In the blink of an eye the damage is done.

“Fucking first lap heroes!” a voice screams through my headphones.

“Race ruined already, brilliant” another sarcastically concedes.

Both of those unhappy chappies are talking about me, or more directly what I’ve done during the first lap of a Skip Barber race at Laguna Seca in the subscription-only sim, iRacing.

Even though the interaction between car and track is entirely simulated with pixels, models and algorithms replacing the nuts and bolts of rubber meeting road, the feelings of guilt are immediately real as I misjudge the entry to Laguna Seca’s beloved corkscrew section resulting in me clipping and spinning a fellow human driver ninety degrees, which in turn tangles us together creating an unavoidable obstacle for a trio of drivers behind.

The details of the accident aren’t important, what is important is the amount of anger which descended upon my eardrums post-tangling.

For the record I drove into him.

The multiple drivers affected, five including me if you’d like to keep count, soon quitted out in a rage as they discovered their cars were irreversibly damaged. For all intents and purposes, I had made the efforts of several people and their multiple hours worth of mastering every apex of Laguna along with tinkering with setups absolutely worthless. I was the villain and they were the riding wounded, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After limping to the pits to get my car fixed, I toured around for a few more laps letting the leaders through a multiple thoughts ran through my head. Was that accident my fault? Could the other driver have given me more room? And then an even bigger question bounded in, why do people take iRacing so seriously?

My front wheel a few corners before it got mangled.

You see, it’s easy to blame somebody else when you’ve made an error, especially in motor sport. There are always two opinions on every accident, but it becomes pretty clear after I watch the replay that I was 100% at fault for the accident and the aftermath of it which ruined my fellow competitor’s evenings. They had practiced for hours, worked hard on setting a good qualifying time during the session prior and I suspect sat on the grid eagerly awaiting the start lights to go green. And that excitement would have probably continued for 14 more laps if I didn’t come along a minute into the race and make all that preparation go to waste.

I feel like some kind of ‘wrestling heel’ who didn’t practice enough, and others paid for my incompetence. Sure it’s just a game, but iRacing is a bit more than that.

Racing games are two-a-penny nowadays, but iRacing’s users deliberately flock to the service due its interactive safety rating which punishes the crashers and bashers, and in one single act I’ve transformed their haven of safety into just another one-time fee, wreckfest racing game.

My remorse wasn’t complete though until as I posted an apology on the forum for the series afterwards, telling others of my four-wheeled folly. The internet’s equivalent of sitting on the naughty step and being essentially forced to accept your faults.

“Why hello there camper.”

Guilt isn’t something you hear about in games much, but iRacing completely has it in spades. Anyone who has been part of the service for any length of time has been on the other end of wreck that isn’t their fault, so they too know the feeling of all their hard work being instantly undone by the carelessness of another. When you find yourself being the singular catalyst to ruining another’s experience – well it doesn’t feel great.

It isn’t the loss of a good position that makes the mistake so frustrating though. Me and my compadre in the carnage were battling for 16th and 17th respectively. Really it’s the act of missing out on some great competitive wheel-to-wheel action that irks people so. That palpable sense of competitive joy which is felt when your grit, determination and apex aiming are tested to their limits in against a similarly skilled human being  That’s what the appeal of motor racing is all about, both simulated and real-life, and to see that potential get wasted before you even cross the start/finish line once can understandably cause to chat channel to suddenly fill with swears and accusations.

These sorts of things will happen again, but then it wouldn’t be iRacing if they didn’t.

Obviously nobody got physically hurt by my actions at Laguna Seca that night, but the disappointment felt by all was palpable and frankly they were right to call me the worst of all labels in racing lexicon; a “Fucking First Lap Hero”. Mistakes breed more mistakes if not properly pounced upon, and that lesson is true in both life and games which is perhaps why multiplayer gaming communities police themselves so passionately.

So of course the big question is, will this experience and the instant condemnation of my fellow racers cause me to change my ways and race cleaner in the future? Probably not to be honest, as it was my lack of judgement that caused the coming together, not foolish ambition. However if the same thing happens to me again, only with me being the innocent party rather than the clumsy aggressor, I’ll absolutely turn the air blue with curse words against the foolish soul who ended my race so unjustly. I’ll cast a feeling of wrath upon them that is so allencompasing that they’ll serious consider whether they want to get behind the simulated wheel again.  After all, it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the community if I didn’t now would it?