After months of putting it off, I am finally creating a blog to upload my rFactor 1993 Indy 500 cars to the web, along with 3d renders. For some reason, I have a soft spot for the 1993 Indy 500, probably because reigning 1992 F1 World Champion Nigel Mansell was participating in that race, I must have watched this race over 100 times.
The first time I watched this race, I was over at a friends house, I lived in NZ at the time, so the race started at like 3am on a Monday morning, whilst in the states, It started at around midday Sunday in Indiana. Horrible time difference lol, I was 18 at the time, and my favorite F1 driver Ayrton Senna wasn't doing too great in F1 at the time, so I started to watch more Indycar/CART races than F1 races. With 1993 being Nigel Mansell's first foray in Indycar, a lot of focus was on the 1993 season for that very reason.
Why do I like the 1993 Indy 500 soo much you may ask? Well, lets see. Nigel's first race at Indy, I've mentioned that, AJ Foyt officially retiring at the speedway after 35 consecutive races at the brickyard. Al Unser, Sr's last race at the 500, Gary Bettenhausens last race at the 500.
Those are just some of them, which brings me to when iDT released their 1995 Indycar mod for the PC sim rFactor in 2008, it featured the 1994 & 1995 seasons and Indianapolis 500's. It took me back to Christmas 1990, when I received Papyrus Indianapolis 500 game for the amiga. From late 1990 - mid 1992, I played that game to death, perfecting my car setup's, til one winter's day in 1992, after months of practice, and numerous crashes, etc, I finally won the 500 mile race, virtually of course. An achievement I have privately kept to myself for a while, but one I am rather proud to have accomplished, albeit in a computer game. You See, racing the 500 mile race in that game, one small crash, you could pop a tire, crash into another car, your race was over, it was very easy to crash out or be crashed out.
I was so proud of myself at the time when I won the 500 mile race in that game, I jotted down all the results in a notepad, the time it took to finish the race, the average speed of the race, all 33 finisher's, everything. Back in those day's I pined for a racing sim that could recreate the Indy 500 accurately, unbeknowst to me I'd have to wait until August of 2008 for that.
FWIW, the average speed for the race I won on the amiga, waay back in 1992, was 218MPH race average IIRC, that includes cautions/yellow flags, etc. Keep in mind the real life Race record Average speed of 185MPH in the 1990 Indy 500 race, won by Arie Luyendyk, you can see the race I won on the amiga was a real flyer.
The end of 2008 was a pretty hard time for me, I was still getting over losing my little sister, and I needed something to take my mind off of that, something that cheered me up some, I found it in painting race cars for this 94/95 indycar iDT mod I mentioned earlier. Some painting templates were released for the 1994 Lola, which, for the most part, really was not all that different from the 1993 Lola. As Lola back in the early/mid 1990's was the main chassis supplier for CART/Indycar, most of the field in the 1993 Indy 500 ran Lola's.
So to re-create my favorite Indy 500 of all time, I set about painting some of my favorite cars from that race, it started off with Al Unser, Jr's 1993 Valvoline Lola Chevrolet. A race sim website I frequented at the time allowed me to upload some picture's of this car to a gallery, from there people asked, "wow, where did you get this car?" When I pronounced I had created it, I noticed there was an interest in my creations, a good feeling I must say. So from September 2008 - April of 2009 I spent a fair amount of my spare time painting about 40-50 Indycars, All 33 cars from the 1993 Indy 500, and a handful from 90-99.
I hosted my car's at a now defunct website which I wont name names, but was going in a direction I did not agree with, I had uploaded approx 30+ cars to this website, and had almost 2000 downloads at the time I pulled the plug and removed my cars.
So now It's time to upload these car's once again, I know rFactor is getting on in years now, but there is still a group of people that enjoy playing this sim, hopefully they will like my cars that I will upload shortly to my blog, all 33 of them that raced in the 1993 Indy 500 :).
