coming into the final bend of our seventh lap together I
think I've finally got the measure of my opponent. I back off just enough
to give him space, yet come out of the turn just behind him. That'll give
me the whole straight to slipstream him and out-brake him -- as I know I
can -- into T1.

But what's this? Nooooooo! You can't over-cook it... please don't lose
it... not now!

Sadly Alain had pushed a little too hard. Maybe he could smell my
anglo-saxon gameplan from across le Channel? Maybe his cat jumped on his
monitor? Or maybe he just lost it the way we all do... by simply being
human.

I contemplate slowing to let him catch up, but that can seem a little
insulting, and besides, there's someone else coming up fast now, and
we'll be racing for position. I may not be the most competeitive person
on the track, but I try not to be too much of an easy target.

The rest of the race was fairly uneventful, but I was basking in the warm
glow of the best seven laps of racing I've had... well, since about 1999
when I nearly had a heart attack from some very exciting and very close
racing in GPL at Monza... I had to quit that race because my hands were
shaking from the adrenalin rush. :-)

The best part was finding out afterwards that Alain had also enjoyed our
encounter, describing me as a 'very fair' racer.

Now to some that's probably a huge insult. Who wants to be fair, this is
racing, not knitting! But to me it was a huge compliment, and I came -->
.<-- this close to renewing my subscription straight away after that
race.

If I do so in the next week it won't be because I love iRacing and its
many, many flaws. It'll be because despite those flaws, iRacing has
reminded me why I still have a wheel attached to the gaming end of my
desk, even though it's years since I've used it regularly.

Maybe, just maybe, that is enough to justify the ongoing cost and the
many frustrations iRacing in its current form has to offer.

Andrew McP... boring rec.autos.simulators for well over a decade!