Date: Sept. 4, 2008
Event: Centurion Boats at The Glen (Round 22 of 36)
Series: NASRAC A-1 Series
Location: Watkins Glen International Raceway in Watkins Glen, NY (2.45-mile road course)
Start/Finish: 8th/11th (Running, completed 90 of 90 laps)
Winner: Adam Lyons (Toyota)

Aaron Bean came to the Watkins Glen International Raceway looking to solidify a spot in the Chase for the Cup and may have done so with his 11th-place finish on the 2.45-mile road course in upstate New York.

“It wasn’t pretty, but I’ll take it,” said Bean after parking his No. 108 Toyota at his team’s hauler. “We put ourselves in a position to really take a deep step into (the Chase), but I just couldn’t keep it in the Top-10 at the end.”

Bean, still 4th in A-1 Series points, ran in the Top-10 for most of the event until a caution with 22 laps to go saw the driver take to the pit lane for the final round of stops. When green flag racing resumed for the final 16-lap sprint to the finish, Bean immediatley slipped outside of the Top-10. When the checkered flag finally fell, Bean found himself just 0.15 seconds shy of 10th-place Tim Reeve’s Ford and what could have been Bean’s 14th Top-10 of the season. But the driver remained upbeat about his position in the end.

“It could have been 12th…13th,” said Bean. “At this point in the season, I’ll take as many points as I can. If 11th is where I finish, it means I got more points than I would have gotten if I finished 12th. I want to be one of those twelve guys (in the Chase) when we roll in to New Hampshire again.”

With four races reamining until the chase is set, Bean remains fourth in A1 Series point-standings, but has increased the cushion between himself and 13th-place Dylan Choquette to 388 points.

“I don’t plan on giving up what I’ve battled for,” said Bean. “I’m not throwing away all that work since the (Daytona) 500.”

The NASRAC A-1 Cup series Cup Series heads next to the 3M Performance 400 at Michigan International Speedway where Bean finished 9th earlier this season.

NASRAC – The Best Online NASCAR Game

The results are in for Race 15 at Michigan and all active groups are complete. I made more tweaks to the race adjustments to make the drivers closer in performance and the results look good. I also added some initial damage code which I will take advantage of more in the next few days but tonight it helped adjust the drivers rating after an accident. I also used some of it tonight for accident car pit stops (or stops right after the accident). The idea is the more damage the longer the pit stop will take. Tomorrow I may add some code into fixing some car damage while pitting which will improve your rating after an accident. Possibly I may get to a car being retired but honest that will be a lot of code change so you may see the guys out of the race lingering along with horrible lap times. Time will tell.

I will continue to make enhancements and improve the game as I said last night which came true today.

Happy Racing…
Minnelli
http://nasrac.com

Race 11 at Darlington tomorrow night. Race results and standings are shaping up nice.

I have added the race track venue to your garage page for your reference and made the cell height a little bigger.

If you didn’t see the news check out the NASRAC Chase for the Cup

As always keep spreading the word. I’m really happy with the progress but need to find time to get back into the code.

Happy racing…
Kevin Minnelli

Okay interesting results – I know we changed code to bring results a little closer and in A1 37 cars finished on the lead lap (I was the 37th car by the way). A2 had 19 and A3 had 10 – Why less and less? The virtual drivers or AI drivers do not have you the real drivers picking the strategies. So a lot of default 50s are being used. I may have to rethink this because this means all AI drivers will pit on the same green flag lap. I’ll pondered it for a while, but that’s what this season is suppose to help us with…issues.

A4 Drivers are up and working again, so new sign ups will be able to do all of their practices. Thanks guys for helping me test this out.

You should all go look at the standings in A2 and look at Boz. Go to standings, select Group A2, then marvel in his 5 wins!!! A regular Kurt Busch. In fact click on his name to see all of his results. I was very curious about this and looked in the database to see what strategy he was using. Very interesting slider use on risk and tires – this does make a difference.

In A3 I looked at my buddy Zach, because I wanted to test some A3 races tonight so I ran this group several times. I noticed a strategy he was using on his tires and let’s just say it wasn’t working at all. In fact this last race he finished better than the other 4 test races I ran tonight.

So strategy does play an important role in the outcome of the race. look for guys who won a lot of poles and drill into them and you will results that do not correspond to your qualifying results.

I also know a lot of talk on the forum about accidents and I will be working very hard to tweak this with a couple of our regular drivers. Right now I use a generic 3% risk per track which also looks at the drivers risk to determine accidents and victims. We will modify this to be different for each track in the near future.

Yeah I finished before midnight…

Kevin Minnelli

Also, You now have the ability to view other groups under Results and Standings. In purple select the group you want to look into. Notice A1 guys if you jump over to A2 to look you will have to select the race since they are behind right now. So for now select race 2 if you look at their standings. Once eveyone is on the same race these little issues will go away.

Okay big progress tonight on the nascar sim front…

• Code to allow users to miss a race is implemented so that user will have the AI Qualify and Race for them.
• Race Season has progressed to Race 2, which means Race 1 can no longer be run. I have tested this out and your garage should be working fine but if not please post it on the forum and I will fix it tomorrow.
• Code is tweaked to make the results tighter, but some drivers still show slower laps because the user was just testing laps out (you A-2 guys might notice this in lap results).
• We will all get in sync soon and start our daily grind.
• New blog for News and Highlights has been created at http://nasrac.com/news
• Stop on by to check the progress, much more to come in the future. Again I’m striving to make the best online NASCAR racing simulation game on the web. Think about NASRAC as the replacement game when your NASCAR fantasy league has fallen apart

Thanks – Kevin Minnelli