My closest iRacing race ever.

My favorite series in iRacing is the IndyCar fixed oval series.  For some reason I have been able to figure out those cars and be successful driving them.  I have won 12 races so far, but the one I had last night was special because of the finish times.  According to the iRacing stats, I was ahead of second place by .000 second.  Which means I won by less than 1/1000 of a second.

That is a very close race.  We were running side by side for about the last 20 laps.  It was the most intense race I was ever in.  He would get a run off the corners and come along side and even get ahead of me on the straights, but never clear me to come down and take the inside line away.  Then I would pull ahead going through the corners.  We even barely touched a few times for 0x contact, but didn't damage either of our cars.

And you can see how close it is in these pictures.

[URL=http://s1282.photobucket.com/user/Troysloth/media/831d0642-dec8-4851-93d...

[URL=http://s1282.photobucket.com/user/Troysloth/media/2e36f264-4934-4c12-b95...

I heard that iRacing actually keeps timing to more decimal places so I asked if they could tell me what the actual time was.  The guy who answered my email says he doesn't have access to the information.

I was curious so I did some math to try and figure it out myself.

I did some measurements at work with my micrometer.  On my screen the car is 7 inches long.  The real car is 197 inches.  The gap between my car and second place is .11 inches on my screen which is .0157 of 7 inches.  .0157 of 197 inches is about 3 inches.  So I was about 3 inches ahead of second place.

The cars are going 218 mph.  218 x 5280 feet/mile x 12 inches/foot = 13812480 inches per hour.  There are 3600 seconds per hour so 13812480 / 3600 = 3836.8 inches per second which is how fast we were traveling.

At 3836.8 inches per second, it would take about .0008 seconds to travel 3 inches.  3/3836.8=.000782

So my calculations show a margin of victory of about 8/10,000 of a second.  That is close no matter who you are.