Formula 1 was a bit of a snooze fest last year and this year is shaping up to be the same. Red Bull/Max Verstappen is so much better than the rest of the field that the only way it’s an interesting race for the win is if Max crashes out or has some type of mechanical failure. If I were a Max/Red Bull fan this wouldn’t be so terrible, but I’m not and it’s been a bit grating to watch them dominate race after race.

My F1TV subscription is due to renew right after this weekend’s China race and I don’t think I’m going to do it. At least this year. Instead I think I’m going to get Peacock and start watching IndyCar, which I’ve never really followed before. I think the series is a lot more competitive and the races are more exciting. I’ve heard there are a lot of commercials during the coverage, which is a bummer. Conversely, the F1 coverage from F1TV is pretty amazing. You can watch all the practices and qualifying and there are a bunch of race weekend/pre-race shows, etc. And no commercials. But again, if the action is non-existent, it’s not that interesting.

I think I’m also going to give Rally.tv a shot for a month or two. I don’t think watching rallies live is all the interesting, but it might be. I really like watching the Red Bull highlights, but have never watched a full event. We’ll see how that goes.

So unless something crazy happens this weekend in China, I’m probably going to jump off the F1 ship for the greener pastures of IndyCar and WRC. I’ll definitely renew F1TV next year to watch Hamilton at Ferrari, though.

Ryan Gosling hosted SNL this past weekend and I thought he did a great job. I’m a sucker for SNL cast and guests breaking character and laughing and I don’t think there was a single sketch where Gosling and/or the cast weren’t on the verge of losing it. It seems like they were having a lot of fun, which of course made it a lot of fun to watch. That’s the point of SNL, right?

They created a follow-up video to the original Papyrus short, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It didn’t air during the show, but they posted that it would drop after the show. Perhaps not as funny as the first one (how could it be), but it’s still pretty clever. And Comic Sans again for the end logo? Font-nerdery at it’s finest. So happy they did this when they had Gosling available as the guest host.

Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC) has a pretty amazing replay system. When you save a replay it stores all of the info in a special file format that gets played back when you view the replay. All the information from the race is stored in the file, not just for your car, but for all cars, which lets you switch to any car in the race and select different views, etc. And since the replays aren’t actual video files, each replay file takes very little storage.

Unfortunately WRC doesn’t have a replay system like ACC, which is a bummer because being able to save your runs and review them later (or make clips, etc.) would be nice. To be fair, WRC does have replays but once you exit the run you’ve just done, you can no longer access the replay. Also, the controls within the replay are not great. For example, you can fast-forward and rewind, but you can’t drag the slider to a specific part of the replay, which is really annoying if it’s a 15 or 20 minute drive as you have to wait for the replay to advance on 4x speed.

All that said, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to record stages I run in some of the events I’m doing. Here’s a short example of what the “TV footage” camera view looks like. The switch to the overhead “drone view” is pretty cool. I just played the replay at the end of a stage and recorded a couple minutes of it. I’ll post what the in-car view looks like (i.e., what I see when driving) later on.

I rekindled my love for cycling last year after I bought a new-to-me Surly Midnight Special and started doing some gravel riding in our local foothills and mountains. I bought the Surly mostly because I love Surlys and have always wanted a more nimble steel bike. I’ve had a Surly Long Haul Trucker, which is steel, since 2011 and it’s probably been the best bike I’ve ever owned. It took me to-and-from work every day for years. It has taken me camping (and still does). It takes me to the grocery store and anywhere else I want to go that requires carrying stuff or keeping my feet dry. It’s old and a bit out-dated, but I love it.

As for the Midnight Special, it has that bullet-proof feel only a solid steel bike can provide. The huge tires eat up bumps and bad pavement, yet it’s still agile enough to make it fun to ride. I absolutely love riding it both on the road and on moderate gravel. As I got more into gravel riding, though, especially in the local foothills/mountains, I began thinking about getting something a bit lighter. Anyone who rides bikes (or motorcycles) knows there’s no perfect do-all bike. You have to make trade-offs. The Midnight Special is solid, yet fun to ride. But it’s a little heavy and doesn’t have the most relaxed geometry. So it can get a little sketchy on “the gnar,” as they say.

I spent a fair amount of time researching bikes and came across some pretty cool ones that were direct-to-consumer only. Lauf, which is an Iceland outfit, has a really unique gravel bike that features their famous (or infamous, depending on your view), front fork. Their Seigla is billed as more of a racing bike and it doesn’t have any mount points for bikepacking so I kind of ruled that one out.

I also really like the looks of the Trek Checkpoint although it’s a bit more expensive than some of the other options (I think you pay a premium for the Trek brand). However, having access to a local dealer that can provide support appeals to me so I haven’t ruled out a Trek.

