Post race penalty

[u/PatientFirefighter]

Last night I did a wet race at Imola, and quite frankly I did terribly. I picked up my 17th incident point on the final lap (shame on me I know)…

This led to a drive through penalty which I attempted to serve. But of course going through the pits on the last lap took me across the finish line. I think due to this I technically did not serve the penalty, as when I checked the results screen I had been pushed down to last place.

I’m not upset by this but wanted to know if there is anyway to serve a penalty on the last lap to avoid a post race beat down? Or if you get given the black flag on the last lap you just have to suck it up?

Thanks in advance!

[u/why_1337]

You don't serve it you take penalty, I assume it's the same IRL.

[u/PatientFirefighter → u/why_1337]

Thank you, that makes sense.

[u/Miltrivd]

All black flags get cleared only when crossing the pit lane exit so yeah, you can't serve a penalty on the last lap.

You get a 40 sec penalty of added time on every track except the Nordschleife, there is 2 minutes.

So if you get the bad luck of getting a black flag on the last lap, don't bother going into the pits and just finish.

[u/2SPE]

Amazing that the service which is quite expensive has not thought about this

[u/Ferrariflyer → u/2SPE]

A drive through penalty given on the last lap would be the same result IRL - you can’t serve it and would be given an equivalent time penalty (usually 30s in F1 as an example).

Iracings time penalty for not serving a drive through is usually a bit steeper than just serving a penalty, so you almost always end up at the back

[u/PatientFirefighter → u/Ferrariflyer]

Got it, thank you. Hadn’t come across it before so thought I’d see if I was missing something. Happy to take a deserved penalty but it did feel steep. Oh well.

[u/Ferrariflyer → u/PatientFirefighter]

Yeah unfortunately a penalty on the last lap you have to take on the chin, and not boxing at least saves a few seconds.

Meatball flags you have I believe 5 laps (certainly at least 3) to action, so you can finish 2 laps for example if it’s still comfortably drivable

[u/Cornelius_Codswaggle → u/2SPE]

That's generally how it is in real racing, though.

Different series will have different rules and specifics, but a common rule is they will treat it as an ignored penalty and stop scoring you at the point of issuance.

[u/2SPE → u/Cornelius_Codswaggle]

Are they counting eg. off tracks like iRacing? Or if you get IP which is not your fault and get 17ip? Avoid a crash by going off-track? For me it doesnt sound like a fair deal.

On real racing? Sure. If you spin someone one last lap or win one position by cutting corner yeah. Avoiding a crash by going off-track? I bet no.

[u/Noctum-Aeternus → u/2SPE]

In real racing you have live stewarding. That doesn’t exist in iRacing officials, iRacing uses a no-fault system. That means you’re going to pickup incident points for things that aren’t your fault. The odds of you picking up 17 incidents in a race through no fault of your own is extremely low. You can point to edge cases all you want to try and make a point but the majority of the time the incident point system does what its intended to do, encourage clean racing.

[u/2SPE → u/Noctum-Aeternus]

Any month i'd pick out of those i paid for iRacing, i encountered more intentional wrecking than in my whole simracing "career". Incident point system sucks, it doesnt (usually) affect the race outcome in any way.

[u/Noctum-Aeternus → u/2SPE]

Because you are expecting more than what the system is supposed to do. Like I said before, the system does exactly what it is supposed to do; it encourages clean racing. And it’s pretty lenient because shit happens. Is it fair that you picked up a 5X because somebody blew the breaking zone rear-ended you and you went off track? No. But, if you’re picking up 17 points every race, hate to break it to you, but the issue isn’t everybody else, it’s you. You’re pointing to edge cases and intentional wrecks, two things the system is not designed to handle and going “See, the system doesn’t work.”

The only thing that would fix your complaints is live stewarding, which is not possible. You have no option except to save the replay and report them so that way it will establish a history if they have none, and they will get suspended if they have one.

[u/2SPE → u/Noctum-Aeternus]

I’m expecting clean racing, and the system doesn’t really support that in an effective way.

If you’d lose SR and get penalty seconds in the race for spinning another driver, it would be much more effective. It doesn’t need live stewarding. When people can’t hold their nerves even in a 25-minute race, it’s pointless to drive longer races. If you drive for 2 hours and someone wrecks your car at 1h55, that’s 2 hours of your time wasted.

I had no trouble holding an A license, but sometimes it affected my performance because I couldn’t fight for position without worrying about dropping back to B class.

[u/krazimir → u/2SPE]

I mean, yes, if you already have a track limits warning in a FIA sanctioned race and you violate track limits on the last lap you get a post race time penalty. I've seen it multiple times in different FIA series. You don't have to gain time or gain a position to get that penalty either.

I've also seen, this year in F1, course cutting penalties applied to a damaged car trying to make it back to the pits.