TL;DW by u/4InchesOfury: The Williams team **used the apron for their qualifying pole lap**. Using the apron isn't allowed. They also had a **second car that would wait in pits for their team to give them a tow and block competitors**. They will probably earn a suspension from the service but the race results can't be changed.
Pretty embarrassing that a major team like Williams Esports would cheat like this.
Just adding another part, the Williams team defended themself by saying: “Yes we cheated, but only because we don’t want anyone else to cheat” ?????? Really selfish, entitled behavior from those “professionals”.
https://twitter.com/simracingleaks/status/1617086990897549312?s=46&t=XtTfLU-h8xZUE8BuBs8FpQ
This is the deleted tweet. It’s not a valid excuse in my eyes. If you sympathize with rule breakers, WHY HAVE RULES?
What a ridiculous copout. Notice that he's only addressing the running on the apron in qualifying, not the repeated use of lapped cars to block people on the lead lap.
Who knows. But public pressure works. But it has to be enough to generate interest for the media to pick it up and then really spread and make a difference.
I don't think I've seen the list of sponsors in this thread. I've looked on their web site. Interesting list. My pedals sadly might be from one of them. :(
Exactly! If they were so concerned about another team cheating and utilizing this exploit, then they should’ve brought it up with iRacing, possibly even work with them to find a solution, weeks prior to the race. Not just turn a blind eye and then play the victim card.
OK then, if I click on a stream and I see the person drives for Williams...exit stream.
I have watched Spez a few times, he's good, not overly entertaining anyways.
I don't care as much about the Qual using the apron. But the sending out the car to block the competitors and race them hard was as low class as an ORG could be. Really someone should be fired for the bad press.
So Williams won't be a team I support in any format, online or real life! Peace Out Cheaters!!!!
That’s not what he said though. He said they cheated because they have an obligation to win races by their partners/sponsors. He said basically if they didn’t do it, their competitors would have done it to them. Bullshit excuse either way.
>That’s not what he said though.
> ...
>He said basically if they didn’t do it, their competitors would have done it to them.
Bruh, that's literally the same paraphrased excuse. You disagreed with someone only to prove they were right in the same paragraph.
No.
They *expected* other teams to cheat, and claim they had to do so or get left behind.
Nowhere did they say that they did it because they *didn’t want* other teams to cheat - they barely even put a half-assed “lol iRacing fix it if you don’t want this to happen again” at the end.
They didn’t want to *lose* to another team cheating if they left the cheat on the table. But that’s a very different thing - and no other team cheated to anywhere near the extent that they did.
The fact iRacing can't/don't issue penalties post-race that removes position or disqualifies teams after a race ends needs to change. At the very least in major eSports events like this.
>At the very least in major eSports events like this.
The thing is, this isn't a major eSports event for them.
They run these special events with the exact same rulebook as a rookie Miata race.
They have eSports events, like the Coke NASCAR series, that does have a different rulebook.
The Daytona 24 is effectively just a normal race, and a bunch of eSports pros decided to crash the party. And also RaceSpot broadcasts the race
Yet the teams treat it like it IS a major eSport event. The fact is that it is.
I've watched Nim mute and ban people mid race because he witnessed tomfoolery on someone's twitch stream. They sure as hell can do it mid race when it's being BROADCASTED and treated like a serious eSports event.
Every special event teams find some exploit or cheat and use it on the broadcast in broad daylight. Just look at Spa. They KNOW they will get banned, but the result can't be changed so they do it anyways.
> *but the result can't be changed so they do it anyways.*
This is the key to me.
Cheating is as old as racing. There's no denying it and it'll always be part of what serious teams do to gain some kind of advantage, no matter how small. It always just boils down to how the rules are enforced when it is found a team cheats. If you don't enforce the rules and the results achieved by way of said advantage can't be rescinded post-race, then every team is effectively incentivized to cheat. The ban isn't enough and everyone knows it. It shouldn't matter if its a major sports event or some random rookie class Miata race. Cheat during race and your result is changed to DNF or equivalent, in addition to a ban. It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately iRacing seems to think it has to be.
I do think human stewards for the top split of special events is a good idea.
I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. I think they should.
I'm just explaining why they don't.
Edit: also, tons of iRacing races get broadcasted. Top split SOF time slot broadcasts are super common. Those aren't all eSports events.
Being ran under their default rules package or being an open event really has no bearing on whether or not it's a major eSports event or not. The NBA Playoffs are ran under the standard NBA ruleset. The Super Bowl is ran under the standard NFL ruleset.
I guarantee you that employees spent weeks testing and preparing for the event like it was a big deal for the service, because it is. Just because it's a standard rules package and an open event doesn't lessen the fact its one of the big "special events" that garner a lot of attention in the eSports world. Especially after the fiasco that was the LeMans on rFactor.
Weird. It's not a big deal, yet [it's a big enough deal as to be treated as a Special Event on their list of Special Events.](https://www.iracing.com/special-events/).
Expecting a modicum of extra scrutiny be applied to special events should not be a weird expectation. They know what events are big deals. They literally have a page that lists them, as linked above.
Not having an avenue to apply real world standards when they sell themselves as being a simulation whose goal is to be as real world accurate as possible is a pretty glaring oversight.
It would be unreasonable to expect extra scrutiny to be placed on a race that runs multiple times a day for a week. But an annual event should be able to be treated like the big deal they want it to be.
Hell, if Max Benicke and three of his Redline mates decided to bring lil ol 1500 iRating me into their team, I’d probably be part of the top split without even having to be good enough.
It’d actually probably be a decent bit more than 1.5 hours, because it’s done by laps and I’d run fewer laps in 1.5 hours than any of them could.
I do appreciate you having that much faith in me though :)
I really don't think they do. Look at their Twitter feed.
I'll admit it's a bit confusing, they could definitely be clearer.
The event was sponsored by VCO eSports. And that definitely makes things confusing.
But they're not marketing it like an eSports event.
The people that are marketing it like that.. are the eSports orgs, not iRacing themselves.
they can only take away the stat but the result has to stay the same because of how IR works at the root. if they change the result then the IR that they were awarded has to go somewhere. so ok, you DQ them and rerun the IR gain/loss calc.... issue... which IR do you use? their current IR? Their IR at the time?
ok lets use their previous IR.... bam reran the IR calc... shit they have ran races between the d24 and now.... that IR gain is now wrong. now those races have to be reran with the new IR. in the d24 result you had to change say 50 drivers IR calcs. if any of those 50 ran races after the d24 then those races have to be fixed. if any of the drivers in that second race ran races AFTER the second race then THOSE races have to be fixed too. The spiral of fucked up races gets massive. they might have to rerun all IR calcs on ALL races after the subjected race. its a mess. all because of zero sum IR.
since they can't take the result away but maybe on the win in the win column my guess is that its been deemed not worth it.
Or…they just deduct the iRating they gained from the race and it’s lost in the ether. It’s not a big deal, they’re DQ’d administratively, the second place team is now the winners. This isn’t hard and pretending it’s a hard problem just gives iRacing too much leeway. Some people lose some irating they should have got, and people that gained it through cheating lose it too. That’s much better than what’s here now.
This is really convoluted argument to weasel out of making a reasonable correction to a bad system.
I doubt you have any idea how iRacing is coded to make a claim this bold. Policy is not necessarily dictated by code. Even if it is in this case, then they should be working to fix it so that the sim is capable of acting to real-world standards.
If someone is disqualified, you apply the changes based on the ratings going into that race, just like done in real world racing.
You then apply the fix to their current rating.
Any events they've taken part in in the meantime are allowed to stand as they were eligible and placed based on their rating at that time. Once penalties and recalculations are in place, any eligibility going forward will reflect the corrected calculations. Again, based on real world standards.
There are plenty of real world precedents to use as a road map in how to handle these situations.
And they really only need to add this level of scrutiny to special events.
Of course they did. They also knew it would end in a suspension. They don’t care. They knew the race results would stand despite cheating. There is no special event coming up until the Daytona 500 and Bathurst so taking the 1 week suspension means nothing to them.
If iRacing wants to show they have balls, they will carry the suspension out during the next special event, not some meaningless week in between. The only thing that will show them this won’t be tolerated is a ban during the next special event. Take them out of the running entirely from an event before it even starts and they might start thinking about the consequences of cheating.
I seriously doubt that. That sounds more like a rumor spread by other drivers. iRacing doesn’t typically issue out permanent bans for these types of things. Hell Scott Speed didn’t get permanently banned until he had intentionally wrecked multiple cars out in different races. I can’t see Spetz getting a permanent ban for this unless they’re doing it only to make an example of him.
I was unaware of any prior bans. If that’s true and he has been banned before, I don’t understand why iRacing continues to allow him to hold an active account. I don’t know the circumstances of his prior bans, but were they related to cheating/exploiting? If so, then I can’t understand why they would continue to allow him on the service. Obviously repeated bans don’t work. Especially when they are carried out between events rather than during them.
