My real-life racing hiatus has given me the time and motivation to do a lot of sim racing. I'm happy to say I'm starting to see the reps add up to improvements in pace, consistency, and racecraft, but that is outside of the point of today's article.

In one of the iRacing-related Discord servers that I'm a part of, I was recently posed a question in response to this message I sent:

Thomas: people care way too much about right and wrong, rather than just surviving out there
Frans: I think you, @Thomas, are a great example of how to drive and avoid trouble (respect), and I agree that's what it takes to raise IR and SR in officials. Do you feel like you can race league competitors harder than you do in officials, and if so, do you enjoy that more than just driving to survive?

Never one to shy away from giving questionable-but-well-intentioned advice, my reply maxed out the Discord character limitation, so I thought this could be the basis of an article! It's a bit rambling and wandering, but I think it covers some important points. My reply is below, with mild editing for clarity.

"I appreciate that, but I still get upset and needlessly cause drama more often than I care to admit. It's something I’m working on.

For myself, racing like my iRating depends on it means that I won’t let simple things go. That could mean forcing moves, driving too defensively at the cost of losing the pack, letting someone turn themselves off my nose, or not allowing an erratic driver that REALLY wants to pass me to just go. All are examples where I feel like I’m in the right, but I’m not thinking big picture. To win, first you have to finish, and all that.

Leagues are not much different than officials. You realize pretty quickly who you can trust and who needs extra care. To give an example, I’ve really never seen @Brian put one foot wrong in a race, and when I can, I’ll go door to door with him endlessly with confidence. But there are other guys I encounter week after week that are similarly paced, but I don’t trust them. I simply enjoy leagues more than official races because there’s usually greater depth of talent and a longer-term rapport is built.

After an incident, the biggest thing that helps me is to calm down and review the replay from multiple angles. It ends up being easy to tell the role that I played in the incident. Even if it was a freak thing, you still learn patterns and avoidance techniques. Most of the time, after review, you realize things didn’t happen exactly like you thought they did in the moment.

I’m still at a level where I might be fighting for a win, or I might be P15. It’s important not to let your ego pick battles just because you feel like you're entitled to be further up the field.

In leagues, officials, or even real life, unavoidable crap happens from time to time. But the choices we make, even when we feel justified, can play into what we feel like is an offense against us. At the end of the day, it takes two to race and two to have an accident. Might as well give someone the benefit of the doubt and live to fight another battle, even if that means losing the pack or the position."

There are two additional points I'd like to make in addition to the reply above, and they are:

1) Unequal Information

You might be like me and have triple monitors with a 192° horizontal field of view, or you might race in Virtual Reality and be really good about checking your periphery. That doesn't mean the person you are racing against has the same visual information available to them, or even, if they do, that they have the mental bandwidth to process it accurately.

There's a non-trivial number of racers that compete on single monitors and ultra-wides. They might have as little as 1/3 the peripheral vision that you have. It is always worth keeping this in mind when you are going side-by-side with another car, even if it is not a vortex of danger move.

2) You Don't Know Jack

Unless this is a league race and you have built long-standing trust and rapport with the other driver, then chances are, you have never encountered them before. They don't know you, and you don't know them.

If you're reading this, chances are you race in real life more than you sim race, and you're used to racing against the same drivers week in and week out. Your race group learns about each other's driving styles and can race cleanly as a result.

The stranger you're about to battle doesn't know whether you're a national champion or a rookie on a provisional license. They don't know whether you're a one-lap wonder that qualifies well but has no racecraft, or whether you're a notoriously bad qualifier that gains a lot of positions due to superior racecraft.

Concluding Thoughts

It's important to differentiate between being right and surviving. I'm not saying there isn't a time and place to attempt risky decision-making. What it comes down to, ultimately, is what are you going to allow yourself to be upset about? Will you be mad that someone dive-bombed and crashed you out, even though you saw them in your mirror and could have chosen to avoid it? Or will you be madder that you lost one or two positions in the interest of self-preservation, and finished the race safely?

The difference might be losing 12 positions (crashing out; the former) or losing 2 positions (getting passed; the latter). I know which I'd choose.

Being a veteran racer doesn't automatically make you great at the video game that is sim racing. In the absence of G-forces, seat-of-the-pants feel, directional sound, peripheral vision, and physical and monetary consequences for our actions, we race differently in the sim than we do in real life. The sooner that we come to terms with that, and leave our egos at the door, the better time we'll have sim racing.