Exciting iRacing based news everyone!
Before that though, welcome to my first written post on Joshimuz.com! If you haven't heard; this is the new home for all things Joshimuz and I'd recommend taking a look at the welcome to video for more details. In this case, it's super useful to have somewhere other than my Discord where I can write out big posts about announcements of stuff! No more screenshots of walls of text on social media!
Anyways on to the actual iRacing based news:
I've joined (another) league! But this time it's different because... It's the "Creator Series", a long running sim racing league for content creators. It's being broadcast on their channel, and everyone involved is another silly ol' streamer like me. You might have heard of them from their previous series in WRC and the F1 game, two games I'm not super into, but now they've started a new iRacing league, for real sim racers.
The league runs every Thursday (A Weekday! Hooray! So many Leagues I looked at only run on weekends and I don't want to commit to a thing on weekends) starting at 19:00 UK time. If you want to know when that is for your time zone head on over to my Stream Schedule page which lists when all my streams take place and converts it all to your time zone.
The format is a little unknown to me at this stage, but the cars, tracks and even disciplines will be totally different each week. So sometimes it'll be 1970s F1 cars at period correct tracks, other times NASCAR Oval racing, sometimes Rallycross in the mud!
This does mean practice will be very difficult if not impossible for me each week, so hopefully I just finally accept joining for fun and not worry about how I perform. 🤪
Since you're here and hopefully interested in motorsport content, here's a little update about what's happening with Joshimuz Motorsport and the IRL GoKarting videos:
So I put out that first race in what was supposed to be a series of me learning to race IRL, and after that I did record a few more races, however the inevitable happened and I got too busy and never got around to editing them. I also had a few issues with a few of the recordings like batteries that gave up on life permanently midway through the race and never worked ever again causing footage loss, and new and accidentally terrible camera angles that just show me sat in the kart the whole racing meaning you can't see a bunch of epic crashes and overtakes... I also fell out of love with the track a lot too, it's just too difficult to overtake anywhere and the reverse layout they run sometimes is so much worse somehow! (This isn't just a skill issue as I'm not the only one who thinks this).
Anyway, the long and short of it is I have a bunch of somewhat incomplete barely watchable footage of some cool moments, but mostly a bunch of races of me being bullied on lap one by a slower person and then being stuck behind them for the whole race getting more and more frustrated. I did get a lot faster though! No more barely keeping up with the back of the pack, now I was hopelessly lost in the midfield! Maybe someday it sees the light of day, but maybe not.
Oops... not a good camera angle... and it's for the whole Summer Season!
I also lost a lot of motivation for IRL racing in general because of another event that I did and recorded: my Thruxton driving experience.
Basically I booked an open wheel racing experience day for me and my mum (who's a closet speed demon!). I took my GoPRO and Faye to help me record it, and pre-purchased onboard 360 video footage of the driving.
All of that worked out, however one of my worst fears happened: I was too tall to fit into any of the open wheelers... To explain for those who don't know, there's an extremely strict height limit in open wheel race cars: the roll hoop.
The thing that prevents the entire weight of the car being balanced squarely on the drivers neck in the case of the car flipping. (A fairly common occurrence in open wheel race cars!) And because of how you sit in a small tube with no wiggle room at all it's not as simple as just "sit lower 4head". So yeah I tried to drive their fleet of open wheelers but the crew (correctly!) wouldn't let me as my head was simply way too far above the roll hoop.
I wasn't left without anything though I got to drive some sports cars as a replacement, however paradoxically I'm not really a car person. I like motorsport, not cars, so driving some Porsche and an Aldi R8 didn't interest me at all. In addition in the sports cars you were required to have an instructor with you at all times whereas the open wheelers did not, and their job is to backseat you the entire duration of the drive, which was not fun for me at all. Being told what gear to go into, when to accelerate and brake etc constantly just was not fun. I practiced Thurxton in iRacing beforehand for a reason!
For the record, I don't blame anyone at Thruxton, as they said they would just let me drive but if something bad happens we're both fucked, me coz I'll lose my head/neck and them losing their careers. I'm just too tall for Open wheel race cars, which is the thing I love the most.
The whole day left me disheartened about the dream of driving Formula Vees and such, and I haven't really recovered since. It's really put a damper on the whole GoKarting thing which to me was practice for one day doing "real" racing. I might just have to stick to Sim Racing.
Anyway all that aside, there is one last minute potential good news too that's just come into my inbox! A *cool sim racing adjacent brand* just emailed me with an interesting offer regarding my sim racing content which I'm excited about and will hopefully improve the iRacing content a lot! It's only a first feeler email thing but I literally just responded to it prior to writing it so thought I could use it for a bit of good news at the end of this post.
Right, that was a lot longer than I thought, so thanks a lot for reading and visiting Joshimuz.com, hopefully I'll see you in the next iRacing stream/video!