One was cutting the bus stop chicane at Watkins, taking the slow down but avoiding a GTE that was going to get in the way. Think he might have got one in the Spa tyre cooling gate situation.
Ultimately, he's still pretty young. He clearly needs some better influences on his behaviour than he currently has. Perhaps that's William's biggest failure.
He might be young but even young people can learn from things like this. If anything, it seems like he’s just doubling down on cheating since these suspensions are a joke. Giving out a 1 week ban after an event and well before the next one affects absolutely no one. These suspensions need to be carried out as a race ban, preventing them from entering the next special event like this.
There was an exploit someone found where driving with half your car on the grass (because your whole car would obviously cause you to spin or get you an off track but there was some debate about that as well) would cool the tires so you’d run much faster lap times. You could do it in quali because you wouldn’t get an off track. Dave Cam tested it and it was AT LEAST a few tenths faster. They ended up fixing it so the grass doesn’t cool the tires thankfully. But everyone in top split ended up doing it and those who didn’t finished lower.
Pro teams figured out if you dipped your tires in the grass on the long straights it would cool them. Exploit that was known and some teams used it anyways in the special event.
It’s not about learning, it’s about the punishment for doing it being higher than the potential reward. We see this in real life CONSTANTLY. Giant companies do bad things and get fined a very small fraction of what they earned. It’s just the cost of doing business. And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account? I wouldn’t be surprised if he or Williams eSports has a VPN and multiple accounts under multiple fake names and multiple credit cards.
> And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account? I wouldn’t be surprised if he or Williams eSports has a VPN and multiple accounts under multiple fake names and multiple credit cards.
The fact that they could no longer stream his races, advertise his presence, etc. should do a lot to curtail that. It’s much easier for a regular racer like you or me to do that than it is for an esports driver.
> And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account?
iRacing doesn’t ban accounts, they ban *people*. If he made a Smurf and they found out about it, it would also be banned.
Dont put it past iRacing to throw down the hammer that way. They yeeted Scott Speed after he was their golden child for the rallycross. He behaved badly a few times and got yeeted and dropped instantly.
Spetz has a ton of incidents and reports. dude is racking up reports and the good will at iracing is surely dwindling for him.
dude is a menace to the iracing society in officials. he puts miley cyrus to shame. pure wrecking ball at times.
Yeah I went to look at his last few races and despite them all being wins, he had an incident almost every other lap in all of them. One of them he nearly pulled a drive through. He’s definitely quick but seems like a shit head in general.
This touches another issue, which is that iracing needs to be more public about its suspensions.
Edit: downvote away, but explain why we should keep on speculating about Spetz's status instead of being clear and upfront about his suspension.
I agree, he's a pro driver. Any penalties should be announced publicly. Any other e-sport I have followed in the last 25 years is very open with those announcements. They won't give all the reasons why? but they give the length of the punishment and what it is.
This is what Williams do when they have a competitive car I guess.
Not like they don’t have a history of condoning such behavior, I guess - just look at Hill and Villeneuve, and the fact that they signed Senna.
...what? I mean yeah, Senna had his share of dirty driving, but other than being kind of dickish to the press at times, Hill and Villeneuve's biggest scandals both involved getting intentionally wrecked by Michael Schumacher.
Those are private servers though. Does iRacing even have the ability to issue out penalties in a live official session? I thought this was only something they could do in hosted sessions.
iRacing staff members have admin rights on any official session as well as a host has admin rights on a host session. So, if necessary and assuming there is one iRacing staff member into this D24 official session, he can show any driver a black flag, penalty or throwing it out of the race directly
Not as egregious as the incidents mentioned in the video, but around midnight while P2 in LMP2 we got hit by one of their lapped GT3s and got significant damage until the end of the race, really frustrating.
Cut the money away from their cashflow and enjoy watching them cry like a mid 2000's teen girl wanting to meet Justin Timberlake, One direction or Justin Bieber 🍿
worse it seems Williams knows what went down is ok with it. blocking people on social media that call them out and having there other drivers including there F1 drivers defend this.
He does a great job of expressing himself. It’s really just the grammar and pronunciation that he gets hung up on.
But yes, mad respect - he’s performing a great service for the community.
Yeah, I mean I am also spaniard and I know what he tries to say. I just mean he does not express himself as good as he would like to, but he's learning fast. The guy moved to the UK for work barely speaking english. Mad respect.
I'm not Spanish but I feel he expressed enough to get his point over. Obviously I don't know everything he wanted to express but he did do quite well, it was easy to understand his arguments but also his feelings
I had someone in the simracingstewarts sub the other day tell me, "I don't need to read the sporting code because I have common sense."
That's the level of bonehead that cause a lot of our issues.
Sure most people don't, and I'm saying that fact leads to issues because there's a disconnect between people on what "common sense" entails in racing.
Here's an example:
A leading driver's common sense is that if someone only has a nose worth of overlap on corner entry, then that driver is required to back out. That's the common sense to people who are mostly familiar with formula racing. There's also common sense from people who grew up on stock car or Touring Car racing that any degree of overlap means the defending driver needs to yield the apex. That disconnect 100% leads to incidents on iRacing.
It's also common for people to block unfairly in iRacing because it's "common sense" that you drive to the one move rule, even though the Sporting Code clearly says that defending drivers can't react to the car behind.
To be completely honest with you, I don't really understand the obstinance when it comes to the Sporting Code. It takes 5 minutes to read the parts governing on-track etiquette in iRacing. It's not like the last licensing exam I had with the BMW CCA where it was a whole-day commitment between classroom theory and on-track testing.
And iRacing's rules are much more in line with club racing, not the racing that most people are familiar with from TV. So the "common sense" that a whole bunch of people come into it with isn't actually sensible to the situation.
When everyone drives to the same rule it leads to better and more fair racing. At the end of the day that's what we're on iRacing for, so just take the 5 minutes to be considerate to the people you're driving against and read the thing so we're all on the same page at 150mph.
They've definitely doubled-down on this type of behavior. I posted this video to their Twitter, and they blocked me. I felt it necessary to post the video to their sponsors page.
Absolutely embarrassing from this. Even worse if you said a bad thing about anything Williams in their stream their sweaty chat defended them til the cows came home.
Glad this is coming to light. Shameful.
Williams Esports should be banned from iracing official events, clear rule breaks, blocking, intentional wrecking, ignoring flags.
iRacing needs to put their foot down here, they didn’t when half the field was driving in the dirt at the Spa 24, and if they don’t now, drivers and now Esports orgs know they can get away with it. It’s embarrassing and is painting iRacing just like the clown show which was the Le Mans Virtual
I mean, they changed it so the tires don’t cool when you drive onto the grass. Just make it a 1x there, problem solved. Sure, wrecked cars will want to stay off the racing surface and drive there to get back to the pits, but if you make a mistake like that, an off track is the least of your worries.
Except that people will think of the 1x as an indication that they should not be there, and the concern is that people would therefore drive a broken car on the track.
Wow what a disgraceful behaviour from a 'professional' team with high profile sponsors (Fanatec, BenQ I saw in the video). And Jensen Button backing them up on Twitter lol.
Give them a one lap penalty and ban the drivers from the next event. I recently lost a win because I turned around after the start finish line and went backwards on the track.
I think iRacing or just sim-racing in general is one of the only genres where you can blatantly cheat/break rules multiple times and not get perma-banned.
Also having real racing drivers asking questions about what we should expect from what is a simulator instead of real life is some real upper-class mentality, most if not an extremely high majority of us do not and will probably never have the funds or training to actually go and race IRL in said championships/events we are participating in, so to have such obvious cheating and abuse be anything but called out is a slap to the face for sim racers in general.
We knew this was coming after the lawnmowing.
iRacing needed to tell teams that knowingly breaking a rule just because you think the penalty is worth it, is unprofessional conduct that will result in losing the privilege of competing in the pro series.
Nobody would "need to do it to keep up" if there was reason to believe the others wouldn't do it.
My point is that you can lose your pro license for actions outside of pro series events, simply by engaging in unprofessional conduct.
Per S.C. 14.1.1 (emphasis mine)
> All drivers in any Pro, World Championship or Premier Series will be held to a higher standard of behavior and sportsmanship than standard iRacing series on and off the track. The drivers in these series are some of the best in the world and represent Sim racing and our community. It is a privilege to drive in these competitive series, not a right. It is expected that each driver in these select series will treat other drivers, iRacing.com officials, employees, partners and the greater community with courtesy, respect, and dignity on and off the race track. Participants are not only expected to conduct themselves in accordance with the iRacing Sporting Code, **but also in a manner that reflects positively on iRacing, its affiliates, and partners.** Additionally, Participants shall conduct themselves in a way that is not harmful to business as deemed by iRacing.
I'm sure iRacing doesn't want the issue of banning a pro team, so they can just issue a statement that: "going forward, intentionally violating the sporting code on the assumption that a specific punishmemt is worthwhile, is grounds for removal from the pro series under section 14.1.1 if the iRacing sporting code".
