Oooo, special guests.
Looking for some excitement during the week between Christmas and New Year's? Escape your family and hit the virtual track with GRM, as our Holiday iRacing series returns December 28, 29 and 30. The race on the 30th will be broadcast live on our YouTube and Facebook outlets by our friends at SYM TV, who now list multiple-time amateur and pro racing champion Tom O’Gorman on their creative roster.
The Monday and Tuesday evening sessions will open for registration at 10 p.m. Eastern in the “Hosted Races” section of iRacing’s interface and will be open to the first 60 entrants using the password “racegrm.” We’re not going to lie, the Monday and Tuesday sessions are a little gimmicky. Things are serious enough these days, so why not have a little fun? But the racing should be intense nonetheless.
On Wednesday we return to srs bzns mode with a tribute to early-oughts IMSA at historic Sebring International Raceway. Multi-class racing will feature the Chevrolet C7 DP Daytona Prototype machine in its own class, and the GT1-spec Corvette C6.R and Aston Martin Vantage GT1 will do battle in the GT class. Setups will be open, but we’ll share plenty of tested setups on our Discord server for folks who don’t want to do their own tuning.
Most excitingly, the feature event of the week on Wednesday evening will be professionally broadcast by SYM TV and available for viewing on GRM’s Facebook and YouTube feeds. Look for close racing among some of the best real-life and sim racers in the scene—and maybe even some special guests in the virtual booth.
SYM TV started humbly in 2018 when founders Kyle Heyer and Finian Dcunha began broadcasting sim racing from their college dorm. After two years of growth broadcasting sim racing series, the Washington DC Region SCCA became SYM TV's first affiliation with a real-world motorsports group by broadcasting its Virtual Racing League. SYM TV has gone on to broadcast and collaborate with GRM, SRO America, SCCA, #Gridlife, Winding Road's SPEC MX-5 sim series, and Speed51—in addition to many grassroots sim racing leagues—pioneering the crossover between real-world and sim race broadcasting.
In 2021, SRO TC America champion and IMSA race winner Tom O'Gorman is joining the team as a contributor and announcer as SYM TV continues to push boundaries for sim racing as authentic racing entertainment. SYM TV's live content and full library of past broadcasts are available on its YouTube channel as well as its Facebook page.
Here are the details you’ll need to know:
Invite yourself to our Discord server using this link.
Up-to-date news on races, in-race voice chat, discussion and setups are available there, too.
To join the GRM iRacing league, go to iRacing’s league directory and Search for “Grassroots Motorsports iRacing” or league number 6133. League membership is not required for the Monday and Tuesday events, but the Wednesday broadcast race will be limited to league members only.
Monday, December 28: RUFs and Rotaries at Sebring International Raceway
The session goes live at 10 p.m. Eastern and is open to the first 60 drivers with the password racegrm.
Ever driven a Miata at a track day and had to wait while all the guys in the mega-horsepower exotics held you up in the corners, only to watch them blast by on the straightaways? Well, you can relive that frustration in this event, where a single class made up of 700-horsepower, all-wheel-drive RUF RT12R Porsches with shot-from-a-cannon straight-line speed will face off against super-sticky Formula Pro Mazdas with all the grip in the world but seriously nerfed gear stacks that limit acceleration and top speed. In our testing, the Mazdas are still a couple of seconds faster than the RUFs, but all that power is going to make this a formidable challenge. Choose wisely.
Damage will be switched off for this event. Please do not take advantage of that to be a butt.
Tuesday, December 29: Max Delta at Daytona
The session goes live at 10 p.m. Eastern and is open to first 60 drivers with the password racegrm.
Mazda MX-5 Cup cars and Dallara DW12 Indy Cars will face off on Daytona’s tri-oval for 20 flat-out laps. Before you assume it’ll be a runaway for the 230-plus-mph Indy cars, understand that they’ll have to take the green flag and park on the apron on the back straight for nine whole laps before attempting to catch the Miatas. The math and testing shows a photo finish, with a lot of dicey moments on the way there.
