That One Time I...

 
... Was Grateful To Finish In 6th Place.

This afternoon, I faced my fears and participated in a 10-lap Group 4 (aka GT4) online race with "Rin" in Gran Turismo 7. Unlike offline races where you can make mistakes without punishment, the online world has a penalty system in case you do stupid things behind the wheel such as exceeding the track limits (aka cheating) or causing accidents. 

Before I could join my first race, I was required to watch a six minute video that left two impressions on me: One, online racing is serious business even if there's no money involved and two, I don't want to be the asshole that ruins someone else's race. More on that later.

Rin and I qualified 8th in the 16-car grid, which is a less than ideal place to start your first race. When you're running mid pack, you don't have to look for trouble because it will find you. I was nervous as hell on that opening lap. Rin is a three decades old touring car, so I had zero expectations to win again modern machinery. My goals were to stay out of everyone's way, finish the race, and earn valuable experience, plain and simple. 

Easy, right? Well, not really. 

Things got off to a rough start. I was muscled out of position by an impatient driver, then I had to dodge a couple of wrecks by racers that I assumed blew off that orientation video about sportsmanship. 

I thought I had settled into a groove on Lap 2, but then I became that asshole that locked up their brakes and overshot a corner while overtaking two cars. I thought I had caused a multicar wreck, so I felt quite humbled when Rin limped back into the pits for her early, compulsory stop to fix the damage and change her tires.

I reentered the race as the last car that was still running, but that open track helped settle my nerves. I concentrated on running consistent laps with Rin, and with every lap I learned more about the track as well as how Rin prefers to be handled. My lap times improved accordingly. 

In the latter half of the race, I passed a couple of cars on the track and a few others that made their required pit stops. I was in 8th place when I took the checkered flag, but then things got really interesting. Two cars that finished ahead of me had 1 minute time penalties added for one or more infractions, which elevated me two spots in the final standings. My sportsmanship rating, which is ranked on a Japanese system that runs from S to E like on their report cards, shot up from its default E rank to a B rank after the event.

In other words, I kept my nose clean after all.

I look forward to getting more racing experience with Rin later tonight. That was so much fun that I really don't care whether or not we win.

UPDATE 8:31 pm PST: Rin and I qualified fourth and won our second race! It was a clean one, too.