[Russell Sobie]

Well, folks, we finally did it. We finished the Monza week for the Dallara F317.
I love Monza. It's the track that I learned how to drive cars in a simulation (as opposed to an arcade racing video game) back on Race '07. It has a little of everything. Two really long straights, a number of really fast corners, and probably the most infamous first turn in sim racing. With all of that said, I participated in four of the 32 Monza races for this series, and every one I was in (even the smallest that only had 12 drivers in it) had someone bump me, punt me, run me off the road, or otherwise bork up the chicane at turn 1... or at least right after the chicane. So I thought to myself, "Self... SimRacingSystem streams every Server1 race hosted. You should see just how many Monza races in this series actually had clean starts. I mean... it can't just be you!"
And so I did exactly that. I started looking at them yesterday when I had the idea, but only finished up in the last hour since the last of the Monza races finished up today. I skipped ahead to the start of the race, then watched as the grid drove (if you can call it that) through the chicane on the first lap.
Then I sorted the URLs for the different streams into two bookmark folders. "Pass" and "Fail". I had to come up with my own criteria here, since the camera being used in the SRS streams is based on some nebulous AI that never quite looks where you want it to, so here's the rules I went by:
In order for a race to "Pass", NONE of the following can be visible IN FRAME before the target of the camera starts accelerating out of the chicane:

• Any two cars collide.
  
• Any car facing backwards.
  
• 2 or more cars seen going off track (all 4 wheels)
  
• Any car seen airborne (not as rare as one might think)
  

So if none of those things are visible, the race got a passing grade. Should be easy right?

Sadly, out of 32 races I was able to find posted this month for DallaraF317 and Monza on simracingsystem's youtube channel... here are the results: 29 Fails, and only 3 Passes.

I won't bother to ask why this is. There's plenty of reasons I can come up with on my own (novice drivers, lack of practicing the car on the circuit, ignorance of the concertina effect, drivers from all over the globe with questionable connection quality, general apathy while driving make believe race cars, etc. etc. etc.). What I do want to ask is:

If we left Monza out of every SRS rotation for every series in the future... would it really be missed?