2023 Season Grand Prix Megathread

Buckle up, @TotosHeadphones and don't you dare ghost on this community at the end of the summer break now that you got me cooking and stitching these silly screenshots on paint.net, ok? Do we have ourselves a deal? If you disband from this flock again, I'll make it my life's mission to track your family down and introduce all of your offspring to this incredibly cheap and not-at-all time-consuming hobby of Magic The Gathering.

You've been warned 🫶

Here's the telemetry comparison for my recorded laps at Zandvoort. It's an outdated model of the track, prior to the F1 revamp and reprofile it got – but the rescan is already baking on iRacing's oven and will be released sometime this year already.

You can have this track guide to base yourself and get a general feel for the track. Please note that there are chapters in the video, don't go about wasting your time watching it from nil!

The side-by-side comparison of the most important braking events. Red is for my weekend's lap with the DD wheel and LC pedals, and Blue is for my Logitech G923 lap from May. The laptimes were respectively 1:55.590 and 1:56.614 so -1.024s. You'll notice how hard it is to modulate the brake pressure on these potentiometer pedals. I'm not a good driver by any means and there are a bazillion Logitech G29/G923 users that will still smoke me out of the water with their base kit, but it's all about one's journey, isn't it?

As a quick recap, potentiometers don't give a damn for how hard you press the pedal, just for how much you make it move. Load cells on the other hand will measure how hard you're pressing them, regardless of how much movement you act on the pedal.

The mind and body connection is way more fluid and intuitive when you base it on force. When not looking at my foot, I'll be way more consistent applying say 40kgf to a break pedal instead of making it move around 2cm. That's the gist of it.

The forum will most likely miniaturize the image, so right click on it and open on a new tab. Or download it from the attached files.

I asked you about MoTec because if you had it I'd just share my telemetry files with you so that you could analyze them as you please. The rendering above is from a free service, Garage61, that I strongly recommend. The link will probably lead you nowhere unless you have an account on their website, but I'm pretty sure my telemetry is public so anyone can access them. It's iRacing exclusive, but there are alternatives for ACC. Pinging @Monzstar83 as well as I know he digs a little data.

For my routine, it helps immensely that iRacing is quite generous with their data and we've got third-party services like this one, where I can get the average qualifying lap, fastest lap, and race pace/average race lap for the many performance brackets there are.

By performance brackets I mean iRating. iRacing has two trackers for every individual driver:

• Safety Rating – SR: A rolling average of your number of incidents by corner. An off-track equals 1 incident point or 1x, a loss of control is a 2x, a light contact with another car is a 0x but if it is strong enough to disrupt your or their driving it mounts to a 4x, etc. Get that number divided by the a set number of corners and another weighing factor and you get one's SR. The SR will inform the many license classes there are (Rookie, D, C, B, A, and Pro), which will gatekeep you from driving certain cars, cups, or events.
• iRating - IR: It's an ELO based performance system much like chess... or League of Legends 🤷. It's the utmost matchmaking parameter as all drivers registered to a given event are divided in splits according to their IR. So if 56 drivers register to race at Zandvoort in the GR86 cup at 9h15pm, there will be 3 splits of 19+19+18 drivers bunched up by IR, with the top split being populated by the top drivers and so on. Those splits are basically race sessions that take place simultaneously. 

In the website above as you can see, we can select a cup, a week (every Monday iRacing opens a new week, with a pre-assigned track for every category), and then find those lap times based on the IR.

You can easily google bell curves for IR distribution across the whole player base, but generally speaking an IR of 2k is considered the big divider. Max Verstappen has a ridiculous preposterous IR of 9347 on his main account plus an IR of 8308 on his fater Jos' account – yeah, Max uses both haha

Just to give you an idea:

That's utterly ridiculous and just goes to show how much of a generational alien Max is. He dominates motorsport everywhere he goes. Don't tell Nico I said that 🫢

Anyway, I use that service to get a few benchmarks, and note them down on this pretty app, Notion. It's a multiplataform note taking and collab tool. Mine looks like this:

Below that I have a track map with corner numbers and names, as well as a track guide with my personal notes for:

G#: gear number at the apex

BM: Braking marker, my reference to establish my braking point. Oh how I wish these would always coincide with the distance boards at the side of the track 😂 

BP: Braking pressure and technique

CE: Notes on corner entry

CX: Notes on corner exit

I've converted two of my track notes to illustrate. Here (Brands Hatch with the GR86) and here (Jerez with the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup). It's on Google Drive. Looks time consuming and it was at first, but Notion is sleek and I've got a template that will quickly generate all the relevant fields 🦾

It usually takes anywhere between 5-8h for me to get competitive on a new track and car combo. I could obviously set for less and jump in after 2-3h with no racing line and such, but my ego would snap at me if I'm no good to at least fight for a top 5 finish haha

Those personal notes pay dividends though. When getting back to a track I've already competed in, in 15 minutes of track time I'm back up to speed and can rapidly test my personal best again.

Races are basically hourly, 24/7. But it's tough to squeeze that preparation in on a busy week, so I don't always find the time to compete.

My favorite classes for far are the GR86 cup, the GT4/LMP3 multiclass, and the Porsche Cup with the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car – similar to the GT3 R but with no electronic aids 💞. There are many, many series with all sorts of cars, including open-wheelers, but driving standards for the lower IR splits are horrendous so I keep a wide berth from them – even though the FF1600, the Dallara F3 and the F4 cars are all delightful to drive.