Chuck's 200th Road Racing Win!!!

According to Chuck, 200 road racing wins is not really a great landmark among our group, or even iRacing as a whole, but when I started checking our team’s stats, I realized that 200 wins is actually a pretty big deal! Oh sure, you can slice and dice that number in lots of ways, e.g.: it’s just a function of years racing, it’s not as important as win percentage, blah, blah, blah… BUT, to put Chuck’s 200 road racing wins into perspective, at vApex there are only 2 guys with more wins – Dave with 231 and Richard Woelkers with 225! Holly cow – say what!?!? Wow!!! Next up: Mikey has 178 wins, German has 167, and Kurt has 119! The rest of us, less than 100 wins.

So, 200 wins IS a Pretty Big Deal and let’s celebrate Chuck’s achievement. Beer and fish tacos sound great – get the beer cold and grill started! It’s time to party at Chuck place. He kindly provided the following about his iRacing career and his 200th win.

The most LAME 200th iRacing road racing win ever.

I started iRacing on May 5th, 2008, during the late BETA stages prior to public release. I was invited by a friend to join the other BETA testers and I jumped on the opportunity. At that time, I was racing in a very well organized NASCAR Racing 2003 online league... on my old Mac G4 computer. I didn't own a PC at all at that time. In fact, we (the folks racing on the Mac computers) could not race on the Sierra (I think I have that right) racing servers with the rest of the PC world. The two just weren't compatible. But, we had an amazing group of guys and we raced together for several years.

So, with the invitation to iRacing, I retired from that league… and from racing on my crusty old Mac computer. I remember lots of very fun Legends races early on. And I remember my very first road course race on iRacing... the Pontiac Solstice at Laguna Seca. In fact, I got my VERY FIRST road racing WIN in iRacing in my VERY FIRST race. I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2017 and I have been fortunate enough to win several big races, including the iRacing Indy 500 and first ever iRacing 24hrs of Spa, and race with the fine group of guys here at the vApex Racing group.

On April 27th, 2017 I was able to claim my 200th road racing win. Honestly, I wish it had been able to come in a much grander fashion that it did... but it wasn't meant to be. I hadn't been on iRacing in a few weeks and had the itch. So, I jumped on the sim and saw the IMSA series was racing at Sebring. Sweet, I love Sebring… and I love the Corvette C7 DP. I searched around and determined I had an old setup from late 2016 (for a day race). OK, not ideal... but, what's the worst that could happen?

I was able to practice for about 25 minutes prior to the race, so I didn't go in totally blind. I was ready to race, knowing I wouldn't have pace to win and maybe not even be competitive… but what the heck! The race server launched and it was really disappointing to see that I would be the lone Corvette DP in the race. L. A. M. E. I was bummed. So, my plan was to just take it easy for the race, as I should have had a super easy win and a great opportunity for a CLEAN (0x) race. Yeah... not quite. I managed to spin the car under braking about 4 times, run off track a few times under braking... all while racking up 11 incidents. Good grief. I got worried I was going to get 17 and be thrown from the race. If that would have happened, running all by myself, I would have crawled in a hole. Something was up with my brake pedal calibration and it caused all sorts of problems, but I think I got it fixed (mostly) after the race.

So... a not so glamorous 200th win, but I guess a 200th win none-the-less. I guess I'll try for 201 tonight.

Congrats Chuck... Nice Job!