It's been at least a couple of years since I did any organized, online racing, and I had also pretty much drifted away from sim racing in general. At my "peak" a few years ago, I was actively involved for about four seasons (and part of a fifth) with the Virtual Online Racers (the VOR league) and was part of the 2005 Team Series Championship team, bringing home four victories for the team in the "B" Division.

The VOR Team Series league was a lot of fun, and the camaraderie was great, but I let myself become intensely competitive towards the end of my tenure there and the amount of preparation I was putting in was starting to take its toll, especially once our second daughter came along. Around the same time, I managed to go negative in the GPL Rank, and by that point I was starting to experience a bit of burn-out.

Between the "burn-out," the sense of accomplishment that came with FINALLY going negative in the GPLRank, and the fact that GPL was beginning to feel a bit stale and repetitive, I pretty much just walked away from racing sims for a while.

I played around with GT Legends for a while when it first came out, but even after upgrading first to a GeForce 6600GT and then to a GeForce 6800, my old Athlon XP-based computer just wasn't able to run GTL in a manner that was truly satisfying, so after attempting to participate in some casual online competitions with the NASRL folks, I even gave up on that.

Around this time, my venerable TSW2 from Thomas Enterprises began to show some extreme signs of wear. I had replaced the pots several times, but the old, original wiring was starting to look pretty ragged. My TSW2 was one of the earlier ones produced, and it was wired for combined brake-and-throttle (not split-axis support) -- and if you're paying attention, this means that I was able to go negative in GPLRank (and win races online) as a right-foot braker, which is no small accomplishment.

Given my technical/engineering background, I decided a few months ago to attempt to rewire the TSW2 myself. This took a couple of weeks, but I was able to put together a very nice and neat wiring harness with quick-disconnect terminal blocks similar to what Thomas Enterprises uses on their current products (sometimes you just gotta love Radio Shack). Once I got it back together I started to piddle around with GPL again with the idea of trying to go negative at the Ring (one of only two tracks that I haven't gone negative at yet). I also looked into what was up with the VOR folks, but after a week or so of putzing around, I lost interest.

The allure of GPL just wasn't strong enough anymore to lure me back into the sim racing fold.

GT Legends, though, still kept beckoning -- there was undiscovered country there, and it kept nagging at me. After a series of recent computer upgrades (I'm now running an Athlon 64 3000+ running at 2.45Ghz, along with an ATI Radeon X800XL video card), I discovered that I could now run GTL with no lag, no stuttering, and with higher graphic settings than ever before. At fairly high graphic settings, I can now run GTL with a full AI field and my frames-per-second (fps) never drops below 75-80, which is much, MUCH more driveable than the stuttering 35-40 fps I was experiencing previously.

Then I discovered the Power & Glory mod for GTR2 -- the vintage cars from GTL dressed-out in physics that more closely replicated their original form, complete with vintage tyres (as opposed to the more modern FIA-approved bias-ply reproductions). This was pretty cool, but what was even cooler was the fact that the P&G mod for GTR2 actually ran BETTER than GTL did on my new hardware.

It didn't take long before I realized I was hooked.

After playing around with the P&G mod for a while, I began to realize that it really was more than just a simply "add-on" for GTR2. I'm not much of a modern GT fan, so I began to wonder what it would take to replace the modern carbon-fibre GTR2 menu screens with something more befitting the vintage cars in the P&G mod. Before I knew it, I was hip-deep again in game modding as I started developing what eventually became the V1.0 P&G add-on menus for GTR2.

As I dove into the P&G community (and thus the GTR2 community), I was thrilled to discover a wealth of vintage tracks that had been converted to GTR2 -- including some of the original '67 tracks from GPL, as well as a variety of third-party add-on vintage tracks that others had created for GPL.

RAPTURE!

Anyway, here I am now, busy putting in laps at Mid-Ohio, preparing to participate in my first Vintage GT Pre-Season race with the NASRL folks.

For the first time in a long time, I'm having fun with racing sims again, which is very cool.

I hadn't driven any version of Mid-Ohio since way, WAY back in the IndyCar Racing II days (which was truly glorious if you were lucky enough to own a Rendition video card). Needless to say, Mid-Ohio was going to be a learning experience, but after several days' worth of practice there, I'm finally getting into the groove.

It's been great fun getting back into the "learning" mode again -- remembering markers and landmarks to learn the track layout, finding your braking points, discovering how things change as your tyres wear and your fuel burns off, trimming first tenths and then whole seconds off your laptimes, seeing your PBs drop down into levels that at least begin to approach the laptimes posted by others in the league, coming to grips with the learning curve associated with mastering left-foot braking techniques, etc.. As they say, when the student is ready, the master will appear -- and for me, the current master is the P&G mod for GTR2.

Seeing one's mastery of of a sim begin to emerge can be truly rewarding, and when things really began to "click" I immediately remembered WHY I love sim racing so much: When you hit that point where the immersion level and your suspension of disbelief begin to merge, you completely forget that you're just "playing a game," and a good lap can be every bit as exhilarating and rewarding as a good lap in a real race car . . . or pretty darn close, anyway.

That's where I am now: Things are starting to "click" and I'm not far enough behind the learning curve that I feel hopeless and -- most important of all -- I'm having fun again.

Not just fun -- GREAT fun . . . and it's good to be back in the groove again.