The other interesting bike I found was from a company in Utah named Fezzari. Well, they were named “Fezzari,” but recently changed their name to “Ari”. They’ve been saying that they wanted to “Better articulate our identity” with the name change, but I think it’s because so many people hated the name Fezzari. The comments in nearly every review or Reddit post about their bikes would spin off into a conversation about how horrible their name is and how folks would never buy one of their bikes because the name is so embarrassing. I wasn’t nuts about “Fezzari” but it didn’t bother me enough to not consider buying one. They have a carbon gravel bike named Shafer, which might be a sign since that’s the name of one of our cats (who is named after the local mountain where I do most of my bikepacking and gravel riding). It looks like a really solid bike that checks all of the boxes for what I’m looking for, except the direct-to-customer bit, I guess.

I told myself and, more importantly, my wife, that I was not going to succumb to the urge to buy another new bike this year and just stick with the Midnight Special since I think I can make that work for the rides I’m doing. As I mentioned, it can be a little sketchy on some of the really rough stuff, but I tend to be pretty cautious so I’m not too worried about it. I still have my old Look 585 for road rides, which I do occasionally. It’s on its last legs, though, so at some point I’ll need to get a gravel bike that works well enough for road riding, too. Maybe 2025!

You have a couple options when playing racing games: you can race against computer-created opponents, generally called “AI” or you can race online against other humans. For the latter usually the game will connect you to a server that shows you upcoming races and some details about them (e.g., start time, virtual location (aka track), how long, how many people registered, etc.). You can then jump in and start racing, which usually ends in tears (aka lots of crashes) because it’s anonymous and random. You may be driving next to someone who’s been playing for years or someone who bought the game 10 minutes ago and is just messing around. Or worse, someone who wants to cause mayhem and crash people on purpose. Game designers try to put controls in place (e.g., safety ratings, rankings, etc.) to keep races clean, but it’s a difficult problem to solve. Which leads me to another aside that I think is unique about racing games.

In a typical video game, you try to dispatch your opponents in whatever way you can, as long as you follow the rules. Racing is weird because while your goal is to be faster than your opponent, you also need to cooperate with them. It’s obvious that to be fair and within the rules you can’t run people off the road or crash into them. But less obvious is the delicate dance that happens when you’re truly racing someone. For example, you need to give opponents room when you’re side-by-side in a corner. You can’t dive-bomb or make moves that are unpredictable and dangerous. You need to respect the other driver and cooperate with them, yet still compete with them.

As you can imagine, doing this online, even in the best of circumstances with people you know and race with a lot, is fraught with problems. People make mistakes or over-estimate their abilities, which causes crashes. Or there are simply different interpretations of “who owns the corner” or if a move was fair or not. There are a thousand other scenarios that can end someone’s race.

Here’s probably the worst scenario when it comes to league sim racing. Say your league has a weekly race that everyone knows about in advance. You spend hours practicing and working on your car setup. (Yeah, literally, hours.) The night of the race comes and you spend an hour doing the pre-race practice session with everyone. Then there’s a 20 minute qualifying session. You do well and are in P3, right in the second row. The race starts and you all rush down the main straight towards the first corner. As you enter the corner someone behind you has missed their braking marker and hits you from behind. Your car spins around and 25 cars rush past you. Your car is damaged and you can’t really drive it so you have to retire from the race. So the 12 hours you spent preparing for the race are over in 35 seconds and you finished in last place.

This happens frequently enough to where it can cause you to question why you spend the time. But it’s not all doom-and-gloom. There are times when you prepare for a race and it ends up being amazing. You have a bunch of intense and respectful battles, survive the race, and have a great time. And this is why you keep racing online with other humans – you’re continually chasing that high you get every now and then when the stars align and something magical happens.

Rallying, though, is a different beast since it’s only time trials. So the format works really well for online racing. You can create a rally event with multiple locations, each with a certain number of stages. You set a start date and an end date for each location and participants simply need to complete their stages before the end date. No hassles trying to find a time for 30+ people to race once a week. No races ended by someone else smashing into you.

Some of the best things about the previous Dirt Rally 2.0 were the daily, weekly, and monthly online rallies that were built right into the game. Every day you could start up the game and find a few different rallies to race. Some only had a single stage, but others had a few stages. Some only lasted the day and others ran for a week or a month. It was really cool to practice for the stages and then see how you compared to other drivers.

Unfortunately, the new WRC game doesn’t have that exact same setup, but they do have this concept of clubs, which is really cool. (I think DR2.0 had clubs as well, but I never really used that feature when I played it.) Anyone can create a club and setup whatever rallies they want, choosing the car class, location, weather, time of day, number of stages, etc. People can then join the club via the Racenet website and get access to the rallies right in the game interface. I’m really impressed with how slick it is and that the website has built-in telemetry and comparison data for all the runs. It’s really, really neat.

Racenet combined with Discord has allowed a bunch of different groups to create pretty vibrant communities that run daily/weekly/monthly rallies and special event rallies. I’m starting to get involved in a couple of them and will probably be writing about it more. Now I just need to get my driving up to speed.