Community Question: What Is Your Best Sim Racing Memory?

Coming from console xbox1 v8 supercars 3 to rf1 orsam v8 mod about 15 yrs ago, sim racing showed me what a real sim was and told me i had just been playing arcade games. Thought i was a better driver than i was, sim racing soon put me in my place. LMFAO PS: best move i made coming to PC and sims.

Win a race against Fulvio Fenix.

Grand Prix Legends, Mosport Park.

Graham Hill overtaking can't remember who on the straight-away, me getting right in the middle of them two and overtaking them both at the same time. Don't know why, but I it's the one that stuck in all these 20+ years.

..when project cars 3 was removed from sales stores..

oh.. wait , didnt happen yet..

Nice topic. I really have those one special moment/memory.
Back in 2008 i joined a rFactor Formula One online league. My serious sim-racing experience so far was the hot- seat mode within Geoff Crammonds Grand Prix 4 only, so i did not expect nothong special but i managed to keep up and score some point in the first season.
In 2009 i improved allot. The hardest thing was always the building of the setup´s
After a sensational second place in Turkey and few leading laps @spa i finally managed to win my one and only GP of my online career. At Montreal i started on 8th position, so i had no really hopes to do so, especially we had a sort of Senna of our league who totally dominated the league.
As good as all guys was racing with a very low rear wing to be able to overtake on the last long straight. I was the only guy which focus on the curved sections and drove a significantly higher wing.
Suprisingly the tactics was worth it. Particularly during the pit stops i was able to improve my position significant.
So with 3 laps to go i was second and totaly happy with it. The dominating leader was about 30 seconds away. Suddenly with 2 laps to go the safety car came out. Few seconds later i saw the leader on the grass. It seems he was using too high motor prgramms and his engine was blown.
I couldn´t believe my luck. I still remember this race and how it felt to win a Grand Prix in a very competetive league.
I got married a year later and my multiplayer gaming ended.

When racing with my son in rFactor in karts, when we had a close wheel to wheel battle for the entire race. I have never been so exhausted in such a short time. Most times I didn't last the entire race, but once in a while I did and that was great.

GTR2 a couple of weeks ago,
Getting to within 2 laps of finishing Lemans 6 hour race, I was hunting down the leader for a few laps getting closer but not close enough, realizing the futility of it I backed off and settled for a well earned second place,
I relaxed the pace a little too much and missed my breaking point at the end of the Mulsanne, only by a few meters so circled in the escape road and fell out of the world... all the while my engineer was saying "what the hell man... he's going the wrong way" (I have the American Engineer sound mod I picked up from no grip years ago)

It is simply impossible for me to summarize as a simracer since 1985 with busy and difficult periods in life along the way where my memory is black.
But now I've started writing, so it will be most polite to make some suggestions - albeit they will be extremely sporadic and fragmented, entirely reflecting my disjointed memory at time writing.

VR AC offline vintage season.
Just arrived here after completing my "Campionato Classico USA contro Italia" Championship, trying to mix competitive different breeds and optimizing AI lines for each venues. Besides some iterations on beforehand of an appropriate dosed points system.
Cars: 4x5 of Bizzarrini 5300GT, Ferrari 250 GTO Series II, Shelby Cobra 289 Hardtop and Shelby Mustang GT350R (all from the ACL GTC Pack)
Venues: 1960s Daytona RC, 1966 Sebring, Stardust, sixties Laguna Seca, 60s The Glen, 1972 Imola, 1966 Monza, 1934-57 Napoli, 60ies Siracusa and Targa Floria as "Gran Finale", all races scheduled to be ~60-90 mins, some in dynamic weather, some in live weather, some in static heat wave, where it made sense.

It turned into many more lovely sweat trips from efforts and sudden mid-race close battles than I even dared to have dreamed of, maybe with the exception of Daytona and Monza (as expected).