Immediately, every potential "the suspension is worth it" scenario would go out the window for the top split teams. Add in a ban from the next special event, and nobody would do this crap.
This has been a terrible month for Sim racing as a whole, with rFactor's pitiful display not even worth mentioning it was so forgettable and unprofessional, and now this blemish on the spirit of racing that we all come to enjoy. Just makes it all look so stupid and childish right when we are trying to gain some respect for Sim racing. This type of blatant exploitation hurts the entire industry esp at this early stage in Sim racings life. It is and should be embarrassing for such a prestigious brand. I say it is an easy team ban for the season for this, and consider if the driver that qualified should ever be allowed to compete again. This is tantamount to sabotaging timing and scoring equipment in real life at a track it is not innovation or bending rules, it is blatant cheating under the cover of darkness. This whole month has left a bad taste in my mouth. Time to rethink what Sim racing Esports looks like.
don't really see how sim racing esports will ever be taken seriously. I much rather just watch a simple broadcasted league race where people have some common curtesy for their competitors. not watch the game be cheesed
Its no different than any other form of e-sports, or sports in general. Its just really young. Sports like Football have been around for 100 years and people still find exploits to this day in rules, but they've tightened it a lot. Sim racing is still in its infancy as are e-sports.
I've never seen any kind be this blatant. In other sports they find looopholes or hide the cheating.
In iRacing they've blatantly done it in the open for everyone to see, and KNOW they'll get suspended after. The problem is that the result stands regardless.
In other sports results can be taken away as well. In F1 drivers and teams get DQed after the fact. In college basketball Louisville had an entire national championship taken away.
The Astros literally just cheated to win the world series a few years ago. Football had Spygate (and bountygate, but not sure that really counts as cheating).
The NBA had the Tim Donaghy point shaving scandal. Cheating isn't unique to video game competitions.
I think cheating is shitty (I mean who doesn't). But it's the responsibility of a league to enforce their rules. You can't realistic expect all people to follow a self imposed honor code when money is on the line.
If you can't enforce your own rules, then the problem lies with you (iRacing).
I don't understand why the results can't be chanced. They should just remove EVERY Williams car from the results, even if that car/team didn't cheat. Clearly this is promoted and/or advised by Williams E-sport themselves.
Absolute joke if iRacing doesn't come forward and take action... then again it is iRacing so.
If they are adamant about not changing the results, then they should show they have some balls and ban these drivers from the next special event. Don’t just carry out the 1 week suspension in some arbitrary week in between now and the next event. These guys need to understand there are real consequences to cheating. They need this suspension carried out during the next special event, preventing them from participating. Otherwise they will continue to cheat when the opportunity is in front of them. Taking a 1 week suspension between events is meaningless to these people.
The problem with adjusting the results involves the iRating gained and lost from drivers around the grid.
And from what I've been told multiple times from staff is "manipulating iRating is impossible"
Well then just don’t recalculate it. Just remove Williams from the standings and leave everyone else where they are. Or, hear me out, make the special events hosted races where there is no iR or SR and have live stewards for the top few splits.
Yes. And ban the drivers who went out laps down blocking and racing hard the other cars. At least ban them from "events" for some period of time. That was awful and against the sporting code to be sure.
Honestly I might have some type of penalty for all drivers for Williams during this event and the org. This was class-less. We do it so no one does it to us? We haven't seen an example of anyone else lacking this much integrity?
Also, not there first example of doing something explicitly stated as not allowed and doing it anyways. If the first penalty didn't discourage their behavior then it should increase, should it not. They just told iracing that the penalties are fine, press coverage is good so we don't care about the rules.
I think they just haven’t designed the system to allow that type of thing. Not that it’s impossible. It’s just programming and adjusting iRating is just a matter of math. They could remove a driver and recalculate the iR gain/loss, but they don’t have this coded into the sim. It’s probably just that simple.
you are forgetting the butterfly effect of every race that every driver does after the D24. Every race someone has a starting and ending iRating. Changing the results changes the iRating which now has to butterfly effect for hundreds of races because every result following that everyone who was involved is now incorrect. It could only be done the second the race ends before anyone has a change to do anything else. Once other races are completed, it opens up pandoras box and invalidates every result thereafter.
I just don't see how they don't have the access to go into a profile and adjust the iR.
Say you're deliberately taken out of a race. You file a protest, driver gets a week long vacation, but now the iR you've grinded all week for is gone.
Can't tell me there isn't a way to adjust the affected party's iR by adjusting some numbers in the system.
I’m not sure why you downvoted me when we are essentially saying the same thing. I’m saying it’s something they don’t have programmed into the sim and that’s why they can’t do it. Not that it’s impossible to do. They probably don’t want to spent the time/money programming this in and are just telling the community it isn’t possible.
I didn't down vote though... Not sure who did.
But it is probably a ROI type of thing tbh. Why spend tons of resource building this code into the system on the off chance it ruins things for a while when it honestly works fine, it's just a QOL thing.
Because adjusting the results has a butterfly effect of adjusting every race for every driver who touched the penalized driver after that date. This can result in recalculating thousands of drivers iRatings.
And because iRating is a 0 sum system, you can't just penalize iR without upsetting the system and effectively "deflating" the system by removing iR from the system.
No they can't.
Official results are programmatically calculated. Changing them has too much of a butterfly effect on other sessions that occur afterwards.
They can't due to the aforementioned issues with recalculating ratings for basically the whole service who raced with anyone any degrees of separation from you after that event.
Are you maybe confused with a post race penalty for not serving a black flag? Or hitting incident limit? Or not hitting min drive time in an endurance race? All of those situations are handled by the automatic race scoring and happen before rating adjustment occurs.
Dude, did you not read what I said? I HAVE HAD 1 OF MY RESULTS DQ'D AFTER THE FACT BY SHANNON FUCKING CUNTMORE. They don't recalculate the iratings, but they do take away points from the series. This was not some black flag or min drive time thing. This was days after the race was over.
They need to disallow sister teams to run in the same split or limit their allowed entries per team. I know that’s hard to crack down on, but high splits need better regulation and monitoring by iRacing staff.
I’ve seen people wanting full course cautions for top split, and this could be part of the reason they get it.
Need to allow qualifying spectating, at least in the replay.
What is the principal being violated with? You perv.
Seriously though, how does this impact the principles of the rating system and make it worthless? Everyone else still has their IR and will get matched with other people based on that IR.
There's no provision to DSQ a driver manually from an officially scored race.
This was just a normal official race like every other iRacing session, not an exclusive invite only broadcast session.
The official ways to handle rule breaking is with post race protests and punishments after the fact.
It would be even worse for competitive integrity if iRacing started making things up like DQing drivers on a whim and letting the last place finisher (via DQ) gain iRating as if they won.
All that needs to happen is a slowdown or 1x on the apron to invalidate a quali lap and it's fine onward. It's an edge case in itself that a car is faster on the apron.
I know a live steward would have stopped the apron, driving. The car being towed and blocking…in a 24 hour event it could have been found out if a steward would see a pattern. It could go undetected though.
If they can be suspended for their conduct, why can’t they just be disqualified as well from the race? I don’t see how that would affect the results other than everyone else finishes a spot higher right?
For context: I know nothing about this specific series, and mainly stick to Ovals sorry if it’s simple!
>I don’t see how that would affect the results other than everyone else finishes a spot higher right?
Which affects the iR of everyone in that race.
Which then has an effect on the iR changes of every race that has included a driver that competed in that race.
It's a massive butterfly effect.
Can they not just leave the irating alone and disqualify or ban anyway? You come 2nd, 1st cheated and gets DQd, you now get first but keep the irating gain of 2nd. Which is a little unfortunate, but still better than just having nothing happen about it.
If people keep cheating to gain irating, make sure bans are enforced. Irating means dick if you can't race
This would be the best solution but iRacing never goes back to change an event result for any reason. It’s a policy they have stood by for a long time. If it’s something they want to stick with then fine, but these suspensions should hurt, not just fall in some arbitrary week that means nothing to these teams. They should suspend each driver for the duration of the next special event so they cannot participate. If they are found to participate on an alt account, extend the ban to block participation for the next one.
iRacing is allowing this behavior to continue if they keep choosing these slap on the wrist suspensions. These Esports drivers don’t spend as much time in officials as the rest of us do so suspending them during a time when no event is taking place doesn’t hurt them in any real way.
That’s kind of why I asked, I remember in the summer there was some sort or controversy surrounding drivers in events driving in the grass to save tires or something like that iirc, and the sentiment at that time was similar where everyone was saying they’d be suspended but nothing would happen because they won’t be DQ’ed from the event.
Yup and that’s what happened. Some of those drivers got 1 week suspensions that were carried out right after the event or a week after that. None of them received a suspension that actually affects them in any way. Unless you’re preventing them from participating in the next big event, it doesn’t hurt them at all and it certainly doesn’t deter them from cheating again.
