Had the final practice tonight at Interlagos.
It’s a pretty crazy track in the F3 and I’ve appreciated this opportunity to really get to know it. My pace has been pretty good, easily within the top ten, which has been great. That said a big change to the MAP Cup this season is to fixed setups.
There has been a push towards this in iRacing as a whole this year and it’s greatly improved things, as it turns out a whole amount of the speed of the “aliens” is down to setup. With everyone running the same settings the deficit to the front has reduced massively and recently I’ve been getting poles in the F3 officials, whereas before I was seconds off the top pace.
This only works because the new iRacing setups are fantastic, they are fast and stable and bespoke for each track. You can really push in them and they tend to understeer on cold tyres which prevents people spinning off, at least as much as they used to. I mean it’s still mostly chaos obviously.
This has really closed up the field in an impressive way, especially in the MAP races. The fastest guys are still at the front but the field spread is so tight now, whereas before there would be two or three seconds between first and twentieth tonight there was about eight tenths of a second. Of course this means that a great lap can be the difference between starting 17th and starting 5th. I’m good a qualifying on cold tyres with the fixed setup so I’m hopeful for a good result. Of course with 45 cars on the grid things tend to get a little hectic.
Things have changed slightly this year, the first non-reverse grid race will be longer, followed by the two reverse grid races as usual. The fun cup will still be run but will not be broadcast, which I think is good as while it’s intended as a fun way to blow off steam at the end of the week it did not present itself as too professional.
Anyway, kick off is at 8PM tomorrow. Let’s put it this way, I almost won one of the practice races earlier, except for a tiny mistake. Maybe I won’t embarrass my ancestors this time.