This summer for Blue Flag Racing’s Mark A Warmington, could not have been any better.

 

Mark has spent the past twelve weeks dedicating himself to and competing in the iRacing GT Championship.  The iRacing GT Championship features the Corvette C6.R – a car which is ‘quite simply the most awesome GT car ever built’, according to iRacing.com.  The C6.R is a winner of five straight American Le Mans Series titles and a staggering total of eight class wins in the 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Le Mans. 

 

When asked why he chose to run the iRacing GT Championship Mark responded by saying, ‘it was a chance to race the C6.R, a car that is probably one of the fastest and most durable sports car of its era – ever!  iRacing have faithfully reproduced, in high-fidelity, this amazing seven-litre V-8, that produces an immensely impressive 600 horsepower and “rewards finesse and style over ham-fisted driving – approach to racing” and suits my approach to racing nicely.’

 

The Corvette C6.R GT1 Series includes some of the best road courses North America has to offer; courses that hark back to the halcyon days of racing, where tracks had character, charm and were built around the local topography, rather than being purpose built to cater for TV.  The series also boasts some extremely talented drivers that made the challenge of running the series all the more rewarding for Mark.

 

The series ran over twelve weeks, with a driver’s best results for 8 out of the 12 weeks contributing to his points tally for the overall GT Championship and individual divisional titles, with the worst 4 results being dropped.

 

Starting out the season at Virginia International Raceway saw Mark take a commanding lead in his division and an impressive 9^th place in the overall GT Championship with a top-five finish at what can only be described as one of the most technically challenging tracks in North America. 

 

Mark would continue his run of top-five finishes through the first half of the GT Championship as the circus turned up at Watkins Glenn, Mazda Raceway – Laguna Seca, Road America – Elkhart Lake, Silverstone – the home of British Motorsport and Road Atlanta.

 

It was at the mid-point of the season that Mark would start to have more indifferent performances as he came to terms with on track incidents, tracks, like Barber Motorsports Park – where the technical and challenging nature of the track presented a rapid and steep learning curve, Brands Hatch – where a DNF whilst running in 2^nd place was extremely hard to take and Sebring International, where Mark would start to recover his form by finding over a second in pace on his last visit to the spiritual home of North American endurance racing, resulting in two more top-five finishes in that weeks heat of races.

 

Round 10 at Mosport  International Raceway was, in Mark’s words, ‘a nightmare of a week’ – with Mark electing to drop round 10’s results from his best-eight finishes for the season.

 

With two rounds to go, Mark was well aware that the divisional title, for Division Five, was potentially his.  Two solid performances at Zandvoort and Daytona Road Course, the season closing event, would not only lock down the title for Division Five but would also potentially cement Mark’s place in the top-20 for the overall GT Championship standings for iRacing’s Season Two, 2010.

 

Mark duly delivered, culminating in what Mark considered to be a supreme performance, for him, at Daytona RC.  Mark managed to improve his personal best times around the circuit by over a second in both qualifying and race trim.  This resulted in Mark starting on the pole for his final heat race and ultimately claiming his first, and only, win in the GT Championship.

 

When asked what Mark considered to be the most enjoyable and satisfying moments of the season, Mark responded by saying ‘... it sounds like such a cliche’, but the drivers that made up the GT Championship are some of the most supportive, generous, competitive and fair racers that I have had the pleasure to share a track with in my entire sim-racing career.  Drivers like Dave Gelink, who absolutely dominated the series from week one, Alexandre Martini, who was always on hand to discuss setup options, Toby Bushnell, Ben Newby and Ian Rogers all made the experience quite simply, amazing!

 

What Mark failed to mention was the fact that winning the Division 5 title for Season 2, 2010 represented the first sim-racing championship title of Mark’s sim-racing career; a career that has spanned almost two decades and a multitude of sim-racing titles.

 

Mark now looks forward to a week off as iRacing moves into its regular week 13 cycle, where the simulation receives updates to its build and a new induction of rookie races are entered into the fold.

 

Dave Gelink was crowned overall GT Champsionship winner for Season Two, with a staggering points haul of 1127 championship points.  Mark would ultimately be classified in 17^th position (out of 326 drivers) with a points tally of 779.

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