![]() If you were to search the planet for the polar opposite of Formula 1, it would be Wreckfest. There’s no such thing as a cheap dog, and there’s no such thing as cheap racing. The car itself may be attainable, but the upkeep? It’s like adopting a dog: whether you buy a pedigree or go to the local shelter, you’re facing a lot of vet bills, etc. Worse, there is the risk that you will damage or destroy your car. You may see a Legends car on sale for $10k or so, but that’s just the beginning. The problem is that they really aren’t that inexpensive. I wasn’t driving as a pale impersonation of Michael Schumacher in these cars, I was driving as me! I could imagine actually owning a car like one of these entry level cars, although I couldn’t imagine how I would ever manage to override the spousal veto, but that’s a problem for a different sim. It also occurred to me that this type of lower ranks racing had another personal appeal: these were cars that I could conceivably drive in real life. Oh, and the races were shorter - you could fit one into a half hour. The fields were bigger, the cars slid around a lot more but were controllable (which is incredibly fun if you have a good FF wheel), and the racing was much closer. I started working my way up the chain, but at some point I realized that I had been having a lot more fun in the entry-level cars. “Poorly,” is the answer, and that would not be fair to the other paying customers in the race. If I couldn’t get through a Miata race, how well was I going to do in Formula 1? The restriction was only on racing, and that made sense to me. The difference was that I hadn’t paid for those cars - iRacing was an early entrant to the DLC model. As a rookie, I was restricted from racing higher level cars, just like the aforementioned sims. ![]() I was far more interested in the top levels, Formula 1, Indycar, even Nascar - I watched all of them, then drove the same races in whatever sims I had at the time. Once having progressed beyond them, I never looked back. I resented it so much that I ended up viewing those entry-level cars with disdain. Go! How long did it take you to get to a real race car? Start last in the field for a five lap race. You know the drill: start in this underpowered beater that isn’t even as fast as your daily drive. Every now and then I would run across a sim/game that would force me to driver “lesser” cars while “earning” the “privilege” of driving model cars that I had already paid for. The inner Walter Mitty in me reveled in it.įrom then until the present, I have had just about every above average sim available, and they all had one thing in common: they gave me the opportunity to feel a glimpse of what it would be like to race those exotic, expensive, high-performance cars. It may have also been the first to provide at least a somewhat limited view into what it must be like to have raced in those skittish, powerful, and hugely dangerous cars, long before the advent of aero downforce and all of the other mumbo-jumbo that goes into contemporaneous racing. It was by no means my first racing sim, but it was the first one that really knocked my socks off with gorgeous graphics (for the era) and believable driving physics the venerable old cars and real world tracks just sealed the deal. I remember when Grand Prix Legends was released, way back in 1998.
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