Tag: eNASCAR

Steven Wilson emerged from the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series Championship Four to claim his first eNASCAR title, the $100,000 grand prize, and the Dale Earnhardt Jr. trophy.

With a large contingency of family members who drove from Iowa City, Iowa, in attendance to cheer him on for the final, held at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., Wilson of Stewart-Haas eSports dominated the final race of the season, run on the virtual Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Alongside Wilson on stage at the NASCAR Hall of Fame were fellow Championship Four contenders Tucker Minter, Nick Ottinger, and Garrett Lowe. Rather fittingly for Wilson, the only driver of the four to not clinch a spot in Charlotte by virtue of a victory, claimed the title without doing so either.

After starting on the outside of row one, Wilson spent much of the race following in the wheel tracks of his backend teammate and good friend, Donovan Strauss. Wilson’s nearest competition at the drop of the green flag was Minter who started in 15th, giving Wilson a comfortable cushion to begin the 100-lap race. Strauss led all 100 laps en route to victory but the focus of the evening was on the Championship Four.

Contrary to the trend of the season, the finale from Homestead-Miami was interrupted by just two caution flags that arose in quick succession near the race’s midway point. The latter yellow set up a 45-lap green flag run that would take the field of drivers to the season’s conclusion.

With Lowe and Ottinger mired deeper in the pack after starting 24th and 31st respectively, they rarely featured in the conversation as Minter and Wilson became the focus of the night. Minter rose to as high as third in the final run, with the bumper of Wilson placed squarely in his sights. The pace of Wilson proved to be too much of a hill to climb for Minter who, having used his tires in pursuit, began to drop back with inside 20 laps to run.

This time, the late caution flag never arrived and Wilson, behind Strauss, cruised to a second-place finish that netted him the title.

“It sounds unbelievable — I can’t believe I’m in this situation,” Wilson said. “I’ve got to thank everyone at Stewart-Haas, everybody at Smithfield, and everyone here to support me. All the family and friends who came out, they’re unbelievable. I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without them so just thank you so much.”

The first people on stage to congratulate Wilson were his mother and father, along with his extended family. All wearing matching t-shirts, they sat anxiously in the front row as the laps began to wind down. They, and Wilson, had been in that spot a year prior when Wilson came up short of Casey Kirwan in the inaugural edition of a live Championship Four at the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

“You got to have lows to have highs, it’s just happy to have this one,” Wilson said.

Wilson’s coronation marks the fifth straight eNASCAR season with a new champion. Only Ottinger, the 2020 titlist, was in a position to break that streak but he ended the race in 13th. Minter was looking to become the first rookie, besides Richard Towler in the inaugural season of 2010, to win the title but he finished in seventh. A Hail Mary strategy call from Lowe, who had little to lose, netted him a 35th-place result.

Off the back of strong performances from its rookie pairing, Team Dillon eSports claimed the team’s championship with the work of Minter and Jordy Lopez Jr. Both drivers finished the season in the top five.

The bottom 20 drivers in the points standings will have to re-earn their spot in the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series. Zack Novak, the 2019 champion, was the biggest name to miss the cut-off, setting up a stressful off-season. The series’ 2021 champion Keegan Leahy narrowly avoided relegation with his finish of 20th.

The eNASCAR Road to Pro Contender Series, where the top 20 drivers will earn a spot in next year’s eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series, begins later this fall.

Garrett Lowe became the first driver to punch their ticket to the Championship Four round of the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series playoffs last week after winning at the virtual Michigan International Speedway.

With two more races before he and three other drivers fight for the title at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Lowe will turn his attention to finding speed at Homestead-Miami Speedway, a track that he’s struggled with in the past. By clinching a spot in his first opportunity, it turns a two-week period of preparation into one that stretches over a month.

“Going into the night, we had already started preparing a little bit for at least Dover, just because like I said, we’re on a two-week turnaround and playoffs is quite a grind,” Lowe said. “We’ve been trying to be prepared at least a little bit for every track and then just work really hard when we get to each one.

“For me… I don’t need to turn 1,500 or 2,000 laps at Dover to be competitive, because I don’t need to be. It’s not going to be the normal playoff grind of turning 2,000 laps for one race,” Lowe explained.

Able to now look past Dover Motor Speedway and Phoenix Raceway, Lowe’s attention will turn to Homestead where he’s still searching for how to get better.

“I’ve raced there probably three or four times and I think the best I’ve ever finished is fourth. Which is not to say that was a terrible race, but I just think the car was capable of more. Ever since they touched up the artwork, I have just been junk at that track so I’ve got to figure that out.

“I think I’ll get it figured out now that I have time but when you’re in a two-week stretch of just back-to-back, you’ve got to get ready for races, it’s hard to sit down and really learn a track from scratch,” Lowe said.

After crossing the line at Michigan, Lowe’s first reaction was one of relief. Relief that he would have the time to prepare for Homestead and relief that he wouldn’t have to fight for his spot on two of the calendar’s more difficult short tracks.

“The first thought is a lot of relief. You’re like, ‘Thank goodness, I don’t have to go to Dover and run good.’ It’s a relief at first and it’s extremely exciting because not only am I going to try for a championship, but I just won another race and I’ve had probably the best stretch of my career so far… The next step is as soon as you sit down and kind of collect your thoughts, you’re like, ‘Man, OK, we have a lot of work to do if we’re going to win this championship.’ So already turning the page is the next emotion.”

After sending the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series to a European track for the first time last week, iRacing opted for another first at the virtual Talladega Superspeedway on Tuesday night: giving everyone the same car setup. It’s the potential first step down a road that eRacr’s Collin Bowden hopes leads to more racing and less science at the highest level of sim racing.

Referred to in iRacing as fixed setups, drivers are unable to make any significant changes to the car’s setup, with restrictions commonly rigid enough to block even minor changes like brake bias. Combining a fixed setup with a superspeedway meant the 40-car field was closer than it ever had been — a fact that was reinforced in qualifying when five drivers set identical lap times.

For third-place finisher Bowden, the fixed setups were a welcome sight. The Virginia native hopes that the series considers more races with fixed setups and even finds a way to limit the amount of practice that drivers can do.

“From my perspective, I wouldn’t mind seeing fixed setups solely for the fact that a lot of the people on this game, they can put hours and hours into practicing or running laps,” Bowden said. “I just don’t have that time with working full time and racing on the weekends. Then when I turn on iRacing, I don’t want to just practice all the time, I want to be able to race and have fun — practice ain’t no fun!”

While fixed setups may be a step in the right direction, Bowden believes limiting practice could be an even bigger influence on the series. Limiting such activity would be a monumental order as drivers can simply hide their activity behind the guise of different accounts.

“You can’t monitor us being on our accounts, because then we just get another account and just bounce around. If there was a way we didn’t have to run lap after lap, every day, and you could stop people from doing that, I really feel like that would better the product.

“It’s kind of like the real world — once you science everything out, everyone knows what’s going to happen,” he Bowden noted. “If you limit the practice, you don’t know, ‘Hey man, do I need to go hard right away or can I lay back and save tires?’ I think the racing would be better because it wouldn’t be so scienced-out with everything,”

Bowden suggested a middle ground where a selection of setups are available to drivers and each competitor picks the one that fits them.

“I feel like if they went to a fixed setup, I would like the option of a few fixed sets. Maybe I like racing a loose set at this racetrack or a tight set. I don’t know if you can make both run the same lap time at a certain lap, like lap 30, but if you could say, ‘Hey, I want to drive a tight setup or I want to drive a loose setup,’ give me the option to race those fixed setups, don’t just give me a fixed set that might not fit my driving style.”