You might say I had a love-hate-love relationship with my latest Summer Road Trip combination.

It went from being one of the weeks I most anticipated to one I dreaded, then back to one I enjoyed, all because of a little thing called perspective.

Before this season started, I had never driven the Formula Renault 2.0. In fact, I didn’t even own the car. But because it was on my Summer Road Trip schedule, I purchased the car before the season started and drove my first laps in it around the newly released Belle Isle street circuit.

I instantly fell in love with the combination, running lap after lap on an empty track while trying to improve my times. The way the car smoothly negotiated the corners and not-so-smoothly absorbed the washboard-like bumps made it a blast to drive.

I was almost disappointed that I wouldn’t get to race it for almost two months, but that wait time only built up my expectations heading into this week.

I also entered the week with some extra knowledge, which was nearly my undoing. After consulting with Virtual Racing School for a setup and reference lap, I discovered that I was two and a half seconds slower than their pro driver, who had a best lap of a 1:24.058. When driving against his lap, it was as if he had 100 extra horsepower coming off the corners. I was baffled.

Trying to keep up with his times only added to my frustration. The harder I pushed, the more I crashed. It made me glad I was driving on a racing simulator rather than in a real car since I would have racked up millions of dollars in crash damage from all the cars I clobbered against Belle Isle’s concrete walls, which felt like they were closing in all around me.

Searching for any sort of assistance — or even reassurance that I wasn’t that slow — I consulted the Formula Renault forum on iRacing. What I found only made me more hopeless.

A thorough user guide written for new drivers included advice such as “you need to practice” and “you will see other drivers faster than you, some of them way faster.” They were true words, to be sure, but none were exactly encouraging.

Although I’d been able to get up to speed reasonably quickly most weeks this season, driving an unfamiliar car around an unforgiving circuit threatened to put a roadblock in my road trip.

Turning the Corner

Desperate to find even a little improvement, I resolved that if I could consistently lap within two seconds of the pro driver’s pace without crashing, I would feel somewhat competent in this combination.

Revisiting that user guide in the forums, I found at tip that finally clicked with me and helped change my attitude about this week once again:

When learning a car/track it is generally more useful to run long(ish) stints, turning in lap after lap for a ~30 minute session (the race distance). Treat the sim as if it was real life: crashing out every over lap will not make you improve rapidly.

With that in mind, I began ignoring the pro driver’s reference lap and focusing on just turning laps, much like I’d done before the season even started. As my pace improved, the fun started returning and I was destroying far fewer cars.

It helped that I saw a top driver in the forums note that while he could run a hot lap in the 1:24s, he wouldn’t be able to sustain that pace over a race. And in the open practice sessions, few drivers were running that quickly. In fact, most were slower than me, clearly struggling to get comfortable with the cozy confines of Belle Isle.

That was also evident from the first few races of the week. The first three time slots didn’t go official — a rarity for this relatively popular car — and just half the field finished in the first official race.

After some more practice on Tuesday afternoon, I was able to reach my goal and routinely hit laps in the 1:25s. Even if the fastest drivers’ times still seemed well out of reach, I was brimming with confidence and eager to race.

I still felt under-practiced and unprepared, especially considering that I hadn’t completed a full race run in practice without hitting the wall and I hadn’t driven behind other cars for more than a corner or two. But I figured that going into my first race with a more cautious approach would pay off.

Stand My Ground

In my first race of the week, I was joined by one of the handful of speedy drivers who was capable of lapping in the 1:24s. But just as I had done in practice, I decided not to push to futilely try for that sort of pace and instead focus on running the sort of laps I knew I was capable of.

With a lap of 1:25.503 in qualifying, I lined up second on the grid, but the third-place qualifier was three tenths quicker than me in a practice session before the race.

Knowing I’d have my hands full enough just completing the full 15-lap race distance on my own, I debated letting him past me on the first lap of the race. But after a decent start in which I opened a half-second gap, I held my position and hoped to keep him behind me without making a mistake while mirror-driving.

Over the next few laps, the gap to the car behind increased to two seconds. I wondered what was he doing. Was he struggling with aero push? Was he purposefully taking it easy? Was his fast practice lap merely a fluke?

Once we started to encounter traffic, he began to close back in, often at a rate of about three tenths per lap. Based on that, his practice pace clearly seemed legitimate.

Traffic was at its thickest on the final lap, and catching a slower car in the wrong spot — or making an overambitious move to get past one — could have easily cost me the position. However, I stayed calm and the lapped cars were accommodating, which helped me hold my second-place position at the finish.

Just two weeks after redeeming myself in the V8 Supercar, in which I’d previously struggled when battling with other drivers, I managed to complete my first race in a new car at a difficult track without succumbing to that pressure from behind.

Maybe I was finally overcoming my mirror-driving weakness, or — dare I say it — even turning it into a strength. After all, I ran my fastest laps of the race on the final two laps when my opponent was at his closest.

All in all, it was yet another change of perspective during this bipolar week on the streets.

Role Reversal

The following afternoon in practice, I found some extra pace but at the cost of some riskier driving habits, such as getting back to full throttle sooner exiting some of the bumpy corners. For my second race of the week, I decided to keep the more cautions — if slightly slower — approach that had worked so well for me the previous day.