Offline VR - full Targa Florio venue.
The extreme of extremes. And not sure whether I'll ever do that again.
A 1:1 1972 Targa Florio venue (except for the 30 car limit, regrety) as of the 11 full laps myself in the #38 Francesco Cosentino's Ferrari Dino 246 GT against a 29 AI cars reflecting history as close as I was able to.
With preparatory work in ensuring that the Crewchief knew all the legendary pilots' names, so for instance experiencing sudden loud inciterence speak in my ears "BLUE FLAG! VACCARELLA IS GAINING FAST ON YOU!", lapping me in his #5 Alfa Romeo T33/3.
And then a lot of work to make sure I could get a good night's rest without timers in either the AC, Windows or my Quest 2 ruining it for me. Amazingly I could get 4 hours of sleep and come back with nothing going to sleep - but I can't reproduce it now with my Quest 2, I don't know if it came after the update.

1985 Speed King for C64
Sure I had tried arcade racing games up to that point, but this was really special to me. My first private sim racing game and I clearly remember the first laps on Paul Richard. Although very pixelated, the mind automatically takes over to fill the rest of the immersion. And then the special Arcade Joystick (not the ones you can see at retail on the UK and US market, but a far more ergonomic model available at my local market) actually worked superbly well for a MC game with time attacks and races.

1996 Grand Prix 2
New PC, brand new game. Whole new world. A comprehensive setup option that I jumped into first, where the changes had a response on the track. Simulating the AI's fragility with burned engines, suspension failures, punctures, etc. Even though I had raced Grand Prix, this was wild. I can still remember the smell from the room in my project group at uni when I started the game for the first time. Later in the year my very first 'online' competition uploading and checking results files on the Little Formula Racing Series (LFRS) server, it was totally borderline breaking for me for the first time - getting my name out on the big internet with a result. Also a definite "moment" for me.

Online 2003-05 Formula SimracingRacing Series, my first serious online competition, where I actually did better than expected, but I ended up spending so much time on it that it became a stress factor, so I dropped sim racing for a whole year after that , right up until the GTR2 hit the streets.
However, one specific event I remember was from my first six months - again with the upload of qual times and offline full race result files. on the FSR site, pilots were mentioned exactly as they were reports after real races, and I remember my Austria race with regret and that I missed out on being outshined by the more famous sims back then. But just a lesson learned - I simply ran into the wall in the last corner on the 3rd last lap. I then CHOSE to pit with a wobbly car. After the results were in, I would have won if I had just nursed through the last lap. Surely some unfortunes deserve to be forgotten, while others cannot be forgotten

Online
2007 rF1 Nürburgring Nordschleife 2 hour event as part of a series. I got into a national series pretty late and was afraid of ruining it for all the experts. Instead, I ended up running away with the podium top spot. Which surprised me quite. But what I noticed was that it was a huge pleasure for me during all +120 minutes and that I was relaxed all the time and at the checkered flag I just wanted to continue.

2008 Race 07 online event against national real real world racing talents. Although I had built up some confidence by winning several online races up to that point, I ran into human hands. I will never forget that.

And then my all-time multiplayer moment

It was a short story, but all pages filled out.

