In a surprise reveal last weekend during the 4 Hours of Charlotte special event benefitting the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, iRacing Senior Vice President and Executive Producer Greg Hill announced the addition of the Mt. Washington Auto Road to the service in time for the historic Subaru Mt. Washington Hillclimb.
The 7.6-mile Auto Road event nicknamed the “Climb to the Clouds” is a historic event that dates back to 1904. The road that travels up to the summit of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire is mostly road. There is a gravel section of the course near the top of it. There are no walls, barriers, guard rails, or anything else separating the road from the mountainside.
The area was scanned last year and will feature point-to-point racing, something that doesn’t inherently exist in iRacing at this moment. All of the tracks and venues on the iRacing service loop around a circuit one way or another. Despite some courses having a different starting and ending point, Mt. Washington will be the first true point-to-point track.
iRacing likes to tease fans, so it should come as no surprise that eagle-eyed members could see this coming since April. Back when the Formula Vee racecar was announced, it came with a fairly blank rendering of the car. There was a sticker on the rear of the car above the tire, but it was pretty tough to decipher exactly.
I watched the documentary about Travis Pastrana’s world record run up the mountain in 2017. After the run, he sticks a bumper sticker on the back of the car that reads “THIS CAR CLIMBED MT. WASHINGTON.” iRacing Digital Media Producer Cisco Scaramuzza tweeted in reference to the sticker after the track announcement, and now it all makes sense.
HOW IT CHANGES THE FUTURE
It’s cool to see another form of racing joining the ranks at iRacing, but that might not even be the biggest news to come out of the project. Hill shared some insight into the build process on Twitter. In one of the tweets, Hill talked about facing new issues never before faced on iRacing. Finding solutions to these issues created solutions for tracks they never considered.
Discussion