As 2008 is in its closing stages, it’s time to take a short look back at what this year brought the sim racing community. It’s safe to say that 2008 was a good year for virtual racing as our favorite hobby provided to be alive and well.

Especially the modding community can take lots of respect for making 2008 a great year for sim racers. Many long-awaited mods like CTDP’s F1 2006 or the Historic Touring Car & GT mod for rFactor saw the light of day and took the community by storm. Aside from rFactor, the modding scene proved to be healthy too as great mods like the World Super GT mod for GTR2 helped to bring much focus to Simbin simulations.

Speaking of Simbin, the Swedish developers granted a big wish of many sim racers this year by bringing us GTR Evolution and the first professionally-made Nürburgring Nordschleife for the PC since GP Legends. GTR Evolution has also attracted some modding attention as countless cars have already been painted and many mods are currently being converted to Simbin’s newest product.

But modding wasn’t just about adding cars and tracks these year as clever modders proved that every aspect of the simulations can be improved. The HDR plugin and 6e66o’s new cubemaps are two examples how clever tweaks can improve the experience for everyone.

Outside of the popular gMotor-based simulations, the launch of iRacing has added some fresh blood to the community. Although controversial discussed, the online-simulation has helped bringing high-profile media attention and known drivers to sim racing. Furthermore, Simbin launched the V-WTCC which gave sim racers a professional base to compete against each other in a tournament that was even featured on Eurosport TV.

Keeping all this exciting stuff in mind, the question is will 2009 be equally good in terms of sim racing? Even though nobody knows what will happen in the next 12 months, some very interesting things are lining up as countless new mods & tracks are due to be released. Furthermore, Simbin has another PC title for us and quite some people predict that rFactor 2 isn’t as far away as many of you might think.

Whatever happens, you´ll find it all on VirtualR. Even though it has been stressful at times, I very much enjoyed covering all events in the past 12 months for you. Thanks a bunch to everyone out there, especially those of you who supported VirtualR one way or another.

Have a pleasant 2009 – Keep On Sim Racing!

Yesterday’s iRacing discussion gave me the motivation to finally revise the site’s category system, and the “Other Sim Racing” category in particular. Originally meant to host stories on not-frequently covered sims, it grew to become the largest category of them all.

I cleaned it up by introducing a few new categories:

iRacing – For all stories on the popular and controversial online racing simulation

Hardware – For everything hardware related, from custom wheels to clever cockpit ideas

InsideSimRacing.tv – All of SRT’s excellent video productions can be watched here

Console – For everything on consoles that can be considered a simulation, including Gran Turismo and Simbin’s RACE Pro

The individual categories can be accessed using the menu bar on the right, of course every category comes with it’s own RSS feed for those who want to subscribe to a certain category only.

My apologies for the complete lack of updates in the past 30 hours. It wasn’t that nothing newsworthy happened in this community of ours but yesterday was just a day to quickly forget.

Turning on your 3 months old 1 TB external hard drive and hearing nothing but ugly and distinct clicks tells you that this ain’t your day. The drive’s headcrash took over 800 GBs of data with it, including all my backups of earlier VirtualR versions, my collection of sim racing downloads as well as my beloved iTunes database.

The problem with backups is that you usually start to think about it when it’s already too late….

Just like Paula Cole was wondering “Where are all the Cowboys gone?”, I find myself asking the same about the comment frequency on VirtualR.

Due to quite popular request, I decided to turn off anonymous comments last month, hoping that it would not hurt the healthy comment frequency around here. That’s exactly what happened though, the daily comment average has dropped from over 30 to below 10 and even though over 650 users have already signed up (thanks!), the switch seems to keep quite a lot of you from contributing.

I will keep an eye on this situation and I might end up switching back to the old system. I rather spend more time moderating comments than to have much less of them. :)

Following a lot of request, I´ve decided to disable the anonymous posting of comments on VirtualR. In the past months, this blog has not just turned out to be a busy news source but also a place of communication for the community. I´m very happy to see people help each other and have healthy discussions around here.

Sadly, a few users are hiding behind anonymity to post insults or wind up other people, especially in “hot-topics” involving arguments between different mod groups and such. Since these few started to spoil it for everyone, I´ve decided to shut down the anonymous posting on Sunday evening.

