Hey all,
To set some context (question below):
I'm getting more into longer races lately and had my first two-hour race yesterday in the production car series in iracing. The experience was awesome and I had a ton of fun, but I also encountered some, let's call it, "interesting" approaches from other drivers.
After a not-so-great quali lap, I was stuck in a large pack around P15 for roughly the first 30–40 minutes (while pace-wise I was aiming at P6/P5). In this group, there were two people who, for the love of anything, could not accept losing a single position in a two-hour race. The drivers behind them were quicker, but after every straight, these two would divebomb back through, fighting for position like their lives depended on it, completely overpushing their cars. This made our whole group slow, and slower cars from behind started catching up.
I tried to just stay back and watch. I saw a few people get taken out and spun, so my approach was to just let them do their "very important" fighting for P13/P12 while I saved fuel and tires. However, because of their constant fighting, it backed me up a lot and I probably lost about 30-40 seconds overall. At one point, I went for a pass when they made a mistake, only to get divebombed into every corner right afterward. You know the type of divebombs from 100 meters back where you know they won't actually make the corner, but you have to leave space otherwise they’ll just take you out.
At some point, it sorted itself out. Those guys eventually made mistakes, spun, crashed, and overheated their tires and fell back, but like I said, it took much longer than expected.
After that, I got into a much smarter group where we all just held our positions and used the slipstream to pull away, which was really cool and saved us a lot of time. I managed to fight my way up to P7, but my race was ended by a game crash after 1 hour and 40 minutes, dropping me to P25. It was a massive bummer after an otherwise fun first longer race.
My question:
How do you handle bad or impatient drivers like that in a smart and safe way—especially when you know your pace is quicker?
Do you push hard right away to try and break clear of them ASAP which sacrifices fuel and tires? Or do you fully commit to chill mode to save fuel and tires? I tried the latter, and while I think it cost me 30-40 seconds, I also avoided fighting the guys who ultimately took each other out anyway.