iRacing Update for 24 Hours of Daytona

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDpY92HclOg[/youtube]

Tony Gardner announced an iRacing update for the 24 Hours of Daytona that will take place this weekend ! I think it’s a welcome addition to endurance racing and adds another element that we see in real life.

Here’s what he posted in the iRacing forums two days ago:

Most things centered around 24 hour race on Saturday.

• We are making an update to the fuel economies on the Ford GT GT3 and the Ruf Track Cars. We increased fuel usage (reduced mpg) 4.5% on the Ford GT GT3 and 1.4% on the Ruf. We based calculations on testing that was done by Alpha Testers. Our goal was to have all the cars make around 31 laps per tank of fuel.

• The HPD getting more rear differential ratio options

• Fixed several bugs

• We are working on having the pit crew replace parts that are too damaged to repair, instead of simply ending your race with a disqualification for being too damaged. Replacing a part will generally take a fairly long amount of time (particularly if multiple parts are badly damaged), so in short races you may not be able to get your car fixed before the race is over. For instance, swapping in a fresh engine can take just over 30 minutes, and replacing the suspension on a corner of the car will take just over 8 minutes. We only will be focused on cars that will be in the Daytona 24 hour race for this build as we do not have enough time to test every car but in the future we will include all cars.

• Our plan is for a Thursday Build. Release notes will be coming with build but we wanted to give a heads up on a few things.

When I went to log in this morning, I came across this..

They did it !  Here’s the full build release notes !

General Simulation

– Improved the synchronization between the session time maintained on the server and the equivalent time maintained on the client. This is likely to greatly reduce the occurrence of missing split times.

– Fixed a bug in practice and testing sessions where your first timed lap after leaving the pits after resetting the car would not be scored when it should have been.

– Removed a blocking point between the game’s simulation component and its drawing component. This might have a minor impact on either the overall frame rate, or the consistency of the frame rate.

Team Endurance Races

– Fixed a bug that was causing the graphical driver models that appear in cars that are on track to (mostly) disappear after about 23:18 into a session.

– Fixed a bug that caused incorrect determination of which drivers on a team met the requirements under the “drive fair share” rule if the race session had only a time limit, and not also a lap limit.

– Fixed a bug that could cause a team to be limited to having only 5 members concurrently connected to a session, instead of the proper limit of 6 members.

– Made a couple of changes to the race server code that will improve the performance of the server when large numbers of people are in the session, and might reduce the big time-skew/wink-out/clock-smash that occurs once the final competitor finishes the race.

Towing

– During a race if you call for a tow while in your pit lane and near to your stall (such as if you get out of your car without quite having parked correctly in your pit stall), we now allow the pit crew to “push your car” into the pit stall if you’re not too far away, more quickly than a regular tow. It will still appear to be a tow, you don’t actually see the pitcrew doing anything, but the tow timing is much quicker.

BMW Z4 GT3 , McLaren MP4-12C GT3 and Ruf RT 12R Track

– Fixed bugs that could cause the pit stop to continue indefinitely. One pitstop stall would occur by turning the tire change requests off while the fuel guy was adding fuel but before the tire guys began to replace the tires. The other pitstop stall would occur if you had a fuel leak.

All of the following cars (BMW Z4 GT3 , McLaren MP4-12C GT3, Chevrolet Corvette C6.R GT1, Ford GT, Ford GT GT3, HPD ARX-01c, Riley MkXX Daytona Prototype, Ruf RT 12R C-Spec, Ruf RT 12R Track)  received this update

– The pitcrew can now replace parts that are damaged beyond repair, instead of simply ending your race with a disqualification for being too damaged. Replacing a part will generally take a fairly long amount of time (particularly if multiple parts are badly damaged), so in short races you may not be able to get your car fixed before the race is over. For instance, swapping in a fresh engine can take just over 30 minutes, and replacing the suspension on a corner of the car will take just over 8 minutes.

HPD ARX-01c

– Added an additional three final drive ratios to choose from.

McLaren MP4-12C GT3

– Added an additional taller final drive ratio.

Ruf RT 12R Track

– Updated fuel use to better equalize green flag ranges amongst the four GT3 cars. This car has increased fuel consumption by 1.3%.

Pretty cool stuff !  Will you be running in the 24 Hours of Daytona this weekend ?  I will be representing Inside Sim Racing with our lead blogger John Sabol and Brazilian brothers Bruno do Carmo and Fabio do Carmo. We’ll be running in the GT3 class in the BMW Z4.

Here’s a recent post on the iRacing members home page about the race.

The iRacing 24 Hours of Daytona is scheduled to get underway at 13:00 GMT (8am EST) on January 31. The opening round of the 2015 Road Warrior Series, the race will utilize the driver swap/team feature that enables two or more sim racers to drive the same car and/or assume various roles such as spotter, crew chief and team manager.

The event will be a multi-class race for prototypes (HPD-ARX01C) and GT3 (BMW Z4, Ford GT, McLaren MP4-12C and RUF Track) and is open to all iRacers with a road license level of D 4.0 or higher.

The top split will be broadcast by RaceSpot as part of its coverage of Road Warriors Series endurance events that will also include the 12 Hours of Sebring and the Bathurst 1000.