2023 Season 1

2023 Season 1

I did not keep a record of races in Season 1 beyond Week 4.  I continued working on a software project related to iRacing, and put more of my effort into developing that than into racing.

2023 Season 1 begins on Tuesday December 13 at 00:00 UTC (Monday December 12 at 7pm Eastern Standard Time), and finishes on Monday March 6, 2023 at 23:59 UTC (Monday March 6 at 6:59pm Eastern Standard Time).

2023 S1, Week 4 (Monday January 2 - Monday January 9)

• Formulat Renault 3.5 at Barcelona: Again I was not competitive here at all.  I finished pretty well, only because some fast people ahead of me (including my brother Tim) crashed.  But I was just driving around here, not really racing anyone.  I may stop racing the 3.5 for now if I don't have time to practice it enough, and just focus on getting back into shape in ARCA.

2023 S1, Week 2 (Monday December 19 - Monday December 26)

• ARCA at Charlotte: At tracks where many people are strong (like Charlotte), I'm not at all competitive anymore, since I mostly didn't run ARCA for the last six months and I'm out of practice.  I entered this race, and was riding along pretty much at the back of the field, when I had a power outage at the house and lost my steering wheel briefly in the middle of a turn and went straight into a wall, and that was it for me.

2023 S1, Week 1 (Monday December 12 - Monday December 19)

• ARCA at Darlington: I qualified much better than I expected to here, taking 4th place on the grid in the second of 4 iRacing "splits".  But I overused the tires somehow, lost 4 positions in the last 5 laps, and ended up finishing 10th.  Darlington Raceway is probably the most difficult track in ARCA, the first stock car "Superspeedway".  The only fast way around Darlington is the high line next to the wall; despite having a very wide paved racing surface, it is effectively a single-lane track.  There are other tracks where the high line is fastest, but this may be the only one where you have to modulate the throttle through the turns to keep going but stay out of the wall.  Real life drivers say that everyone gets a "Darlington stripe" on their cars during a race here, which is a line of scratched paint on the right side of the car from  scraping along the wall at some point in the race.

• Formula Renault 3.5 at Suzuka: I started 14th on the grid, and ran in 10th from the end of lap 1 until I spun by myself in the chicane on lap 9 and got hit by the car behind me, which damaged the car beyond repair and my race was over.  (The car behind did not get hurt, which was very fortunate, I don't like to be the cause of someone else's race getting ruined.)