iRacing 2021 (or maybe 2022, but mostly believe in '21, maybe in '20).
I still get cramps from laughing.
An open mixed levels at Tsukuba, 15 min race with a somewhat "hectic and eager grid" to put it mildly.
A start where I was run off the track and got all the way to the front, but dive bombs from all sides, like it was the season for meteor strikes. So two guys at the front I let fly with a safe distance and nice distance behind to the remains of the horror cabinet of haywire. It was like a "Tyson vs. Holyfield match" between the two, so that one had to dive into the pit on the penultimate lap with severe car damage.
The second guy seemingly by driving style looking for the first guy and immediately at full speed at main straight he turns into the pit at the last moment, hitting the railing, somersaults right into his "playmate".
So there I was - a free bee #1 all of a sudden and just had to cruise it home.
But half way through the last lap, my daughter comes in "Dad, dad!" and pulls hard in one of my hands.
I wasn't in my flexible sim rig, but just clamped my steering wheel to an otherwise solid office desk, but with a rather flimsy rolling office chair. It caused me to fall off the chair, but still on the gas pedal and my by then ~6yo daughter took over the steering wheel for a few secs - and most incredibly I stayed on the track, still with an eager daughter and me in a very strange position, but still with the remeinder of the grid at a safe distance behind me.
But just as I miraculously was ready for cruising home, a large wasp comes in my room and sits right on my left hand. Here I have to admit that things go wrong for me and I do a nice 360° round in my MX-5 and end up in the guardrail, where two competitors manage to pass me, noticing the first was a girl, crossed the finish line still on podium, with both my daughter and I laughing hard.
But since then I've been thinking about whether the winner was Emre. I'm pretty sure the name was 'Emily'/'Emely'. Maybe she can remember it in that case?

Coming home from the Game Wizards in Sydney with a Thrustmaster Wheel and a copy of Rally Championship 2000, Setting that bad boy up on my Pentium 3 with its stupidly expensive Voodoo 3 video card and then dedicating the next 8 months of my life to that game.

Simple, going negative (GPLRank) in Grand Prix Legends.

For me big thing was because you quickly found different cars would suit you better over 11 circuits.

That was the beginning of dynamic sims

=======
I went from 100+ to - 30 in 8 and a half weeks.
+1 to -30 in just a few days by knocking 31 seconds of Nords.
I still recommend do the other 10 tracks first then do Nords and you knock off gobs of time.
Many on GPLRank remarked that was fastest progress they had ever seen.
So yeah best memory

P.S. After that I found I had reached my peak @ -30, at least with plastic mad Katz wheels.
Still today mind boggling for me that records are +60 seconds faster over just 11 circuits.
Aliens

Hmmm, I've yet to relive the sense of involvement or the immersion I had in ICR2 in our CompuServe offline league. Wonderful times.

Also the sense of accomplishment when I finally got the hang of driving GPL (over a year after I was a beta tester, lol).

Pete Conway said:

GTR2 a couple of weeks ago,
Getting to within 2 laps of finishing Lemans 6 hour race, I was hunting down the leader for a few laps getting closer but not close enough, realizing the futility of it I backed off and settled for a well earned second place,
I relaxed the pace a little too much and missed my breaking point at the end of the Mulsanne, only by a few meters so circled in the escape road and fell out of the world... all the while my engineer was saying "what the hell man... he's going the wrong way" (I have the American Engineer sound mod I picked up from no grip years ago)

Click to expand...

Ironically, that probably wouldn't have happened had you not backed off!

Getting my first PC wheel and driving SCGT and GPL. I figured the hobby couldn't get any better than that. But happily, down through the years, the hobby has become better and better. It makes me wonder where we'll be when the same interval of time has passed from today.

Buying and first time using a proper FFB wheel with the Logitech G29 in October 2020 in NR2003, having a crash on lap 1 and the wheel spinning away from my hands. Was my first proper introduction to sim racing and it was amazing.

Mine is very, very old school. Grand Prix 2, 1997. Racing in the GP2 Racing League, where we had to submit results and times (no online racing in those days!) I was leading at Spa, and I took a trip into the gravel on Sector 3 of the final lap in a full race distance 47 lap slog. The 2nd place car overtook me as I tripped and bumped through the gravel trap and I was about to lose the race.

The red mist came down, and I have never driven any car in a sim in such a focused way before or since. I got off the gravel and screamed after the race leader, about 2 seconds behind him. I got him at the Bus Stop and led him over the line to the victory!!

Beating the leagues alien in an rFactor F1 1986 Monza race... Around 2011...

My first real win where I was on pace and not having to rely on luck...

2 different memories in particular come to mind.

