Upadated 1/9/07

Hmmmm, so you want to know about me. Lets see, where to start?

I have a wife and two daughters. They are pretty good about my addiction. My wife even bought me my old Logitech Formula Force wheel a long time ago.

I was born in 1969 and I live in Indiana. I grew up about 20 miles away from a little track called the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Maybe you've heard of it.

For the majority of my life, Jim Clark and Grahm Hill were guys that won the 500 and, oh yeah, they raced F1, right? Jackie Stewart was a guy that once ran the 500 and a funny sounding color analyst. Oh, he ran F1 too, right? Dan Gurney had some fast Eagles but he only owned them when I was younger. He never drove them that I knew of.

Imagine my surprise when I got into GPL. Today I'm a touch wiser. :)

As far as sim racing goes, my first one was Indy 500. I remember playing that on my 386SE computer with 40megs of hard drive space and 1 whole meg of RAM! It was a blast. I slowly moved onto other things however and it wasn't until NASCAR2 that I got back into it. From there, I ran NASCAR3, NASCAR Legends, NASCAR Heat, and NASCAR4. That's a bunch of NASCAR. I had purchased GPL way back in October of '98, but I had only ran Watkins Glen a few times and it was so vastly different than anything else and so much harder, I never really got into it. Plus, at the time my computer was pretty slow, so there it sat while I ran all things fender related for 2 plus years.

The thing about NASCAR games is that I like to run a full field and really feel like I'm competing with the guys I see on TV, not some schmuck named "BJ65082" warping all over hell's creation. With the Woeful Papy AI of N4, I finally gave up. On a whim in September of 2001 I decided to load up GPL and have a go. I haven't played much else since.

Yes, I have an addiction.


I'm a left foot braker who trails throttle into the turns. Maybe that's not so realistic but it's pretty dang fast. If you're a realism guy who right foot brakes, consider this when you watch my replays.

As far as real racing goes, I haven't really done any. In 2003, my brother Kevin, who I had hounded for smoking for years, won a trip to the Marlboro racing school in California. Marlboro had purchased the real IROC cars from the mid 90's and we got to drive them around the speed way. We're guessing we got up to 120mph or so. It was way cool. We also rode along with pro drivers and they tached it out. I'm pretty sure we around 160mph mid corner. Pretty fun stuff. I'm the one on the right below. Kevin is on the left. Some of you have probably raced with him before too.


Another cool part about those cars was the list of drivers that had driven them. all the famous NASCAR drivers were listed of course, but one name jumped out at me and slapped me across the face; Jacky Ickx! Not sure where or why he drove them but it was cool to know he might have driven the very car I did.

We also got to run some Formula Van Diemans. they were fun and it felt allot like GPL to me. This is me in one getting ready to go out. The guy I was paired up with and our instructor went the fastest of the groups there. We got up to about 100mph in the short straight they had. It was more fun than the IROC really.

 

Steve Cloyd

Controller:
Wheel: Logitech Momo Force
Pedals: BRD Speed7 pedals