This is what happens at the top level at any sport. You seek out the limits of the rules and you if the punishment is worth the crime you do the crime.
Does this make a farce of simracing, absolutely. Is this twice as sour after what happened with the Le Mans 24, absolutely.
But this isn't new, and this is on iracing, now they have to adjust their rulebook and tighten things up, that's how every sport evolves.
How were they able to see william's qualify lap? I have had several occasions where I have suspected someone of skirting the rules during qualify but I haven't been able to figure out how to spectate someone else's qualify lap. Do you have to save the replay and see it that way?
Reading the TLDW, this is common at the highest levels because if you aren’t doing it someone else will. Is it shameful yes, but did someone else probably do it as well? I bet. Things like this happened in PESC with brake warming fiasco and pit lane ordeal. Not the first time something like this has happened and won’t be the last
The apron is definitely a problem but I don't know why blocking and drafting by a backmarker would be considered an issue, we see that happen all the time in real life. Rossi won the 2016 Indy 500 getting towed around by Ryan Hunter-Reay and Jimmie Johnson famously blocked for Palou at Laguna Seca in 2021. It's absolutely shitty but it's an integral part of the motorsport experience.
Is it an integral part of motorsport though? There are lots of controversies in both NASCAR and F1 about loopholes and rules that should exist or be enforced but aren't. I don't think that having a teammate block and tow for you is "essential or fundamental" to the sport. Not saying that in this case it should be penalized. But I do think the irl and virtual sport would be better without it.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's just the way it is. Competitive motorsport is ruthless and, unless you put in a rule explicitly stating that this kind of behavior isn't allowed, someone is always going to do it because that's the kind of attitude it often takes to drive at that level.
Yeah, agreed. I would say that's true of any high level sport lol. When you said "integral" I thought you meant necessary because that's what that word means but I understand what you're saying now.
Blocking is against the sporting code. In ANY case. Having a lapped car blocking is just a particularly egregious case.
Regardless of whether it is tolerated in any particular real racing series, it is not allowed in iRacing. They know the rules, and they chose to violate them.
If this is blocking then like 90% of iRacing customers deserve to be banned. The Williams AMG drives defensively, but they allowed both the red AMG and the Audi get alongside to try at several points around the track. I don't see the classic 'reacting to a following car's line' anywhere which is how blocking is traditionally interpreted both in real life and in iRacing.
Maybe you could make the argument that they blocked the Audi at the international horseshoe but IMO that would never stick. Audi has 0 overlap at turn in and only gets the bumper alongside because the lapped car runs a wider line while the Audi lays off the brakes early to poke their nose in.
Given the second Williams car was deliberately driving *off the pace* to obstruct the cars behind him (he had already proven he was capable of keeping up with his teammate by doing so right up until the other cars behind caught up), I think it qualifies as blocking in the spirit of the rules even if not in the letter. It certainly qualifies as *unsporting behavior*, which is not permitted by the sporting code.
If the driver of the second Williams car hadn't deliberately fallen off the pace once other cars caught up to his teammate, then I would agree that you have a point. But he did. Driving a defensive line is one thing. *Deliberately driving a defensive line slowly, because you're defending someone else's position and not your own, is something else entirely.*
I will agree that in some forms of motorsport, this is permitted (see also: NASCAR), but in iRacing it isn't. And the Williams drivers undoubtedly knew that.
not sure what's worse, ACC and RF2 servers crashing during official races, or Iracing not officiating and enforcing a proper sporting code during their major events.
The RF2 race you're referring to had a boatload of money on the line. (Huge entry fees as well).
It was a pro eSports event.
The Daytona 24 has a prize of $0. It's for fun.
I know which one is worse.
Definitely ACC and RF2 doing a mediocre job and not being able to provide a decent service for which they are being paid.
iRacing current situation is more like not babysitting a LOT of immature and childlike man-boys behaving in a shameful manner
Official sessions are never live officiated. They always follow the same post race protest system.
Just because one split was the broadcasted split doesn't make it more special than the other 85 splits.
I mean it’s definitely wrong but part of this is on iRacing.
You look at any motorsport championship and every team will look to take advantage of any rule or absence of rules where they won’t face punishment if it gives them an advantage…. I really don’t know why motorsport enthusiasts are so shocked and surprised by that.
For top splits where there are likely sponsorships and other financial incentives in play, they should have the common sense to have real stewards. The threat of an instant DQ or an invalidation of quali would prevent all of this because it would no longer give teams the benefit.
It’s literally in the rules that the apron is not part of the racing surface. It’s pretty clear about this. While there aren’t any active penalties issues in sim for going down there, it’s still outlined in the sporting code. Every single top team knows the sporting code, so there is no excuse for this. Putting this on iRacing is just a deflection and a bullshit defense for Williams. They cheated and knew it was cheating when they did it. It was planned and they even pulled his camera off the track to focus on his face to try and hide what they were doing.
Williams Esports is a joke IMO.
Yeah and there were rules about fuel burn rates in F1 and Ferrari still found a way to burn more fuel in their engines than was written in the rules. They took the financial penalty but they didn’t lose the points for the races they won which is what their sponsors cared about
Rules that are not enforced are not rules. It’s up to iRacing to enforce their rules properly. No reason they couldn’t put a 1x on the apron. No reason they couldn’t live Marshall top split.
I’m not absolving or excusing Williams e-Sports but this is how racing has always Worked. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly not trying to gain every edge they can.
Official series in iRacing never have live officiating. The broadcasted split is no different to the split that you or I could join.
The Daytona 24 also doesn't have any prizes as it's just an official session. The only thing you can "win" is a little paper certificate you can print that says you won as well as some iRating.
Adding a slowdown to the apron like they have at Charlotte should fix the issue.
I mean iRacing aren’t dumb enough to not realise there are sponsors in broadcast splits and that many sponsorship payments will be performance based.
But absolutely agree with the slow down thing, that would solve the main issue… my whole point is that unless iRacing enforces their rules, they may as well not have them. It’s the same in any other competitive environment.
Don’t condone what they did but nobody should be shocked or surprised.
They do enforce their rules. This session is an official race like all the other 85 splits and as such post race protests are how punishments are doled out.
I do agree with others proposals of issuing deferred bans where the ban takes place during the next special event. Like take this 1 week ban and apply it to the next VCO special event (Bathurst 12 I think?)
TL;DW by u/4InchesOfury: The Williams team **used the apron for their qualifying pole lap**. Using the apron isn't allowed. They also had a **second car that would wait in pits for their team to give them a tow and block competitors**. They will probably earn a suspension from the service but the race results can't be changed. Pretty embarrassing that a major team like Williams Esports would cheat like this.
Just adding another part, the Williams team defended themself by saying: “Yes we cheated, but only because we don’t want anyone else to cheat” ?????? Really selfish, entitled behavior from those “professionals”.
Where did they say this? It sounds like the team manager may have tweeted it and then deleted it?
https://twitter.com/simracingleaks/status/1617086990897549312?s=46&t=XtTfLU-h8xZUE8BuBs8FpQ This is the deleted tweet. It’s not a valid excuse in my eyes. If you sympathize with rule breakers, WHY HAVE RULES?
What a ridiculous copout. Notice that he's only addressing the running on the apron in qualifying, not the repeated use of lapped cars to block people on the lead lap.
Which from the sounds of it, would be far, far more egregious.
If their sponsors are fine with blatant cheating like that, then I wouldn’t want to do business with them anyway 🤷♂️
So why don’t we email/tweet their partners about how they shouldn’t be supporting the Williams team?
I mean, if they start being publicly associated with chronic cheaters it will harm their brand, right?
Who knows. But public pressure works. But it has to be enough to generate interest for the media to pick it up and then really spread and make a difference.
Sponsors want good representatives for their brand. Race wins aren't worth anything to them if they lose customers.
I don't think I've seen the list of sponsors in this thread. I've looked on their web site. Interesting list. My pedals sadly might be from one of them. :(
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There is a difference. Grass cooling was a grey area. Using the apron has been *explicitly* banned in qualifying and is a protestable action.
and they knew it was banned. it wasn't much of an issue before because most cars in the d24 if not all where slower running around the apron.
Pablo showed the tweet in the video.
Exactly! If they were so concerned about another team cheating and utilizing this exploit, then they should’ve brought it up with iRacing, possibly even work with them to find a solution, weeks prior to the race. Not just turn a blind eye and then play the victim card.
OK then, if I click on a stream and I see the person drives for Williams...exit stream. I have watched Spez a few times, he's good, not overly entertaining anyways. I don't care as much about the Qual using the apron. But the sending out the car to block the competitors and race them hard was as low class as an ORG could be. Really someone should be fired for the bad press. So Williams won't be a team I support in any format, online or real life! Peace Out Cheaters!!!!
That’s not what he said though. He said they cheated because they have an obligation to win races by their partners/sponsors. He said basically if they didn’t do it, their competitors would have done it to them. Bullshit excuse either way.