First was playing GTR2, simulating the 24hrs of Spa accelerated over 4 hours I think it was. I had just upgraded my PC and could finally run a full field of AI cars and have decent graphics settings. I just remember being so immersed, thinking it was the greatest thing ever. I spun two or three times, messed up my pit strategy, but still ended up with a decent finish and really enjoyed it. Before that I had a tendency to just run quick sprint races but after that I grew to enjoy longer races a lot more.

I also remember back in the very early days of iRacing, I'm thinking 2008, I got to race against Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a Pontiac Solstice race at Laguna Seca lol. I actually had really good pace with that track combo but Dale qualified better than I did. It wasn't a super strong field, I think there were only maybe 10-12 cars and Dale and I were the fastest. He led the majority of the race but I managed to stay within a couple seconds, then with around 2-3 laps to go he made a small mistake and I was able to get by, and held on for the win. He gave me the standard "good race" over text chat and I said something to the effect of "thanks, it was cool getting to race with you". Definitely a nothing special race, but the memory has always stuck. I got to race against a few other professional drivers over the years in iRacing but that race was always the most memorable.

My best experiences were online at the Altbierbude & Pilsbierbude with GTL & GTR2.
Back then, it still had a dual-core processor and a 43-centimeter screen.
Our load cell brake was an old sock behind the brake pedal.
It was a 5-lap race on the old Hockenheimring.
A Altbierbuden member, unfortunately I can't remember his name, and I were in the front row. He was in a BMW CSL 3.5 and I was in my Ford Capri. From the first second, we led the field wheel to wheel.
Sometimes he was in front in the bend, sometimes I was. Fair to the point of nausea.
Everyone gave the other the space they needed. It went back and forth.
In the last lap, it looked as if he would keep his nose in front in his shark. He was the first to turn into the Motodrom, a few car lengths ahead. I must have had the better line, because I caught up, and in the last bend before the start and finish we both went through together. I must have had better traction, because I won by less than a tenth of a second. We chatted for minutes afterwards. Races like that are etched in your memory.
Another time I drove an Abarth 500 at the Altbierstande in Monaco for 35 laps. Qualified poorly but fought my way up to third place. I drove hard but was completely fair. A few laps before the end I noticed that my tires were getting worse and worse, but I thought the lead over fourth place was big enough.
Then, about 3 laps before the end, nothing worked anymore and at the swimming pool the pack overtook me and mercilessly passed me to the back.
Ferrari 550 Maranello in GTR2 in Riverside, another memorable race at the, I think, Pilsbierbude.
I chased the, I think it was the second-placed driver for laps. I was slowly but surely running out of laps. Suddenly, out of the blue, the horse stopped responding to the accelerator and I saw black smoke in the rear-view mirror. Engine failure. Didn't drive out of the slipstream enough to cool the engine.
Another event.
4 Hours of Spa. A league race. Outside the Bierbudenuniverse
For a week, I practiced, practiced, practiced every free minute. Improved the setup. Then came the big day. We drove, I think it was two introductory laps. When the last one was around the hairpin, the go-ahead came. We rushed towards Eau Rouge. I lost the rear of my car and ended up in the tire stack. That was it.
A week of training for a few seconds of racing. I would have loved to throw my G25 out of the window.
That's how a real racing driver must feel.
In all the races that I remember, those are my key moments when you ask yourself why you do all this.
I never had such fair but tough races again when I went online.
Now everyone thinks they're the next world champion and just rams you out of the way if they can't get past.
It sounds like an old white man now, but back then we just wanted to have fun.
It didn't matter if you came first or last. It was more important that we treated each other hard but fairly.
My philosophy was the same then as it is now.
I'd rather drive and fight for 20th place than drive my laps alone and lonely as the first-placed guy.
I want those times back.
The saying still applies.
To finish first you must finish first.

Have a nice weekend and spend it with the people you like

Playing GP2 with a joystick around 1990s Hockenheim yanking back on the joystick and hammering the button to do “F1 downshifts” at the chicanes. Realism peaked at that point for me