This time, the competition was a bit stiffer and I found myself third on the starting grid. I knew I had lost at least a tenth of a second on my qualifying lap and that extra speed would have put me even with the second-place qualifier, so I expected a close race with him.

In the first few laps, I began to understand exactly what my opponent in the previous race must have experienced while being stuck behind another car. The visibility is a little worse, the car doesn’t handle quite as well, and it’s easy to lose time.

By the end of lap 5, I was two seconds behind, but by dropping outside of the range of some of the dirty air from the car ahead, I was able to put some good laps together and I slowly chip away at the gap.

That also meant taking more risks, though, and I brushed the wall on the backstretch while trying to find every bit of extra pace possible.

The similarities with my previous race stopped on lap 9 when I caught a lapped car in a bad spot. That cost me a full second and effectively ended my hopes of a close battle to the finish.

It turns out that it probably didn’t matter anyway. In the closing laps, the driver ahead found some extra speed and pulled away by a few more seconds. It was still a fun fight while it lasted, and I had no problem taking a podium finish behind two clearly quicker drivers.

Against All Obstacles

Later that night, I raced one more time and found myself in the biggest field I saw all week with 18 total entries. However, none of the heavy-hitters were present, and after taking the pole by a second and a half, I was the clear favorite.

It was like a trap game in basketball. I was expected to win, and it would only be a big deal if I lost. With such a big field, half of which were more than three seconds slower than me in qualifying, those threats to snatch defeat from the hands of victory could potentially be lurking around any given corner.

In addition, the track temperature was the warmest I encountered all week, which would make Belle Isle’s bumps and bends even trickier.

To my surprise, this was the only one of my three races this week without a multi-car crash on the first lap. Of course, that lack of early attrition would only mean more traffic later in the race.

Before I encountered any of those slower cars, I pulled out to a big lead, running two seconds per lap faster than the second-place driver. Despite that pace advantage, I didn’t want to back off too much since in my experience, it can actually be easier to make mistakes if you change your braking points, throttle application, and driving style compared to what you practiced.

Once I did run across traffic, I tried to be especially careful, and most drivers moved out of the way to make things easier on both of us.

With two laps to go, though, I had my biggest scare of the week. The fifth-place car had spun in turn 5 — one of the tightest, blindest corners on the track — and was trying to get pointed in the correct direction.

My spotter told me that a car was stopped on the left, so I tried to stay on the outside coming around the left-hander. But his car was driving backwards at the apex of the corner, and he nearly clipped the front of my car. iRacing’s predictive netcode gave us a 4x contact, but fortunately there was no contact or damage.

Instead of a trap game, it wound up being almost like a meaningless preseason football or hockey game with a costly injury in garbage time. In this case, my win was preserved, but my streak of incident-free race laps around Belle Isle was broken at 43.

At some tracks, I might look at such a streak as a sign that I should have been pushing harder, but at Belle Isle, almost any incident is likely to be a race-ender. While I knew based on my practice runs that I could have driven a bit faster by slightly upping the risk factor, I don’t think I could have improved my finishing position in any of my three races by taking those extra chances.

Series Status

Overall, the iRacing Formula Renault 2.0 Championship is quite healthy, and like the Pro Mazda I encountered on last year’s Summer Road Trip, it’s a great example of a mid-level step on the open-wheel ladder.

Compared to the likes of the Skip Barber Formula 2000 or Spec Racer Ford, the Formula Renault 2.0 has more setup options but also isn’t extremely setup-dependent based on what I read and felt for myself this week. I wound up abandoning the Virtual Racing School setup, which was a bit too unstable and loose for my liking, and instead using a modified version of the iRacing default high-downforce setup without sacrificing any speed.

The community around this car is active and helpful in practice sessions, races, and the forums, and despite the tough love I felt when I first read through the user guide, the Q&As posted for new drivers, such as “why are others so much faster?”, are quite constructive.

So far this season, the iRacing community has been hesitant to take on the challenge of Belle Isle. In that sense, the Formula Renault community is no exception. No races split for the first time all season, and while most time slots outside of the late-night European and American ones did go official, this week’s participation with 234 total drivers racing was the fewest ever in this series.

Personally, I sincerely enjoyed the challenge of Belle Isle in the same way that I love racing at Bathurst, where the walls on either side of the road are a constant reminder of the punishment that awaits even a small misstep. In the future, I may look for combinations like this one — a mid-level single-class series at Belle Isle — to become a go-to farming opportunity just like I often binge on GT3 races at Mount Panorama.

While I haven’t minded the hour-long races of recent weeks since they play to my endurance-racing strengths, sometimes a shorter sprint race is all it takes to scratch my racing itch. In that sense, the Formula Renault is an ideal car. Even 20 minutes behind the wheel locked in close battles was enough to make me sweat as much as I did during a full hour of driving the HPD last week.

Both the Formula Renault car and the Belle Isle track do require a bit of practice, but as long as you’re not overly focused on equalling the pace of expert drivers and instead set reasonable targets, you’re likely to improve and have a blast doing it.

So for anyone who, like me, didn’t own this content and is on the fence about trying it, my question for you is: Do you believe in love at third sight?