If you have been following the Pansy Patrol for any length of time you know that I have not posted in a while. Well, today I saw something online that enraged me enough to end my hiatus.

Recently, iRacing.com opened their website to the public. On it they explain their still-in-beta product to the world in the hopes of raising excitement and brand awareness. Basically, their product is a virtual world (based loosely on the World of Warcraft model) in which customers pay a monthly fee of about 20$ to race cars in virtual races against other people. The basic subscription gets you a Pontiac Solstice and admission to only a few simple tracks. If you wish to race anything more exciting you have to fork out your Mastercard.

Normally I would be all for this. As the founder of a very nascent technology startup I can sympathize with new companies trying to get customers and opening the site up to show people is a great way to do it. But what really rubs me the wrong way about these guys is their attempt to distinguish themselves as a serious online racing community and not a game.

In an interview on opening day one of their executives said the following:

We don’t think of ourselves as a game company… World of Warcraft has a real appeal…But our system is more serious, frankly. If you are serious about racing, our product is for you, because getting on a [simulated] track with a full field of other drivers and racing against them safely involves as much commitment and time investment as if you went to racing school.

They even go so far as creating a new acronym so you don’t confuse their online world with an MMO. For you see, they are an MMIS, or ‘massively multiparticipant Internet sport.’

Perhaps I am doing something wrong, but my efforts to get into serious racing have cost a lot more than 100$ for an electronic steering wheel, 20$ for a monthly subscription, and a comfy office chair. How this company can compare the cost, the risk, and the reward of actually racing a vehicle with an online simulator is beyond me.

On their website they explain it in greater detail:

iRacing.com is not a video game. It is a subscription-based simulation service for real-world racers and racing enthusiasts, as well as a platform for a new branch of global motorsport - known as internet racing - which is the sport of real-time, online racing

Internet racing… Definately sounds like the next big sport. Might be too new for the Summer Olympics in 2012 but I hope to see you there in 2016.

Somebody over there needs to get off themselves and update their page to accurately describe their product. It is a game made out of a racing simulator built on top of a popular Nascar game which the company bought the rights to. If you are in the market I would recommend Live for Speed because at least they don’t have an identity crisis.

In the meantime, I’m going to all the popular local racing sponsor companies and try and get some funding to start my iRacing career!

Hey guys,

Thanks for all your emails letting me know comments were broken. I don’t often comment on my own posts. Anyway, the problem is with the spam filter plugin and I am working to fix this!

Update 4:03pm PST: Comments work again.

A lot of attention has recently been brought to the pictures of us testing the efficiency of various home chemicals as a fuel additive. Well I guess that I can explain it a bit better.

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A comment was raised in Noah’s last post about protective garments and their effectiveness against fire. I looked into this a bit when I bought my fire suit a few years ago and so I found this site which explains how fire protection is measured. Some of interesting points about these measurements:

• The Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) founded SFI (SEMA Foundation, Inc.) which manages many standards in this area.
• One of these standards is SFI 3.2a which is a specification for how well race car garments resist flame and heat.
• It is based on another standard, Thermal Protective Performance (TPP)
• TPP is a measure of the length of time the garment will protect the wearer from a second degree burn.

The table below, (from the sfi site) lists the SFI, their equivalent TPP value, and the time to burn.

SFI Rating	TPP Value	Time to 2nd Degree Burn
3.2A/1	6	3 Seconds
3.2A/3	14	7 Seconds
3.2A/5	19	10 Seconds
3.2A/10	38	19 Seconds
3.2A/15	60	30 Seconds
3.2A/20	80	40 Seconds

For comparison the following is a list of required TPP values for different activities:

• Top Fuel Drag Racing: 80
• NASCAR: 38
• NFPA Requirement for Fire Fighting garments: 35

It is interesting to see how little protection these garments actually provide. As a kid I always assumed race car drivers were invulnerable to fire in their suits, but the reality is that a NASCAR driver has 20 seconds before he starts to get burned very badly!