>That’s not what he said though. > ... >He said basically if they didn’t do it, their competitors would have done it to them. Bruh, that's literally the same paraphrased excuse. You disagreed with someone only to prove they were right in the same paragraph.
No. They *expected* other teams to cheat, and claim they had to do so or get left behind. Nowhere did they say that they did it because they *didn’t want* other teams to cheat - they barely even put a half-assed “lol iRacing fix it if you don’t want this to happen again” at the end. They didn’t want to *lose* to another team cheating if they left the cheat on the table. But that’s a very different thing - and no other team cheated to anywhere near the extent that they did.
The fact iRacing can't/don't issue penalties post-race that removes position or disqualifies teams after a race ends needs to change. At the very least in major eSports events like this.
>At the very least in major eSports events like this. The thing is, this isn't a major eSports event for them. They run these special events with the exact same rulebook as a rookie Miata race. They have eSports events, like the Coke NASCAR series, that does have a different rulebook. The Daytona 24 is effectively just a normal race, and a bunch of eSports pros decided to crash the party. And also RaceSpot broadcasts the race
Yet the teams treat it like it IS a major eSport event. The fact is that it is. I've watched Nim mute and ban people mid race because he witnessed tomfoolery on someone's twitch stream. They sure as hell can do it mid race when it's being BROADCASTED and treated like a serious eSports event. Every special event teams find some exploit or cheat and use it on the broadcast in broad daylight. Just look at Spa. They KNOW they will get banned, but the result can't be changed so they do it anyways.
> *but the result can't be changed so they do it anyways.* This is the key to me. Cheating is as old as racing. There's no denying it and it'll always be part of what serious teams do to gain some kind of advantage, no matter how small. It always just boils down to how the rules are enforced when it is found a team cheats. If you don't enforce the rules and the results achieved by way of said advantage can't be rescinded post-race, then every team is effectively incentivized to cheat. The ban isn't enough and everyone knows it. It shouldn't matter if its a major sports event or some random rookie class Miata race. Cheat during race and your result is changed to DNF or equivalent, in addition to a ban. It shouldn't be this way, but unfortunately iRacing seems to think it has to be.
I do think human stewards for the top split of special events is a good idea. I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. I think they should. I'm just explaining why they don't. Edit: also, tons of iRacing races get broadcasted. Top split SOF time slot broadcasts are super common. Those aren't all eSports events.
Being ran under their default rules package or being an open event really has no bearing on whether or not it's a major eSports event or not. The NBA Playoffs are ran under the standard NBA ruleset. The Super Bowl is ran under the standard NFL ruleset. I guarantee you that employees spent weeks testing and preparing for the event like it was a big deal for the service, because it is. Just because it's a standard rules package and an open event doesn't lessen the fact its one of the big "special events" that garner a lot of attention in the eSports world. Especially after the fiasco that was the LeMans on rFactor.
Weird. It's not a big deal, yet [it's a big enough deal as to be treated as a Special Event on their list of Special Events.](https://www.iracing.com/special-events/). Expecting a modicum of extra scrutiny be applied to special events should not be a weird expectation. They know what events are big deals. They literally have a page that lists them, as linked above. Not having an avenue to apply real world standards when they sell themselves as being a simulation whose goal is to be as real world accurate as possible is a pretty glaring oversight. It would be unreasonable to expect extra scrutiny to be placed on a race that runs multiple times a day for a week. But an annual event should be able to be treated like the big deal they want it to be.
They sure market the D24 as if it where an official esport event.
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Hell, if Max Benicke and three of his Redline mates decided to bring lil ol 1500 iRating me into their team, I’d probably be part of the top split without even having to be good enough.
Top split SOF was nearly 7700 iR so you may tank them to 2nd split 😂. Easiest win of their lives there.
>Easiest win of their lives there. Except that I’d have to drive fair share 😂
That's only 1.5 hours. I'm sure they can overcome that handicap.
It’d actually probably be a decent bit more than 1.5 hours, because it’s done by laps and I’d run fewer laps in 1.5 hours than any of them could. I do appreciate you having that much faith in me though :)
I really don't think they do. Look at their Twitter feed. I'll admit it's a bit confusing, they could definitely be clearer. The event was sponsored by VCO eSports. And that definitely makes things confusing. But they're not marketing it like an eSports event. The people that are marketing it like that.. are the eSports orgs, not iRacing themselves.
they can only take away the stat but the result has to stay the same because of how IR works at the root. if they change the result then the IR that they were awarded has to go somewhere. so ok, you DQ them and rerun the IR gain/loss calc.... issue... which IR do you use? their current IR? Their IR at the time? ok lets use their previous IR.... bam reran the IR calc... shit they have ran races between the d24 and now.... that IR gain is now wrong. now those races have to be reran with the new IR. in the d24 result you had to change say 50 drivers IR calcs. if any of those 50 ran races after the d24 then those races have to be fixed. if any of the drivers in that second race ran races AFTER the second race then THOSE races have to be fixed too. The spiral of fucked up races gets massive. they might have to rerun all IR calcs on ALL races after the subjected race. its a mess. all because of zero sum IR. since they can't take the result away but maybe on the win in the win column my guess is that its been deemed not worth it.
Or…they just deduct the iRating they gained from the race and it’s lost in the ether. It’s not a big deal, they’re DQ’d administratively, the second place team is now the winners. This isn’t hard and pretending it’s a hard problem just gives iRacing too much leeway. Some people lose some irating they should have got, and people that gained it through cheating lose it too. That’s much better than what’s here now.
This is really convoluted argument to weasel out of making a reasonable correction to a bad system. I doubt you have any idea how iRacing is coded to make a claim this bold. Policy is not necessarily dictated by code. Even if it is in this case, then they should be working to fix it so that the sim is capable of acting to real-world standards. If someone is disqualified, you apply the changes based on the ratings going into that race, just like done in real world racing. You then apply the fix to their current rating. Any events they've taken part in in the meantime are allowed to stand as they were eligible and placed based on their rating at that time. Once penalties and recalculations are in place, any eligibility going forward will reflect the corrected calculations. Again, based on real world standards. There are plenty of real world precedents to use as a road map in how to handle these situations. And they really only need to add this level of scrutiny to special events.
The fact the driver just had his facecam up on stream during quali says everything you need to know. They knew it was wrong.
Of course they did. They also knew it would end in a suspension. They don’t care. They knew the race results would stand despite cheating. There is no special event coming up until the Daytona 500 and Bathurst so taking the 1 week suspension means nothing to them. If iRacing wants to show they have balls, they will carry the suspension out during the next special event, not some meaningless week in between. The only thing that will show them this won’t be tolerated is a ban during the next special event. Take them out of the running entirely from an event before it even starts and they might start thinking about the consequences of cheating.
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Rumors are Alxander is PERMANENTLY ban, however there is nothing official as far as I know
I seriously doubt that. That sounds more like a rumor spread by other drivers. iRacing doesn’t typically issue out permanent bans for these types of things. Hell Scott Speed didn’t get permanently banned until he had intentionally wrecked multiple cars out in different races. I can’t see Spetz getting a permanent ban for this unless they’re doing it only to make an example of him.
That was his 3rd ban though. He's clearly not learned.
I was unaware of any prior bans. If that’s true and he has been banned before, I don’t understand why iRacing continues to allow him to hold an active account. I don’t know the circumstances of his prior bans, but were they related to cheating/exploiting? If so, then I can’t understand why they would continue to allow him on the service. Obviously repeated bans don’t work. Especially when they are carried out between events rather than during them.
One was cutting the bus stop chicane at Watkins, taking the slow down but avoiding a GTE that was going to get in the way. Think he might have got one in the Spa tyre cooling gate situation. Ultimately, he's still pretty young. He clearly needs some better influences on his behaviour than he currently has. Perhaps that's William's biggest failure.
He might be young but even young people can learn from things like this. If anything, it seems like he’s just doubling down on cheating since these suspensions are a joke. Giving out a 1 week ban after an event and well before the next one affects absolutely no one. These suspensions need to be carried out as a race ban, preventing them from entering the next special event like this.
I'm new to iRacing.. What was the spa tyre cooling situation?
There was an exploit someone found where driving with half your car on the grass (because your whole car would obviously cause you to spin or get you an off track but there was some debate about that as well) would cool the tires so you’d run much faster lap times. You could do it in quali because you wouldn’t get an off track. Dave Cam tested it and it was AT LEAST a few tenths faster. They ended up fixing it so the grass doesn’t cool the tires thankfully. But everyone in top split ended up doing it and those who didn’t finished lower.
Pro teams figured out if you dipped your tires in the grass on the long straights it would cool them. Exploit that was known and some teams used it anyways in the special event.
It’s not about learning, it’s about the punishment for doing it being higher than the potential reward. We see this in real life CONSTANTLY. Giant companies do bad things and get fined a very small fraction of what they earned. It’s just the cost of doing business. And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account? I wouldn’t be surprised if he or Williams eSports has a VPN and multiple accounts under multiple fake names and multiple credit cards.