Setups will be fixed and damage will be turned on for this race to discourage the Indy cars from turning themselves into land-based missiles whenever they pass the field of Miatas.
Wednesday, December 30: Classic IMSA at Sebring
The session goes live at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, with the broadcast starting at 10:00 p.m. Eastern. Open to members of the Grassroots Motorsports iRacing league.
Relive the days of Daytona Prototypes and factory-backed GT1 machines for the feature event of the week. Chevy Corvette C7 DP machinery will compete in its own class, while a GT class made up of Corvette C6.Rs and Aston Martin Vantage GT1s will compete for door-slammer glory. The live broadcast will feature the final few minutes of qualifying and continue as the field takes the green for a 45-minute feature. Fuel capacity will be tuned to force a pit stop some time during the proceedings.
Setups are open for this event, and we encourage anyone with a setup they like to share it in the “setup garage” section of our Discord server. Damage will be switched off for this race. We do this to keep people on track and having fun, not so you can take advantage of it by turning your car into an unstoppable killdozer. Please drive respectfully.
The broadcast will be streamed live on our Facebook feed and our YouTube channel.
Dress for Success
Make sure to dress your car in its holiday best, too. Head over to Trading Paints to get your liveries in order, and here’s a Dropbox folder with a few Grassroots Motorsports logos if you’re so inclined.
And just as with our fall Holiday series, we’ll toss a few GRM prizes out to lucky finishers in each race.
Like what you're reading? We rely on your financial support. For as little as $3, you can support Grassroots Motorsports by becoming a Patron today.
Oooo, special guests.
David S. Wallens said:Oooo, special guests.
Editorial Director, Grassroots Motorsports & Classic Motorsports
It's like the Kenny Rogers Christmas Special. You never know who will be knocking on the door next.
Dolly Parton!?
JG said
Damage will be switched off for this race. We do this to keep people on track and having fun, not so you can take advantage of it by turning your car into an unstoppable killdozer. Please drive respectfully.
I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I think it would be better accomplished by leaving damage on and giving each driver a large number of ‘fast repairs’ for the race. With damage off even a huge crash at Turn 1 will cost you only a few seconds. This means the ‘slow and steady’ approach cannot really be an effective strategy and forces anyone hoping to do well to be very aggressive. With damage on the penalty for wrecking is larger because you have to get back to the pits to fix it, but everybody can still enjoy the rest of the race because the ‘fast repair’ will give you a fresh car.
CrashDummy said:JG said
Damage will be switched off for this race. We do this to keep people on track and having fun, not so you can take advantage of it by turning your car into an unstoppable killdozer. Please drive respectfully.I understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I think it would be better accomplished by leaving damage on and giving each driver a large number of ‘fast repairs’ for the race. With damage off even a huge crash at Turn 1 will cost you only a few seconds. This means the ‘slow and steady’ approach cannot really be an effective strategy and forces anyone hoping to do well to be very aggressive. With damage on the penalty for wrecking is larger because you have to get back to the pits to fix it, but everybody can still enjoy the rest of the race because the ‘fast repair’ will give you a fresh car.
I hear you, but so far what we've seen is that people have not been abusing the system and rather than driving super aggressively, they've been using the zero-damage model to not have small mistakes put them at a huge deficit. I fully agree thatthe system is easy to exploit, but so far it hasn't been an issue. I don't expect that to last forever, though. As soon as we start getting a lot of banzai re-entries or overly physical racing, the party is over.
Heard through the grapevine that the Discord invite that was originally posted with this story was expired. I generated a new one and took the time limit off, and we replaced it in the story, so the current link in there now works fine.
Thanks for setting this up! I had decent pace, qualifying 13/24 in GT1 with my Corvette. Inexperience with the starting procedures (the short roll followed by an immediate green when I was expecting a partial pace lap) resulted in a missed shift and an immediate spin. Inexperience with these cars resulted in a botched pit strategy; I had no idea it took so long to change tires (I assumed it would be concurrent with fueling). Ended up where I started; 13th in class (26/42 overall). Could have been maybe 10th in GT1 but I learned for next time. At least I never got lapped by Tom!
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