Here is an Associated Press writeup on a new feature GM is going to bring to its OnStar service in 2009: The ability to remotely disable your vehicle! Highlights from the article:

• The service will be on available on 20 models in 2009.
• The cutout will be a gradual cutout so cars won’t be screeching to a halt on the highway.
• The system will likely give a verbal warning to the operator to give them some time to prepare.
• People can opt-out of this feature while retaining their OnStar subscription.
• It is being sold as a technology which will help eliminate dangerous police chases.

Sounds great, but most ideas sound great on paper. My complaint is that this is an electronic feature and so it can be disabled. Most thieves will likely have some black box they plug into the car which disables this annoyance. On top of this, imagine when some jerk discovers how to hack the system to disable other people’s cars. What a great party trick.

Personally, if I were going to steal a car, I’d just drive up with a tow truck and tow the thing away. It is probably going to be gutted for parts anyway so who cares if it starts? But I’m pretty sure if Clint got his hands on this technology I’d never be sure if my car was going to start again!

I just got back from a great autocross practice run by a Western Washington Sports Car Council member group known as The Coneheads. Even though it was kind of wet out, the event was a blast. We got about 30 runs each, and had some interesting people show up (Like Matt Panic). Thanks for doing this guys!

By now you must have seen this, but I am linking it again because it is just so vicious. There is no description associated with the video but the title and first few seconds explain themselves pretty clearly.

One thing that’s particularly important to point out is that THIS IS NOT A CONTINUOUS stream of events. This is a compilation of frames from a collection of combustion events inside the engine. If you watch carefully it gives you a really good idea of the cycle to cycle variation. It is shocking how different any two combustion events can be from each other. Most people consider the entire process from filling the chamber to evacuating the exhaust gas to be a batch process that is identical in every instance but this is incorrect as can be seen from this video.

It is no secret that here at The Pansy Patrol we revere the Miata as one of the best track cars for the money. They are cheap, have amazing part availability, and are easy to track because of their light weight. Well, today I came across a car that I am extremely impressed and excited by that is about as opposite from those things as you can expect. I’m talking about Gary Faules’ Shelby GT-350 clone that was mentioned last week on The Garage.

(Image taken from Gary’s site)
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Autocross, which is commonly abbreviated to autoX, is a sport in which drivers complete time trials around a course made up of cones. It sounds extremely easy, but the reality is that the courses are usually very tight and the cones come at you very quickly and you realize at the last moment that you are set up completely incorrectly for the corner you are about to enter which will only put you in an even worse position for the following corner. It’s a slippery slope that ends up with either spinning and hitting all the cones, or plowing straight through a corner and hitting all the cones.

Whether or not you enjoy the sport itself, it is impossible to deny that autocross is one of the most accessible ways to get into motor sports. The cost of entry is lower than most other car events, the risk is probably the lowest, there are very few requirements for vehicles, and the basic concepts apply to any motor sports event. For this reason I try and push people who call themselves “car people” but have never gone to a competitive driving event into coming with me when I go. The following is the advice I usually give them:
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It is no secret that Noah and Clint are quicker with the camera than me. The car-carrier which smashed one of its cars into a bridge, the lovely moose spoiler, and the guy who drives around with his seatbelt dragging are all examples of the pictures they have taken of the the splendid failures of others. Well it kills me to see the ridiculing of others and not be a part, and I don’t have the patience to wait around for failure to happen. So, I decided to go onto YouTube and find the most unreasonable car video I could to share with everybody.

Well, as it turns out, if you are willing to follow the suggested links from each video deeper and deeper you get some pretty spectacular results. I had enough candidates that I’m going to try and make a habit of posting these over the next few weeks. So with that, I present YouTube Failure #1: Dancing Miata.

This video has a collection of factors which made it my first pick to highlight as a YouTube failure.
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