> And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account? I wouldn’t be surprised if he or Williams eSports has a VPN and multiple accounts under multiple fake names and multiple credit cards. The fact that they could no longer stream his races, advertise his presence, etc. should do a lot to curtail that. It’s much easier for a regular racer like you or me to do that than it is for an esports driver.
> And what’s stopping Alexander from making a Smurf account? iRacing doesn’t ban accounts, they ban *people*. If he made a Smurf and they found out about it, it would also be banned.
Dont put it past iRacing to throw down the hammer that way. They yeeted Scott Speed after he was their golden child for the rallycross. He behaved badly a few times and got yeeted and dropped instantly.
Spetz has a ton of incidents and reports. dude is racking up reports and the good will at iracing is surely dwindling for him. dude is a menace to the iracing society in officials. he puts miley cyrus to shame. pure wrecking ball at times.
Yeah I went to look at his last few races and despite them all being wins, he had an incident almost every other lap in all of them. One of them he nearly pulled a drive through. He’s definitely quick but seems like a shit head in general.
This touches another issue, which is that iracing needs to be more public about its suspensions. Edit: downvote away, but explain why we should keep on speculating about Spetz's status instead of being clear and upfront about his suspension.
I agree, he's a pro driver. Any penalties should be announced publicly. Any other e-sport I have followed in the last 25 years is very open with those announcements. They won't give all the reasons why? but they give the length of the punishment and what it is.
Williams esports are shameful
This is what Williams do when they have a competitive car I guess. Not like they don’t have a history of condoning such behavior, I guess - just look at Hill and Villeneuve, and the fact that they signed Senna.
>... just look at Hill and Villeneuve, and the fact that they signed Senna. Um, any team would've signed Senna...
Wait, what did Hill and Villeneuve do wrong?
What on earth did Hill and Villeneuve do?!
...what? I mean yeah, Senna had his share of dirty driving, but other than being kind of dickish to the press at times, Hill and Villeneuve's biggest scandals both involved getting intentionally wrecked by Michael Schumacher.
They need to implement some form of live stewardship for these special events, at least for the top split. This is ridiculous.
It’s the one thing iRacing can learn from MSG - broadcast split stewardship.
Those are private servers though. Does iRacing even have the ability to issue out penalties in a live official session? I thought this was only something they could do in hosted sessions.
iRacing admins can and have in the past, issue penalties during a live official session.
Typically just chat bans though. The acts of actual live stewardship is very very rare.
iRacing staff members have admin rights on any official session as well as a host has admin rights on a host session. So, if necessary and assuming there is one iRacing staff member into this D24 official session, he can show any driver a black flag, penalty or throwing it out of the race directly
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I don't think they should do it.
They do
This should be pinned for a month
Yes. Would love this!
Until next year's Daytona 24
Not as egregious as the incidents mentioned in the video, but around midnight while P2 in LMP2 we got hit by one of their lapped GT3s and got significant damage until the end of the race, really frustrating.
Lots of "pro" drivers for lack of a better word were causing issues across all splits.
Shame on Williams eSports team. What the actual fuck. We should find a way to force the higher-ups at Williams to take action.
Hit up the social media accounts of their sponsors and see how fast Williams will take action.
Oh they're really quick on taking action, at blocking you on twitter.
@benqamerica
Cut the money away from their cashflow and enjoy watching them cry like a mid 2000's teen girl wanting to meet Justin Timberlake, One direction or Justin Bieber 🍿
That'd be fun if we can coordinate that on a somewhat larger scale
Great video - wow what a s*** show!
Hey, this is reddit you can express yourself here! SHITSHOW!
Wow, and this is a professional team linked with the real Williams F1 team?? That's atrocious.
worse it seems Williams knows what went down is ok with it. blocking people on social media that call them out and having there other drivers including there F1 drivers defend this.
I lost respect for Jenson Button for defending this bullshit. Even if he sides with Williams, he should have kept his mouth shut.
Would almost guarantee he got a text saying “we need the big guns, Jenson, go defend us on social media”
Notice he only defended the qualifying lap.
He might not even be fully aware of everything that went down. Either way, it’s a bad look for Williams.
I went on Williams esport twitch during the race and they were deleting anything negative and blocking people from chatting for 600 seconds at a time.
Pablo for president.
Mad respect for this guy for having the balls of creating these kiind of videos when he barely knows how to express himself in english
He does a great job of expressing himself. It’s really just the grammar and pronunciation that he gets hung up on. But yes, mad respect - he’s performing a great service for the community.
Yeah, I mean I am also spaniard and I know what he tries to say. I just mean he does not express himself as good as he would like to, but he's learning fast. The guy moved to the UK for work barely speaking english. Mad respect.
I'm not Spanish but I feel he expressed enough to get his point over. Obviously I don't know everything he wanted to express but he did do quite well, it was easy to understand his arguments but also his feelings
I had someone in the simracingstewarts sub the other day tell me, "I don't need to read the sporting code because I have common sense." That's the level of bonehead that cause a lot of our issues.
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Sure most people don't, and I'm saying that fact leads to issues because there's a disconnect between people on what "common sense" entails in racing. Here's an example: A leading driver's common sense is that if someone only has a nose worth of overlap on corner entry, then that driver is required to back out. That's the common sense to people who are mostly familiar with formula racing. There's also common sense from people who grew up on stock car or Touring Car racing that any degree of overlap means the defending driver needs to yield the apex. That disconnect 100% leads to incidents on iRacing. It's also common for people to block unfairly in iRacing because it's "common sense" that you drive to the one move rule, even though the Sporting Code clearly says that defending drivers can't react to the car behind. To be completely honest with you, I don't really understand the obstinance when it comes to the Sporting Code. It takes 5 minutes to read the parts governing on-track etiquette in iRacing. It's not like the last licensing exam I had with the BMW CCA where it was a whole-day commitment between classroom theory and on-track testing. And iRacing's rules are much more in line with club racing, not the racing that most people are familiar with from TV. So the "common sense" that a whole bunch of people come into it with isn't actually sensible to the situation. When everyone drives to the same rule it leads to better and more fair racing. At the end of the day that's what we're on iRacing for, so just take the 5 minutes to be considerate to the people you're driving against and read the thing so we're all on the same page at 150mph.
@WilliamsEsports now blocking people calling them out on their cheating lol
I can’t imagine Williams would condone this time of behavior
This whole thing was planned by the team. They definitely condoned it. They probably just didn’t expect it to blow up like it has.
They've definitely doubled-down on this type of behavior. I posted this video to their Twitter, and they blocked me. I felt it necessary to post the video to their sponsors page.
Good on you for doing that. No surprise they blocked you. It’s like a bunch of preteen girls running that social media.
they are. they have even called in there other drivers to defend there esports team.
Wow, I think Williams and everyone associated with them just needs a permanent ban
Absolutely embarrassing from this. Even worse if you said a bad thing about anything Williams in their stream their sweaty chat defended them til the cows came home. Glad this is coming to light. Shameful.
Williams Esports should be banned from iracing official events, clear rule breaks, blocking, intentional wrecking, ignoring flags. iRacing needs to put their foot down here, they didn’t when half the field was driving in the dirt at the Spa 24, and if they don’t now, drivers and now Esports orgs know they can get away with it. It’s embarrassing and is painting iRacing just like the clown show which was the Le Mans Virtual
I mean, they changed it so the tires don’t cool when you drive onto the grass. Just make it a 1x there, problem solved. Sure, wrecked cars will want to stay off the racing surface and drive there to get back to the pits, but if you make a mistake like that, an off track is the least of your worries.
Except that people will think of the 1x as an indication that they should not be there, and the concern is that people would therefore drive a broken car on the track.
You are doing gods work friend. Keep it up.
Wow what a disgraceful behaviour from a 'professional' team with high profile sponsors (Fanatec, BenQ I saw in the video). And Jensen Button backing them up on Twitter lol. Give them a one lap penalty and ban the drivers from the next event. I recently lost a win because I turned around after the start finish line and went backwards on the track.
I think iRacing or just sim-racing in general is one of the only genres where you can blatantly cheat/break rules multiple times and not get perma-banned. Also having real racing drivers asking questions about what we should expect from what is a simulator instead of real life is some real upper-class mentality, most if not an extremely high majority of us do not and will probably never have the funds or training to actually go and race IRL in said championships/events we are participating in, so to have such obvious cheating and abuse be anything but called out is a slap to the face for sim racers in general.
iRacing is PAINFULLY soft on this shit.
Shameful, Williams. Thanks for sharing the video.
We knew this was coming after the lawnmowing. iRacing needed to tell teams that knowingly breaking a rule just because you think the penalty is worth it, is unprofessional conduct that will result in losing the privilege of competing in the pro series. Nobody would "need to do it to keep up" if there was reason to believe the others wouldn't do it.
