GRM Holiday iRacing Series Returns With a Live Race Broadcast Special

Looking for some excitement during the week between Christmas and New Year's? Escape your family and hit the virtual track with GRM, as our Holiday iRacing series returns December 28, 29 and 30. The race on the 30^th will be broadcast live on our YouTube and Facebook outlets by our friends at SYM TV, who now list multiple-time amateur …

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Oooo, special guests.

David S. Wallens said:

Oooo, special guests.

Editorial Director, Grassroots Motorsports & Classic Motorsports

It's like the Kenny Rogers Christmas Special. You never know who will be knocking on the door next.

Dolly Parton!?

JG said
 

Damage will be switched off for this race. We do this to keep people on track and having fun, not so you can take advantage of it by turning your car into an unstoppable killdozer. Please drive respectfully.

I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I think it would be better accomplished by leaving damage on and giving each driver a large number of ‘fast repairs’ for the race. With damage off even a huge crash at Turn 1 will cost you only a few seconds. This means the ‘slow and steady’ approach cannot really be an effective strategy and forces anyone hoping to do well to be very aggressive. With damage on the penalty for wrecking is larger because you have to get back to the pits to fix it, but everybody can still enjoy the rest of the race because the ‘fast repair’ will give you a fresh car.

CrashDummy said:

JG said
 

Damage will be switched off for this race. We do this to keep people on track and having fun, not so you can take advantage of it by turning your car into an unstoppable killdozer. Please drive respectfully.

I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I think it would be better accomplished by leaving damage on and giving each driver a large number of ‘fast repairs’ for the race. With damage off even a huge crash at Turn 1 will cost you only a few seconds. This means the ‘slow and steady’ approach cannot really be an effective strategy and forces anyone hoping to do well to be very aggressive. With damage on the penalty for wrecking is larger because you have to get back to the pits to fix it, but everybody can still enjoy the rest of the race because the ‘fast repair’ will give you a fresh car.

I hear you, but so far what we've seen is that people have not been abusing the system and rather than driving super aggressively, they've been using the zero-damage model to not have small mistakes put them at a huge deficit. I fully agree thatthe system is easy to exploit, but so far it hasn't been an issue. I don't expect that to last forever, though. As soon as we start getting a lot of banzai re-entries or overly physical racing, the party is over.

Heard through the grapevine that the Discord invite that was originally posted with this story was expired. I generated a new one and took the time limit off, and we replaced it in the story, so the current link in there now works fine.

Thanks for setting this up! I had decent pace, qualifying 13/24 in GT1 with my Corvette. Inexperience with the starting procedures (the short roll followed by an immediate green when I was expecting a partial pace lap) resulted in a missed shift and an immediate spin. Inexperience with these cars resulted in a botched pit strategy; I had no idea it took so long to change tires (I assumed it would be concurrent with fueling). Ended up where I started; 13th in class (26/42 overall). Could have been maybe 10th in GT1 but I learned for next time. At least I never got lapped by Tom!