SSZ: iRacing IMSA Open Series Update No.4

Hello, and welcome back to another edition of Steve’s SimRacing Zone! Today I’ll be updating my progress once again for the 2024 Season 4 IMSA Open Series Championship in the LMP2 class.

This week we headed to Zolder (alt layout). I really enjoy this track and have some pretty good pace there, especially in the wet where…again….is the forecasted at 26%. iRacing really loves the wet, eh?

I decided to do the very first race session of the week. It was unfortunately only one lobby, so a bunch of slow GTP drivers were in it. Fortunately the odds left us with a bone dry race. I don’t think it’ll be wet for my next races.

I messed up my good qualifying lap that would have put me very close to, if not on pole. However, my banker lap was still good enough for 2nd.

The start was chaotic to say the least. The LMP2 pole sitter decided to go early so we had to slow down for the GTP cars on the front straight before the first corner….this is very bad. Normally we give a gap so when the inevitable first lap GTP crash happens, we don’t get caught up in it.

Well guess what? It happened and took out almost the entire GTP field and somehow me and P1 managed to get through it unfazed and proceeded to have a good battle. I got held up by lap down GTP and LMP2 traffic, so ended up in 2nd at the end. A solid 141 points and a good way to start the week. AND! This race put me over 3000 iRating for the first time!

2nd race didn’t go so well. I got pole with my personal best lap of the week, but the race was full of incidents. I had to avoid a GTP car on lap 1 and although I missed them, I jerked the wheel a little too hard and almost spun the car, and brushed the wall slightly for some damage. Another few laps later passing GT traffic for the first time, a GT car pit maneuvered themselves off me, which caused even more damage. I pitted early to repair, as I was faster and would also benefit from the cleaner air.

However, I spun on my outlap on cold tires, and never fully recovered from that after. I also got too many incident points and thus finished 5th despite finishing behind P2 by a car length. It was a race I shouldn’t have raced in, as the winner only got 118 points, so if I had won, it wouldn’t have counted for the week’s results anyway.

Since Monday was a holiday in Canada, I was able to do my final race of the week around lunch time, since the Europeans were yielding higher SoF (more points on the table). I got into a pretty decently high SoF, but not as many entries as it was split into 2 lobbies.

I qualified P2 with my best lap of the week, 0.3s off pole. The race started and I didn’t time it right to the pole sitter, so P3 got ahead early and I was chasing him down. We got held up by 2 really slow GTP cars, and temporarily allowed P4 to get around me, but I managed to pass him and the slow GTP cars in short order. It only took me a handful of laps to catch back up to P2 but it was going to prove difficult to pass them.

Thus I decided to make a calculated strategy call to pit early and try to undercut, since I had the pace. This would only work if I didn’t encounter a lot of traffic. Fortunately that was the case, having NONE for 10 laps or so and pumping in best lap times during that span. What was a P3 turned into a P2 with a 5s gap after everyone had pitted. P1 was in another area code, even with a spin at the first chicane.

P2 was all I could muster, and got 142 points (1 more than last Monday’s race, but I’ll take it nonetheless). This put me up into P5 overall with a healthy lead to P2 in Division 2.

This coming week the iRacing IMSA series races at Road Atlanta, which I will use as preparation for the Petit Le Mans this coming Saturday, so stay tuned for that! Should be fun!

Here are my full season stats below (As of Oct/13/2024 8pm EST (end of Week 5 of 13):

Races Completed:	14
Pole Positions:	3
Class Wins:	4
Class Podiums:	8
Top 5 Finishes:	9
Championship Points:	719
Championship Position (All Divisions):	5th
Championship Position (Division #2):	1st

Here is the tracker for my counted results from each week (Pos / Points):

Week #	Split / Position Finished:	Points Awarded:
1	Split 2 / P1	137
2	Split 1 / P1	137
3	Split 1 / P2	159
4	Split 1 / P4	144
5	Split 1 / P2	142
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