By Dewey Kang, Metropolitan New York Region PCA

Hello PCA Racers! On behalf of the PCA Sim Racing Steering Committee, thank you, everyone, for your great sportsmanship and participation across our inaugural 2019 PCA Sim Racing Series races. We owe it to each of you for our wildly successful inaugural year of PCA Sim Racing Series across 20 races, and we’re thrilled to race with all of you again in 2020.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our survey – we had just under 100 survey participants, and the Steering Committee spent quite a bit of time poring through and analyzing the results to properly apply your feedback to further improve our series in 2020 and beyond.

That said, I’m excited to share the findings with you.

Reflecting on our Series 3, generally, our racers felt good about their own competency against the larger field, with a strong consensus that it was ‘okay’ to drive with slower drivers during the races.  We were pleased to see that almost all our racers welcomed the multi-class designation that we introduced for the first time in Series 3.

In almost complete consensus, our racers voiced that clean racing is the foremost importance in participating in a league like our PCA Sim Racing Series.  Survey results indicated that our racers believe that increasing the level of harshness of penalties and adjusting the number of incident points could help encourage clean driving – with the optimal incident points voted to sit around 11-15 points.  Our racers were relatively evenly split on whether a racer should be disqualified as DNF, as it is native to the official iRacing races, once he/she hits the incident points.

Looking ahead for 2020, our racers expressed highest excitement over the new Cayman GT4 Clubsport, followed by the 911 RSR, 911 GT3 Cup, and RUF RT12 R RWD; racing on a mix of some international tracks and some North American tracks.  (Track selections to be discussed below)  Vast majority of our racers preferred fixed setup with one pit stop for fuel, and races that require fuel strategy and managing traffic – much like how our prior series have run.  There was a slight lean towards a preference for our future series to mirror real-world racing series schedules and venues.

Our racers were evenly split with a very slight lean towards firmly locking the incident points at the initially-set incident points (e.g., 15) for all races, provided the series’ experience of raising the incident points to 30 for our COTA and Road Atlanta races.  As it has been with our prior series, Friday evenings received the most votes to be the best night for our races.  Finally, before we discuss the track selections, many/majority of our racers believed that head and shoulder photos should be required for all drivers for the broadcast.

Regarding the races, we observed the following.  Our racers expressed a strong preference for 45 and 60 min races, with at least one race in the series running longer than other races.  Furthermore, there was a reasonably strong preference for racing on full-sized track layouts over smaller configurations, but many also voted for a mix of both full-sized and smaller track configurations over the course of a series.

Tracks

Finally, the track selections.  The following tracks received the most number of votes, in alphabetical order:

  1. Barber Motorsports Park
  2. Brands Hatch
  3. Circuit Gilles Villeneuve
  4. Circuit of the Americas
  5. Daytona RC
  6. Laguna Seca
  7. Mid-Ohio
  8. MoSport
  9. Road America
  10. Road Atlanta
  11. Sebring
  12. Silverstone
  13. Spa Francorchamps
  14. Suzuka
  15. Virginia International Raceway
  16. Watkins Glen

—End of Survey Results—

Thank you again for your enthusiasm and participation in our PCA Sim Racing Series.  Without you, our Series would not be possible and please be assured that The Steering Committee has been and will continue to actively listen to all your comments and suggestions.  To my knowledge, no other national club like ours, globally, accomplished bringing fellow enthusiasts together over a competitive sim racing series like ours, and I’m personally very proud to have been a part of this history in the making.

Most importantly, however, please do not hesitate to reach out to any of us with the Steering Committee with any of your thoughts.  Your feedback is very important to us, and we’re fellow racers too – we’d love to work with you to help grow our series to an even great success that we achieved in our inaugural year 2019.

Thank you all and Happy Holidays!  Speed safely.

Dewey Kang and the rest of the PCA Steering Committee: Jim Hemig, Doug Atkinson, Andrew Ellsom, Mike Nyden, Liam Rudzitis, and William Yu.