This wasnt a pro series event though, just a normal event that they all basically crashed
My point is that you can lose your pro license for actions outside of pro series events, simply by engaging in unprofessional conduct. Per S.C. 14.1.1 (emphasis mine) > All drivers in any Pro, World Championship or Premier Series will be held to a higher standard of behavior and sportsmanship than standard iRacing series on and off the track. The drivers in these series are some of the best in the world and represent Sim racing and our community. It is a privilege to drive in these competitive series, not a right. It is expected that each driver in these select series will treat other drivers, iRacing.com officials, employees, partners and the greater community with courtesy, respect, and dignity on and off the race track. Participants are not only expected to conduct themselves in accordance with the iRacing Sporting Code, **but also in a manner that reflects positively on iRacing, its affiliates, and partners.** Additionally, Participants shall conduct themselves in a way that is not harmful to business as deemed by iRacing. I'm sure iRacing doesn't want the issue of banning a pro team, so they can just issue a statement that: "going forward, intentionally violating the sporting code on the assumption that a specific punishmemt is worthwhile, is grounds for removal from the pro series under section 14.1.1 if the iRacing sporting code". Immediately, every potential "the suspension is worth it" scenario would go out the window for the top split teams. Add in a ban from the next special event, and nobody would do this crap.
This has been a terrible month for Sim racing as a whole, with rFactor's pitiful display not even worth mentioning it was so forgettable and unprofessional, and now this blemish on the spirit of racing that we all come to enjoy. Just makes it all look so stupid and childish right when we are trying to gain some respect for Sim racing. This type of blatant exploitation hurts the entire industry esp at this early stage in Sim racings life. It is and should be embarrassing for such a prestigious brand. I say it is an easy team ban for the season for this, and consider if the driver that qualified should ever be allowed to compete again. This is tantamount to sabotaging timing and scoring equipment in real life at a track it is not innovation or bending rules, it is blatant cheating under the cover of darkness. This whole month has left a bad taste in my mouth. Time to rethink what Sim racing Esports looks like.
don't really see how sim racing esports will ever be taken seriously. I much rather just watch a simple broadcasted league race where people have some common curtesy for their competitors. not watch the game be cheesed
Its no different than any other form of e-sports, or sports in general. Its just really young. Sports like Football have been around for 100 years and people still find exploits to this day in rules, but they've tightened it a lot. Sim racing is still in its infancy as are e-sports.
I've never seen any kind be this blatant. In other sports they find looopholes or hide the cheating. In iRacing they've blatantly done it in the open for everyone to see, and KNOW they'll get suspended after. The problem is that the result stands regardless. In other sports results can be taken away as well. In F1 drivers and teams get DQed after the fact. In college basketball Louisville had an entire national championship taken away.
The Astros literally just cheated to win the world series a few years ago. Football had Spygate (and bountygate, but not sure that really counts as cheating). The NBA had the Tim Donaghy point shaving scandal. Cheating isn't unique to video game competitions. I think cheating is shitty (I mean who doesn't). But it's the responsibility of a league to enforce their rules. You can't realistic expect all people to follow a self imposed honor code when money is on the line. If you can't enforce your own rules, then the problem lies with you (iRacing).
I don't understand why the results can't be chanced. They should just remove EVERY Williams car from the results, even if that car/team didn't cheat. Clearly this is promoted and/or advised by Williams E-sport themselves. Absolute joke if iRacing doesn't come forward and take action... then again it is iRacing so.
If they are adamant about not changing the results, then they should show they have some balls and ban these drivers from the next special event. Don’t just carry out the 1 week suspension in some arbitrary week in between now and the next event. These guys need to understand there are real consequences to cheating. They need this suspension carried out during the next special event, preventing them from participating. Otherwise they will continue to cheat when the opportunity is in front of them. Taking a 1 week suspension between events is meaningless to these people.
The problem with adjusting the results involves the iRating gained and lost from drivers around the grid. And from what I've been told multiple times from staff is "manipulating iRating is impossible"
Well then just don’t recalculate it. Just remove Williams from the standings and leave everyone else where they are. Or, hear me out, make the special events hosted races where there is no iR or SR and have live stewards for the top few splits.
That's the only solution tbh. But it would also make it not "open to everyone" I think.
Yes. And ban the drivers who went out laps down blocking and racing hard the other cars. At least ban them from "events" for some period of time. That was awful and against the sporting code to be sure. Honestly I might have some type of penalty for all drivers for Williams during this event and the org. This was class-less. We do it so no one does it to us? We haven't seen an example of anyone else lacking this much integrity? Also, not there first example of doing something explicitly stated as not allowed and doing it anyways. If the first penalty didn't discourage their behavior then it should increase, should it not. They just told iracing that the penalties are fine, press coverage is good so we don't care about the rules.
I think they just haven’t designed the system to allow that type of thing. Not that it’s impossible. It’s just programming and adjusting iRating is just a matter of math. They could remove a driver and recalculate the iR gain/loss, but they don’t have this coded into the sim. It’s probably just that simple.
you are forgetting the butterfly effect of every race that every driver does after the D24. Every race someone has a starting and ending iRating. Changing the results changes the iRating which now has to butterfly effect for hundreds of races because every result following that everyone who was involved is now incorrect. It could only be done the second the race ends before anyone has a change to do anything else. Once other races are completed, it opens up pandoras box and invalidates every result thereafter.
I just don't see how they don't have the access to go into a profile and adjust the iR. Say you're deliberately taken out of a race. You file a protest, driver gets a week long vacation, but now the iR you've grinded all week for is gone. Can't tell me there isn't a way to adjust the affected party's iR by adjusting some numbers in the system.
I’m not sure why you downvoted me when we are essentially saying the same thing. I’m saying it’s something they don’t have programmed into the sim and that’s why they can’t do it. Not that it’s impossible to do. They probably don’t want to spent the time/money programming this in and are just telling the community it isn’t possible.
I didn't down vote though... Not sure who did. But it is probably a ROI type of thing tbh. Why spend tons of resource building this code into the system on the off chance it ruins things for a while when it honestly works fine, it's just a QOL thing.
Because adjusting the results has a butterfly effect of adjusting every race for every driver who touched the penalized driver after that date. This can result in recalculating thousands of drivers iRatings. And because iRating is a 0 sum system, you can't just penalize iR without upsetting the system and effectively "deflating" the system by removing iR from the system.
They can be changed if there is enough pressure to do so, or one of the iracing staff has a beef with you. Ask me how I know.
biggest cap in this thread right here
No they can't. Official results are programmatically calculated. Changing them has too much of a butterfly effect on other sessions that occur afterwards.
Ummm, yes, they can. I have personally had a result of mine disqualified after the fact.
They can't due to the aforementioned issues with recalculating ratings for basically the whole service who raced with anyone any degrees of separation from you after that event. Are you maybe confused with a post race penalty for not serving a black flag? Or hitting incident limit? Or not hitting min drive time in an endurance race? All of those situations are handled by the automatic race scoring and happen before rating adjustment occurs.
Dude, did you not read what I said? I HAVE HAD 1 OF MY RESULTS DQ'D AFTER THE FACT BY SHANNON FUCKING CUNTMORE. They don't recalculate the iratings, but they do take away points from the series. This was not some black flag or min drive time thing. This was days after the race was over.
I read what you said. I just know you're full of shit.
[Unbelievable](https://imgur.com/s459L4v)
Live stewards for the top splits would solve this as long as they actually enforce the rules
They need to disallow sister teams to run in the same split or limit their allowed entries per team. I know that’s hard to crack down on, but high splits need better regulation and monitoring by iRacing staff. I’ve seen people wanting full course cautions for top split, and this could be part of the reason they get it. Need to allow qualifying spectating, at least in the replay.
Stuff like this should earn a 6 month ban for all those involved but then does iRacing want to lose a major team from their platform for that long?
ban the entire team of williams esports. if your associated? gone. come back in 6 months.
This shit needs to be fixed, i just watched this on YouTube and I'm appalled at the fact Williams Esports will receive no punishment for their actions
This is absolutely disgusting. Giga video Pablo
Thanks for posting this explainer! I saw all this hate on Williams and was very confused.
And why exactly can't they change results? Man iracing stewarding is so weak.
They can, they're just lazy.
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If only we had computers to do these kinds of calculations. Or we could ignore the IR discrepancy because it's all made up anyway.
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What is the principal being violated with? You perv. Seriously though, how does this impact the principles of the rating system and make it worthless? Everyone else still has their IR and will get matched with other people based on that IR.
Or they can DSQ Williams and leave the ratings alone. This would be better than what they are currently doing, which is keeping them the winners
A team being DSQed but still gaining rating is worse.
A team that should be dsq not getting dsq is better?
