Move aside, bald eagle. I may have found an even greater story of recovery from the brink of extinction: the Radical Racing Challenge series on iRacing.

Okay, maybe comparing a virtual racing competition to the living symbol of our nation’s freedom is a bit heavy-handed, but the change I’ve seen in the past year is nothing short of miraculous.

The summer of 2017 was the low point for the Radical. It averaged just 14 drivers per week, and two weeks didn’t have enough interest for any official races at all.

Getting the Radical back on track after that must have seemed like magic, but it was actually the result of a productive combination of community involvement, a bit of TLC by iRacing, and finding the ultimate way to bring the car to the masses.

At the end of last summer, the small but active Radical community successfully campaigned iRacing to permanently affix the dive planes on the car. It was a way of making a semi-fixed setup and adding some extra downforce that might make the learning curve easier for drivers new to the car.

The Radical was also featured in an official week 13 racing series in the offseason, and for drivers who wanted to race but hoped to avoid the wreckfests in rookie Mazda Cup and the unofficial road series, the Radical was the only other option.

That gave it a boost in popularity for season 4, averaging 43 drivers per week. But it didn’t last. In the first two seasons of 2018, it was back to averaging less than 20 drivers per week with a handful of weeks featuring no official races.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in the latest week-13 build before the current summer season began, iRacing announced two big changes to the Radical series. First, they would make it fixed-setup, and more consequently, the car would become free to all members.

It was a smart way of addressing perhaps the biggest negative working against the Radical. It’s not an ultra-modern car running in any popular series, so it doesn’t have the same attraction as a GTE car or Le Mans prototype. While it is a track-day and club-racing staple, that hasn’t made it a huge draw in sim racing.

As I found last summer, its appeal was only unlocked when I actually got behind the wheel. Sadly, few others had made that discovery. While iRacing does not release car ownership figures, it’s safe to say that only a fraction of the overall membership — road racers who bought the car and members like me who initially subscribed using a deal that granted the Radical and the Silverstone Circuit for free — actually owned it.

By making it a free car, there was suddenly no risk for members to try it and discover its fun factor. And the results were immediate.

In the first week of this season, 1,559 drivers raced the Radical — a 260-fold increase over the six drivers who raced it in the final week last season. Of course, popularity tends to fade over time, so by visiting the Radical Racing Challenge at the end of the season, I hoped to see whether the Radical in its new life was fading or flourishing.

Old Habits…

The venue this week was my favorite track on iRacing: Mount Panorama. I’ve driven hundreds of laps up and down its winding roads, but mostly in GT3 cars. In fact, when first driving this circuit in the Radical, my GT3 muscle memory took over. I was using the same braking markers, turn-in points, and even forgetting to blip on downshift.

I eventually adjusted to the Radical and started to spot some differences between it and the GT3s I was used to. The Radical was much more maneuverable down the mountain, and I’m sure I still wasn’t pushing the car to its limit. It also absorbed every bump in the road, and its lightweight body could easily take damage even from bottoming out on the raised kerbing. That would make navigating the twisty track even more treacherous.

While the fixed setup was a bit tight in some corners, it was very stable and drivable. Lowering the brake bias helped with that tight condition on corner entry, and I just had to practice patience when getting back on throttle, lest I push out toward the walls and kerbs that surround the road.

In some ways, this car reminded me of my time practicing the HPD prototype earlier this season. It seemed like finding extra pace was relatively easy, but there were also nearly unlimited opportunities to gain time.

As I got more comfortable behind the wheel and shed my GT3 habits, I focused on improving my pace by using more throttle over the mountain, trusting the car’s downforce, and gritting my teeth while riding out the bumps.

With more practice, I’m sure I could have found additional speed, but my time was limited due to weekend travel plans, so I bit the bullet and jumped into my first race.

…Die Hard

Seventeen drivers signed up for the 5 pm EDT race on Wednesday, and while that wasn’t even the biggest turnout at that time slot all week, it was still more than raced this car per week last summer. That was yet another sign of the about-face this car and series have made.

I qualified in third and briefly jumped up to second after the standing start. However, by the middle of lap 2, I had fallen back to fourth, and it became clear that the three cars ahead were faster.

Even though my lap times were remarkably consistent — I ran five laps in a row within two tenths of each other — I wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the leaders.

Remember, I kept telling myself. Crashes happen at Bathurst.

And soon enough, one did. But instead of the beneficiary, I was collateral damage.

Coming over the mountain on lap 10, a car many laps down was stuck between the two cars battling ahead of me, refusing to yield the position. The third-place driver took matters into his own hands and dove up the inside entering Skyline corner.

That risky move resulted in contact with the lapped car that sent them both spinning. As I approached from a few seconds back, the racing line was clear. But not for long.

