Our first race using Patrick's new race utility would be the 24 Hours of L2R. Finally, a chance to actually race in a team running a 24 hour endurance race! Some people would call it punishment but to those of us who love this type of racing, it was a dream we wanted to live through for years. After the SimHQ 24 hour race calamity in 2006, then the cancellation of the SSCA 24 hour race on the Le Mans track in 2008, the team was more than ready. Third time around would indeed be a charm.
We had a great mod and track to work with for the event.
Back in 2006, Jens "McGonigle" Lindblad did a write-up on the LM70 mod for GTR. In rFactor, while the Sports Car Challenge, Série Internationale Du Mans and the Endurance Series mods have proved to be highly popular for modern endurance car racing, most endurance racers who are historic racing fans were waiting on the 1970 World Sports Car Championship mod by CSGT. It includes 48 of the 1970 Le Mans entries from Sports 5000, Prototype 3000, Sports 2000, Grand Touring 5000, and Grand Touring 2000 classes. In June 2009, version 1.00 of the mod was released. It is the Sports 5000 and Prototype 3000 cars that L2R based their 24 hour event on.
There have been multiple versions of the Le Mans track produced with varying degrees of accuracy and visual appeal, but there is none better than the famed Virtua LMs “Le Mans ’79”. Arguably, it is the very best rFactor track ever produced by anyone. If not the very best, it is in a very small, select group.
I asked Joe Keefe to once again use his mastery at creating a driving schedule for our team. As you can see below it is a quite involved process to develop. Purple indicates the driver is available but not scheduled for the stint; blue means the driver is scheduled for that stint; red means the driver is not available for the stint. Now consider the drivers — Ahmad (Australia); Dan "DBR9" Bailey (Great Britain); Ben "LazyC" Holt (Denmark) and Dan "Chipwich" Blake (USA) — all had to sync their schedules across multiple continents and time zones. I will tell you everyone was right-on-time thanks to each driver showing their seriousness towards the event, and because of Joe's excellent driving schedule. Thanks again, Joe!
Driver Schedule for Team SimHQ Motorsports.
Rather than go through a race report here, you should read the Team SimHQ Motorsports thread on the event in the SimHQ Motorsports Forums. Several of the reports were updates as the race was in progress, and you get a real sense of how it was going hour-by-hour.
And how it was going was a real emotional roller coaster ride. All was not wonderful with linear progress during the race and at times we wondered if our previous bad racing luck was carrying over to this race. Between discos and crashes, we crested and fell several times. But each time we came charging back. Special mention must be made to Ahmad who was even faster than his usual fast. Ultimately, tenacity paid-off with a 7th place overall finish.
Progress in the L2R 24 hour event.
Now the point is, without L2RES, we would never have seen the opportunity for such suspense. Indeed, it would have proved to be the previous disco then exit as usual.
Hats off to "PatrickA" and L2RES. Until we get the problem solved in rFactor (maybe in rFactor 2, Gjon?) we can now race long races without fear of a sudden disconnection permanently ending our efforts.
Overall race winner and Sports 5000 class winner was car #12 from Team Nexus 6.
Car #24 from KiwiSimRacing was the Prototype 3000 class winner.
Race Screenshots
Click here to open the Flash slideshow from the event. There are 240 screenshots spanning the entire race. I will confess that car #9 appears in a disproportionate number of screenshots. ;)
Race Video
Below is my video of the event. It is taken from 24 hours of recorded track time, and reduced to YouTube's criteria of 10 minutes and 100 MB maximum. It was especially difficult to capture the transition of the daylight to dark within the 10 minute allotment! If you are interested in receiving a DVD of the original HD 2 GB avi file, please email me. You can read more production details about the video at SimHQ's YouTube Channel.
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