My journey in simracing began during corona in summer 2020. I felt I haven't played a racing game in forever. I remember when in the early 2000s I got a PlayStation 2 with a demo disk that had a Formula One game. So looked for a Formula One game on Steam.
I just found that the new game released. I plugged in my controller and played a bit. But I felt like the experience was not immersive enough. I wanted a wheel. After some research, I bought the Logitech G29. On Twitch, I started to watch some people playing the game and connected with them through the chat.
In the mean time, I heard of other simulations. So at some night in February 2021, I searched on Twitch for Assetto Corsa Competizione. I found a stream, I opened the stream and the stream ended and got raided to someone else who was playing Assetto Corsa with some friends. I chatted with them and they convinced me to buy it and invited my to their Discord. I still remember the night quite vividly. We raced BTCC cars on Road Atlanta. I enjoyed that so much I stuck around and joined them frequently. Later, we also did ACC from time to time as well. It was fun. We just had a practice server and did some laps, nothing special.
At some night in the end of November 2021, someone called me on Discord at 2 am. They have heard that I enjoy ACC. They asked me if I was interested in an endurance race with them between Christmas and new year's day. After looking around they didn't find anything fitting. So we decided, we are going to host our own race. For that we partnered up with the streamer through which we found each other to fill the grid. Our first event: 6 h on Paul Ricard.
We enjoyed organizing the event so much, we wanted to continue. Unfortunately we didn't come an agreement with the streamer for the previous event, so we created our own community and also a simracing team. The RDC Racing Team and Community were born. My membership in the team was nothing special. We were just friends and enjoyed racing together.
My responsibilities for the community were providing and managing the servers for the events, and later also managing the community and the events themselves. In February 2022, we hosted an endurance series consisting of 5 races and trophies for the top 3 teams of the championship. We also tried ourselves on a sprint series but that project flopped so hard, we decided it was not something for us. Later in July 2022, we hosted a 14 h race on Kyalami which was a success in our eyes. At the end of that event we announced another endurance series for the summer/fall season. The event with the most participants had 116 drivers. At the end of August, a friend and I left the team due to different interests for the future.
The friend and myself were still hungry and wanted to host events and race together. So we formed another team and community in September 2022: Racingquest. The team grew initially but over time when key members left to advance in their simracing career. My personal highlights in my career were a class win on Suzuka and a podium on Brands Hatch.
The journey of the community started with an event on Spa-Francorchamps. To incentivize participants, announced a prize for the winning team. The winners received a Belgian waffle iron. We used our experience and the event was an absolut success with 110 participants excluding broadcasters and stewards. The feedback from our community was very positive. They wanted us to host more events and we obliged. Later that year, we hosted a Christmas themed 8h event on Barcelona-Catalunya everyone on the podium received an ornament. With a satisfied community, we decided to host an endurance series in spring 2023 consisting of 5 races where the top 3 teams of the championship received a trophy. Unfortunately, our later events of the championship were overshadowed by other larger and more prominent communities. Thus we decided to limit ourselves to only host single events.
However, late 2023 and early 2024 we the organizing team found very little time due to our work and studies. During this time we could only host two events so far, a 5 h Hollywood themed event where the winner would have received a popcorn machine, but since the home team won, we gave it to the broadcaster of the event. The other event is themed around the content feeling of sunsets in late summer: A 7 h races on a circuit with beautiful sunsets known as Kyalami.
These days I mainly use my knowledge to help various communities with judging incidents during races. It is a way for me to give something back to the entire simracing community. Without those non-racing activities, the simracing community as we know it could not exist.
To summarize my journey in simracing: I met a lot of new people whom I became very good friends with. I learned a lot about managing people and events. And I enjoy myself in teams where we competed together for victory.
To put this in numbers:
I participated in 19 organized events and championships including one class win and one podium (excluding daily races).
I organized and hosted 10 events and championships.
I did stewarding for 5 communities.
I even broadcasted 2 races.