A hotfix for 2022 iRacing Season 4 Patch 1 was released on Thursday (22nd September 2022) and in it, a recent issue that creeped into the equation for the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series in their most recent event at Bristol Motor Speedway was hopefully resolved.
During the race, eNASCAR Playoff driver Matt Bussa was involved in an incident around lap 100 of the 175 lap event. The ensuing incident, which also involved fellow playoff contender Casey Kirwan, wound up costing Bussa enough time on the track during the yellow flag slow down lap that it trapped him behind the pace car, but still ahead of the leader on the tail end of the lead lap.
Normally, the game will do one of two things in these situations. Either it will wave a driver around if they are between the leader and the pacecar, or if the game determines that they were involved in the caution to an extent, it will send them to the tail end of the line. At shorter tracks, however, a few iRacers reported in official and unofficial races that they found this procedure to be glitched at times.
Apparently, in this scenario, the game got confused on the matter and overlapped itself, causing Bussa and later Garrett Manes to become the control car for the restart by simultaneously waving them around and sending them to the end of the line. When their cars entered the new iRacing Start Zone, the race restarted incorrectly, and also provided black flags to those drivers for ignoring Start Zone procedures.
Bussa would serve his penalty and ultimately finish 28th, multiple laps down following another incident later in the race. Manes, on the other hand, was able to get his penalty cleared by race control, but the race restarted in the middle of Turn 3 as a result with the pace car still on track.
Essentially, these incidents would not affect the playoff picture too much besides originally trapping Bussa laps down before he wrecked out again later, but there is a bit of scuttlebutt that there may be something updated in the playoff format in time for next week’s race at Talladega and the Playoff Finale at Homestead-Miami. We’ll have to wait and see if this is the case.
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