I raced 195 times in January. Then islet happened. February dropped to 23 races. March, so far, 16. My iRating has cratered. My incident count is embarrassing. Mae'n dda bod nôl — but being back doesn't mean being good.
The numbers don’t lie
My recent results read like a comedy of errors. Last ten finishes: P11, P4, P25, P28, P46, P2, P21, P15, P6, P24. Average finish: P18. Average incidents per race in March: 6.7. That P46 was a 13th Week Track Day in a Mercedes-AMG GT4 at VIR where I completed precisely zero competitive laps. The P2 at Okayama? Probably the only clean race in the batch.
1,384 career races. I used to be consistent — nothing spectacular, but I’d keep the car on the track and finish mid-pack with single-digit incidents. Weeks away from the sim and that muscle memory evaporates faster than you’d think.
Muscle memory evaporates faster than you'd think.
Where the time went
Since mid-February, nearly every waking hour outside of work has gone into islet. A T1D glucose intelligence platform that started as a Nightscout mirror and grew into a full analytics engine, iOS app, multi-provider AI meal estimation, and now an alerting system. The kind of project that absorbs every available minute because there’s always one more thing to ship.
The trade-off was clear: ship islet or maintain race pace. I chose islet. The roast dinner I logged last night (82g carbs, GI high, fat high, protein high, fibre moderate) was tracked by a system I built from scratch. The alert engine watching my glucose right now was deployed hours ago. That matters more than a clean lap at Okayama.
But I miss it.
The Mazda problem
13th Week is traditionally when you mess around — fun series, low stakes, try new cars. I jumped into the Mazda Cup at Oschersleben. Qualified P1 (the field was small, don’t read into it). Finished P11 with 11 incidents. Eleven. In a Mazda MX-5. At a track I’ve done hundreds of laps on.
The problem isn’t the track knowledge. It’s the racecraft. You lose the instinct for when to brake later and when to give room. Confidence erodes into caution, then caution becomes hesitation, and hesitation in a pack of MX-5s at Oschersleben means getting punted off at turn 1.
Finding the balance
The honest answer is I don’t have the balance figured out yet. islet is the kind of project where the work compounds — every feature enables the next one, every test catches the next bug, every deployment teaches something new. Racing rewards consistency over everything else, and consistency requires seat time I haven’t been putting in.
The plan is simple: keep the islet pace but carve out two or three sessions a week for the sim. Start with practice, not races. Rebuild the muscle memory before throwing it into traffic. Drop back to a car I know — the MX-5, probably — and stop chasing incidents in GT4 machinery I haven’t earned the right to push.
Start with practice, not races.
The iRating will recover. The 6.7 incidents per race will come down. And the next time I log a meal from the pitwall between qualifying and the race, at least the app will be mine.