Just after the sun’s risen on the second day of a 24 hour race comes what’s known as happy hour. It’s when the track’s at its best as some warmth returns to the tarmac after the chill of the night, and when lap times begin to tumble. It’s when endurance racing presents its most picturesque side, the morning light capturing the bumps and bruises upon the cars that remain, a gentle mist rising from the trackside verges. For the drivers and teams, just having survived through the night of one of motorsport’s greatest challenges is reason enough for good cheer.
iRacingDeveloper: iRacingPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: iRacing is PC only, with various tiers of subscription available, while additional cars cost $11.95 with additional tracks costing from $11.95 to $14.95
Ever since I fell in love with the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I’ve always made a point of being around for happy hour. On the years I’m lucky enough to be trackside, I’ll stroll from Maison Blanche to Tetre Rouge, enjoying the strange serenity of a world slowly waking to a race that hasn’t stopped, pausing to get – depending how the night before went – a fresh coffee or one final branded beaker of flat beer. Watching at home, I set an alarm so I can sprint downstairs just before dawn, where my visiting dad will be sitting on the sofa wide awake having powered through the night.
This year, though, I found myself in my shed at sunrise, lowering myself into my primitive rig and strapping on a Rift headset as I prepared myself for a stint in my first ever iRacing team endurance event. They’re sim racing’s equivalent of an MMO raid, where small groups share cars in a race that goes once around the clock. My team – a gaggle of friends with a few iRacing veterans amongst us happy to show rookies like me the ropes – had made it to the morning, and my team boss, knowing how sentimental I can be about such things, gave me the privilege of taking the seat for happy hour.
Happy? Try ecstatic instead. Ticking off the laps and trying to keep our Porsche 911 RSR in one piece, seeing the sun dip underneath the Dunlop Bridge and strobe through the trees that line the flat-out run from Mulsanne to Indianapolis, I got that same little tickle in the pit of my stomach that I get every June when the big race comes around. Surely, I said to myself, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Happy hour at Le Mans – iRacing Dallara P217 LMP2 VR onbard Watch on YouTube
In many ways 2020 has been iRacing’s year, its popularity boosted as racers and race fans found themselves isolated from the real thing, but the online racing service has been around since 2008. Its roots go even further back, its foundations laid in a series of genre defining games that came from a small Massachusetts studio known as Papyrus. It’s where programmer David Kaemmer, inspired by his experiences with Microsoft Flight Simulator, set about applying that same approach to the humble racing game, resulting in 1989’s Indianapolis 500: The Simulation – which, alongside Geoff Crammond’s Revs, was one of the first commercially available driving sims.