This and That!

This month’s column is about membership communications and more Sim Racing.

With our website and social media being our primary communications vehicles to the membership, you will see much more content than you used to find in the NOR’EASTER appearing on porschenet.com. To ensure that there is a steady and interesting flow of content there we have established a formal submission and publication process. In addition to the regular contributors, we would love to hear more from any members that have something interesting to share, like a trip report, or your experience from your first DE, Autocross or Rally, the new or old Porsche that you just bought, or anything else that you would like to share with the rest of us.

Submissions should preferably be in Microsoft Word format and emailed to [email protected] with any pictures attached. The pictures should be in the highest possible resolution you can provide. Once we receive the email, we run the text through Grammarly to fix any punctuation, spelling, or grammatical errors, but we do make sure that your writing style is preserved. It is also categorized and tagged in order to make it easy to locate in the future. After that is done, it is sent to our web team, who add the content to the website and schedule it for publication. New content is summarized on the front page. Then, on a weekly basis, we send an email to all members summarizing and linking to all new content published after the previous email and a calendar for the current and following month to ensure that you don’t miss anything interesting. Any questions or comments you may have for us should also be emailed to [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

The summer Sim Racing race series and both the regional and national levels are wrapping up, and the fall race series are about to start. This is a good time to jump in and join the fray. We have loaner equipment that we let members take home to get a taste of Sim Racing with minimal investment. If you are interested, send an email to [email protected].

At the regional level, the next series will be racing Porsches on a weekly basis. Race evening is Tuesdays at 8 PM and lasts about two hours with practice, qualification and races. We have a friendly, welcoming, and fun group and work hard to keep it this way. We also invest a lot of effort in bringing new racers up to speed with advice and practice races. To learn more, join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/810156892838722

At the National level, we will be racing the Porsche GT3 R, a sweet car, in an 8-week series. National also works hard to be accommodating to newcomers and has programs targeted towards bringing them up to speed and into the races. They have divided the races into four classes, Challenge, Sport, Club, and Pro, according to the driver’s abilities, so you will race against drivers with similar skills. The next series, number 7, will be published soon on the National Sim Racing League’s website pcasimracing.com. The website has a wealth of information about what Sim Racing is, how to join, and much more, so head over there and take a look.

At the National level, December, January, and February are dedicated to races between the PCA Zones. They have been organized into five groups that each will run their own races in December and January to select the top 8 drivers in each class for each Zone Group. These 32 drivers will participate in a series of three races in January that will crown the Zone group and individual winners within each class.

While we wait for Series 7 to begin, there will be an exciting two-race series between International Porsche club teams. The races will be broadcasted on YouTube and will take place (virtually) at Road Atlanta on September 11th and Spa Francorchamps (no rain!) on September 18th. It will feature the best Sim Racers in the PCA and is guaranteed to be exciting. When I know the exact times and have the URLs to connect to, I will let you know.

Finally, a few comments about myself and Sim Racing: the series that just completed was organized by the West Coast Zones in PCA and featured the Porsche GT3 R in 8 venues. 7 were road races, and one was an oval race at Indianapolis Speedway. To do well in these races, requirement one was to participate. To increase your chances of placing well, you also had to finish well in at least 7 of the eight races. To do that, you had to avoid incidents (crashing, getting penalized for violating racing rules, spinning or running off the track), and finally, you had to have a decent pace. Good pace with incidents leads to worse results than slower pace and fewer incidents. It also requires a huge amount of self-control. It is easy to increase speed when you are anxious to pass a slower driver or when a faster driver is on your rear bumper, but increased speed also increases the risk of incidents, so the best strategy is not to let the adrenalin surge take control and lead you into trouble. I have worked on this for two years now, and it finally came together in this series, and I placed much higher in the rankings than I expected.

It was a good thing that only 8 out of 7 races counted. My performance on the oval was embarrassing. I was involved in multiple crashes (but didn’t cause any) and was black-flagged multiple times for infracting rules that I didn’t quite understand. It was fun but very much a learning experience. If you are interested in seeing a 10 minute summary of the race, check out https://youtu.be/cU1VilIrWsU  for a 10-minute video or https://youtu.be/lmr3GXoHO08 for a 30 minute video.

Anker