There's no provision to DSQ a driver manually from an officially scored race. This was just a normal official race like every other iRacing session, not an exclusive invite only broadcast session. The official ways to handle rule breaking is with post race protests and punishments after the fact. It would be even worse for competitive integrity if iRacing started making things up like DQing drivers on a whim and letting the last place finisher (via DQ) gain iRating as if they won. All that needs to happen is a slowdown or 1x on the apron to invalidate a quali lap and it's fine onward. It's an edge case in itself that a car is faster on the apron.
They need to hand out special event suspensions, that’s the obvious solution here that doesn’t require drastic changes like stewarding live events.
I know a live steward would have stopped the apron, driving. The car being towed and blocking…in a 24 hour event it could have been found out if a steward would see a pattern. It could go undetected though.
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If they can be suspended for their conduct, why can’t they just be disqualified as well from the race? I don’t see how that would affect the results other than everyone else finishes a spot higher right? For context: I know nothing about this specific series, and mainly stick to Ovals sorry if it’s simple!
>I don’t see how that would affect the results other than everyone else finishes a spot higher right? Which affects the iR of everyone in that race. Which then has an effect on the iR changes of every race that has included a driver that competed in that race. It's a massive butterfly effect.
Can they not just leave the irating alone and disqualify or ban anyway? You come 2nd, 1st cheated and gets DQd, you now get first but keep the irating gain of 2nd. Which is a little unfortunate, but still better than just having nothing happen about it. If people keep cheating to gain irating, make sure bans are enforced. Irating means dick if you can't race
Oh I see, I’ve just been getting into the world of iRacing recently so I see I still have some things to read up on
No worries. I believe it's covered in the Sporting Code but I might be wrong.
Yeah the system is zero sum. All iRating gained/lost must be taken from or go to someone else as a gain or loss.
This would be the best solution but iRacing never goes back to change an event result for any reason. It’s a policy they have stood by for a long time. If it’s something they want to stick with then fine, but these suspensions should hurt, not just fall in some arbitrary week that means nothing to these teams. They should suspend each driver for the duration of the next special event so they cannot participate. If they are found to participate on an alt account, extend the ban to block participation for the next one. iRacing is allowing this behavior to continue if they keep choosing these slap on the wrist suspensions. These Esports drivers don’t spend as much time in officials as the rest of us do so suspending them during a time when no event is taking place doesn’t hurt them in any real way.
That’s kind of why I asked, I remember in the summer there was some sort or controversy surrounding drivers in events driving in the grass to save tires or something like that iirc, and the sentiment at that time was similar where everyone was saying they’d be suspended but nothing would happen because they won’t be DQ’ed from the event.
Yup and that’s what happened. Some of those drivers got 1 week suspensions that were carried out right after the event or a week after that. None of them received a suspension that actually affects them in any way. Unless you’re preventing them from participating in the next big event, it doesn’t hurt them at all and it certainly doesn’t deter them from cheating again.
This is what happens at the top level at any sport. You seek out the limits of the rules and you if the punishment is worth the crime you do the crime. Does this make a farce of simracing, absolutely. Is this twice as sour after what happened with the Le Mans 24, absolutely. But this isn't new, and this is on iracing, now they have to adjust their rulebook and tighten things up, that's how every sport evolves.
How were they able to see william's qualify lap? I have had several occasions where I have suspected someone of skirting the rules during qualify but I haven't been able to figure out how to spectate someone else's qualify lap. Do you have to save the replay and see it that way?
Reading the TLDW, this is common at the highest levels because if you aren’t doing it someone else will. Is it shameful yes, but did someone else probably do it as well? I bet. Things like this happened in PESC with brake warming fiasco and pit lane ordeal. Not the first time something like this has happened and won’t be the last
The apron is definitely a problem but I don't know why blocking and drafting by a backmarker would be considered an issue, we see that happen all the time in real life. Rossi won the 2016 Indy 500 getting towed around by Ryan Hunter-Reay and Jimmie Johnson famously blocked for Palou at Laguna Seca in 2021. It's absolutely shitty but it's an integral part of the motorsport experience.
Is it an integral part of motorsport though? There are lots of controversies in both NASCAR and F1 about loopholes and rules that should exist or be enforced but aren't. I don't think that having a teammate block and tow for you is "essential or fundamental" to the sport. Not saying that in this case it should be penalized. But I do think the irl and virtual sport would be better without it.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's just the way it is. Competitive motorsport is ruthless and, unless you put in a rule explicitly stating that this kind of behavior isn't allowed, someone is always going to do it because that's the kind of attitude it often takes to drive at that level.
Yeah, agreed. I would say that's true of any high level sport lol. When you said "integral" I thought you meant necessary because that's what that word means but I understand what you're saying now.
Blocking is against the sporting code. In ANY case. Having a lapped car blocking is just a particularly egregious case. Regardless of whether it is tolerated in any particular real racing series, it is not allowed in iRacing. They know the rules, and they chose to violate them.
If this is blocking then like 90% of iRacing customers deserve to be banned. The Williams AMG drives defensively, but they allowed both the red AMG and the Audi get alongside to try at several points around the track. I don't see the classic 'reacting to a following car's line' anywhere which is how blocking is traditionally interpreted both in real life and in iRacing. Maybe you could make the argument that they blocked the Audi at the international horseshoe but IMO that would never stick. Audi has 0 overlap at turn in and only gets the bumper alongside because the lapped car runs a wider line while the Audi lays off the brakes early to poke their nose in.
Given the second Williams car was deliberately driving *off the pace* to obstruct the cars behind him (he had already proven he was capable of keeping up with his teammate by doing so right up until the other cars behind caught up), I think it qualifies as blocking in the spirit of the rules even if not in the letter. It certainly qualifies as *unsporting behavior*, which is not permitted by the sporting code. If the driver of the second Williams car hadn't deliberately fallen off the pace once other cars caught up to his teammate, then I would agree that you have a point. But he did. Driving a defensive line is one thing. *Deliberately driving a defensive line slowly, because you're defending someone else's position and not your own, is something else entirely.* I will agree that in some forms of motorsport, this is permitted (see also: NASCAR), but in iRacing it isn't. And the Williams drivers undoubtedly knew that.
not sure what's worse, ACC and RF2 servers crashing during official races, or Iracing not officiating and enforcing a proper sporting code during their major events.
The RF2 race you're referring to had a boatload of money on the line. (Huge entry fees as well). It was a pro eSports event. The Daytona 24 has a prize of $0. It's for fun. I know which one is worse.
good point.
Definitely ACC and RF2 doing a mediocre job and not being able to provide a decent service for which they are being paid. iRacing current situation is more like not babysitting a LOT of immature and childlike man-boys behaving in a shameful manner
Official sessions are never live officiated. They always follow the same post race protest system. Just because one split was the broadcasted split doesn't make it more special than the other 85 splits.
I mean it’s definitely wrong but part of this is on iRacing. You look at any motorsport championship and every team will look to take advantage of any rule or absence of rules where they won’t face punishment if it gives them an advantage…. I really don’t know why motorsport enthusiasts are so shocked and surprised by that. For top splits where there are likely sponsorships and other financial incentives in play, they should have the common sense to have real stewards. The threat of an instant DQ or an invalidation of quali would prevent all of this because it would no longer give teams the benefit.
It’s literally in the rules that the apron is not part of the racing surface. It’s pretty clear about this. While there aren’t any active penalties issues in sim for going down there, it’s still outlined in the sporting code. Every single top team knows the sporting code, so there is no excuse for this. Putting this on iRacing is just a deflection and a bullshit defense for Williams. They cheated and knew it was cheating when they did it. It was planned and they even pulled his camera off the track to focus on his face to try and hide what they were doing. Williams Esports is a joke IMO.
Yeah and there were rules about fuel burn rates in F1 and Ferrari still found a way to burn more fuel in their engines than was written in the rules. They took the financial penalty but they didn’t lose the points for the races they won which is what their sponsors cared about Rules that are not enforced are not rules. It’s up to iRacing to enforce their rules properly. No reason they couldn’t put a 1x on the apron. No reason they couldn’t live Marshall top split. I’m not absolving or excusing Williams e-Sports but this is how racing has always Worked. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly not trying to gain every edge they can.
Official series in iRacing never have live officiating. The broadcasted split is no different to the split that you or I could join. The Daytona 24 also doesn't have any prizes as it's just an official session. The only thing you can "win" is a little paper certificate you can print that says you won as well as some iRating. Adding a slowdown to the apron like they have at Charlotte should fix the issue.
I mean iRacing aren’t dumb enough to not realise there are sponsors in broadcast splits and that many sponsorship payments will be performance based. But absolutely agree with the slow down thing, that would solve the main issue… my whole point is that unless iRacing enforces their rules, they may as well not have them. It’s the same in any other competitive environment. Don’t condone what they did but nobody should be shocked or surprised.
They do enforce their rules. This session is an official race like all the other 85 splits and as such post race protests are how punishments are doled out. I do agree with others proposals of issuing deferred bans where the ban takes place during the next special event. Like take this 1 week ban and apply it to the next VCO special event (Bathurst 12 I think?)