In order to keep on commenting, you´ll have to sign-up to VirtualR. Registration will take less than 10 seconds, you will not have to give away any personal data and will never receive any unwanted e-mails or anything else. I realise that this is no perfect protection against “trolls”, but it makes it much easier to ban people that try to stir up trouble.

I really hope that this will not hurt the comment-frequency around here as I very much enjoy every single comment. Hopefully, this will even improve the disscusion-quality as nobody will be hiding behind anonymity. Let me know what you think of this change, anonymous comments will be active for another 24 hours. You can already register to VirtualR to have your account ready if you wish:

Click Here to Register to VirtualR.net

In the past days, I´ve received several mails from website/league owners asking for permission to include my RSS feed on their website. I figured it would be a good idea to let everybody know that they´re absolutely free to do that.

So if you run a league or another sim racing related site, feel free to include my news feed on your site. That way, your visitors will always find the latest sim racing news with no hassle for you involved.

If you included my news, make sure to mail me so I can place a link to your site too :)

Here’s my first gallery of composed screenshots of GTR Evolution. I´ve combined a few things and came up with a new (at least for me ;) ) style that looks really interesting, almost like a painted postcard. Enjoy!

 

Appologies to those of you who got a “database connection” error while visiting the site during the past 36hrs, there have been slight problems with the database caused by things beyond my control.

The problem has been resolved by my webhoster, all is back to normal now :)

Even though the surroundings of the Nürburgring Grand Prix Circuit have been turned into one big construction site, racing on Germany’s most famous track continues.

The Eifel Grand Prix Revival saw a pack of historic 1988 Formula One cars racing around the Ring, bringing back memories of times when Grand Prix racing was exciting and pure. Enjoy the shots!

 

Precisely one year ago, I started VirtualR with this harmless little posting. Started out of boredom, this site did offer nothing but a few edited screenshots of mine until late November 2007.

Without having any particular goal, I started posting news on rFactor and GTR2 mods. Suddenly the site started to get popular, gaining more and more readers. By the end of December, VirtualR had an average of 800 readers a day. These days, some days attract ten times as much.

Times have changed and so did the workload the site is creating. In the beginning, I posted something every other day. Today, the site is updated several times a day and I spend a big portion of my day digging for news, replying to emails and posting stuff.

VirtualR has become a very important part of my life and I hope it’s a helpful asset to the community. I have no idea what the future will bring sim racing, who know’s which way our community is heading… but one thing is certain: VirtualR is here to stay!

This is also the time to look back and thank those people that helped me along the way. It’s impossible to list everybody who tipped me off on news, wrote comments or helped promoting the site…. Thanks a lot – You know who you are!

My thanks for giving me advice and supporting VirtualR in one way or another goes out (in no particular order) to all the guys at RaceSimCentral, NoGrip Racing, Racebit.de, the folks at Simbin & ISI , erale, 6e66o, Wix, CTDP, F1Racer, stabiz, RMi, Alex Martini and AutoSimSport, Maggi, ermax18, Trebor901, Paul Kelly, Simon, Drivingitalia.net and of course Biek for just reminding me about the anniversary :-)

The Mount Panorama Raceway at Bathurst is one of the most stunning race tracks in the world. What makes Australias most exciting track even better? A full field of historic cars racing on it. Enjoy the shots!

 

Manfeild Park in New Zealand was the scene of the latest meeting of Abarth TCR owners. Of course, they did not stop at just meeting but took their babies to the track for some good Italian tin-top racing action. Enjoy the shots!

 

… and quite a bad case. The 24 Hours of Le Mans are coming up this weekend, definitely the most important race of the year for me. With unlimited coverage from Saturday all the way through Sunday, it will be very hard for me to focus on anything else.

That’s why updates may be coming a little slow this weekend. Of course, I´ll be keeping up with the major stuff but new stories might not be posted as quickly as you´re used to and I might be a little slow replying to mails. Sunday evening, all will be back to normal – I hope you won’t mind the inconvenience :)

A brand new team has shaken down their brand new Epsilon EE1 at Most yesterday, luckily I was around to capture the car’s first kilometers. As usual, the screenshots have just been mildly edited :)