One car backed across the road and clipped the my car, sending me hard into the wall.

While attempting to recover, I broke the cardinal rule of my Summer Road Trips: never wreck another car by driving over my head.

Frustrated by the incident, I pulled away from the wall right as the fifth-place car approached. My damaged car was unable to make even the next corner, so I spun in front of him, giving both of us even more damage.

If there was any doubt before then, my race was clearly finished, but I was determined that my Summer Road Trip wasn’t. What started as a one-off race in the final week of the season became a race against the clock and the mountain to make it to the checkered flag at Bathurst.

First to Worst

I registered for the following race as well, which attracted another grid of 17 drivers. Despite brushing the wall on my first qualifying lap and putting in a more conservative effort on my second, I managed to take the pole position.

My lead lasted all of one corner, as the second-place starter drafted past me on the straightaway leading into turn 2. And my stay in that position lasted less than half a lap, as in one of the fastest corners at the top of the mountain, I clipped a kerb a bit too much and spun out.

Incredibly, I avoided hitting anything, and the other cars zooming by avoided me as well. However, I had to wait until the entire field passed to get going again, and as I spun my car back around, I nosed into the wall, taking some costly aero damage.

By that point, the leaders were 30 seconds up the road, so recovering to win was out of the question. But a top five seemed possible if I could keep my car off the walls while others couldn’t.

The back of the field looked like the aftermath of a demolition derby. A lap or two into the race, most cars had damage. After just three laps, I was already inside the top ten, and halfway through the race, I was up to sixth.

Even getting that far required fighting a difficult combination of handling characteristics. The nose damage had made my car even tighter, and well down on top speed, the Radical was even more of a momentum car than ever.

After getting in clean air, my pace improved, but I was still a second and a half off my pace from the previous race. At that rate, I was barely making a dent in the fifth-place driver’s 20-second advantage. To catch him, I would need some help from on high.

With three laps to go, it seemed that the mountain was willing to let the rest of us live to the finish. But just as I resigned myself to finishing sixth, I caught wind of a problem ahead of me. The fifth-place car spun entering turn 4 and bounced off the wall, leaving him limping and moving me up another spot.

On the final lap, the mountain claimed one more victim. The third-place car nosed into the wall on the way uphill, ending his race with just a few miles to go.

While I still lost iRating and safety rating in my final race of the summer, I had turned a race that once looked hopeless and destined for failure into a respectable recovery. In that sense, it was a fitting homage to the state of the Radical Racing Challenge.

Series Status

After a few years as a wanderer, between mixing with the HPD in a multi-class series and running in its own standalone championship, followed by the recent seasons of participation desperation, the Radical SR8 finally seems to have found a stable home on the iRacing service.

It fits well at the C-class license level, representing a nice transition between less powerful cars such as the Skip Barber Formula 2000 and Spec Racer Ford and ones with more horsepower and downforce like the Formula Renault and HPD.

Its lower license class and free status do welcome a wide range of driving talents, similar to what I found with the Cadillac at the outset of this summer, and that may have contributed to the sort of incident that ended my first race.

But overall, I’ve seen no suggestion that dirty driving has dominated this season. Clearly, this series has done something right to keep drivers coming back even in the often-lackluster week 12.

Given this radical recovery, is the free-to-play model the path forward for other unpopular cars?

As I surmised earlier this summer, a series like the GT Challenge may not be sustainable in the long term, even if its cars were made free. With those cars’ more current real-world counterparts already on the iRacing service, they’re quickly becoming obsolete — if they’re not already there.

Other cars and series certainly could benefit from becoming part of the base content package. The Kia Optima, for instance, is struggling to draw in drivers, and while its front-wheel drive setup may not attract many new ones, it could at least close the participation gap to its Global Challenge series counterpart, the free Cadillac CTS-VR.

Of course, giving away cars à la Oprah isn’t exactly a frugal choice, so the finances have to make sense. Radical likely receives a much smaller cut of each car purchased than big-name manufacturers like Ferrari or Porsche, so by making that car free, iRacing really only cost themselves whatever limited income they received on the rare occasion that someone bought it.

Another concern about keeping aging cars afloat is series oversaturation. With an ever-growing list of more than two dozen road series, we’re bound to eventually reach a tipping point where there simply aren’t enough members to populate every series, whether the cars are free or not.

The upcoming addition of an AI mode, and the existing hosted and league racing features, could become the best — and only — options for certain cars that just can’t draw enough of a crowd in an official racing environment. At least for now, though, that doesn’t apply to the Radical.

I’m hesitant to speak too soon about what its future holds since it has previously seen single-season surges in popularity before declining again. But given its incredible turnaround from this time one year ago, it seems that the Radical has imitated the bald eagle, spreading its broad rear wing and flying off of the endangered species list.