The Driggs Factor 12/10/09

Welcome to another edition of the Driggs Factor! We’ve got a lot to talk about in this edition.

First off, I wanna thank WallRunner, Jerry, Rebel Texan, Bloodtaker, and M0R0NI for the awesome site. I probably should have done that last week but I was so excited about MRG3 and having my own blog that it just completely slipped my mind. If you get a chance, thank these guys. They make the site run as smoothly as it does and they put in a lot of effort in making sure it’s one seamless process for you.

On the subject of the site, MRG3 is coming along nicely. I don’t know when exactly the new forum additions will be made (NR2003, Forza, rFactor, etc.) but as far as I know, they ARE coming. I can only speak for myself when I say that I, for one, am looking forward to the NR2003 sections. That’s where I’ll be focusing most of my attention from now on since I am retiring from NASCAR 09.

If you didn’t hear that I was retiring from NASCAR 09, you probably didn’t hear I was posting all of my NASCAR 09 stuff as well. Yep, it’s like a liquidation sale at a carpet store. EVERYTHING MUST GO! I figured if I wasn’t going to be using it anymore, everyone else who wants to use it ought to have the opportunity to. Consider it a parting gift.

Anyway, let’s get down to business on the topics for this week’s edition of The Driggs Factor.

Danica-mania

Danica Patrick will be driving the #7 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet Impala in the NASCAR Nationwide Series for JR Motorsports.

On Tuesday it was announced that Danica Patrick, IndyCar’s most popular driver and 2005 Rookie of the Year, would be driving a part time schedule for JR Motorsports in the NASCAR Nationwide Series. I would be lying if I wasn’t a bit surprised that JRM had gotten the number 7 for her to use, but I guess that shows what kind of clout she has in motorsports.

From the standpoint of being a fan, I sincerely hope that she does well. She hasn’t exactly proven herself in open-wheel race cars, but then again, open-wheel is a different beast than stock car racing. Still, one would hope that a driver of her stature would bring a more complete performance record than the one’s she’s got. In my opinion, Danica has a lot riding on this opportunity with JRM, and it’s more than her potential Cup career. If she doesn’t knuckle up and throw down some decent finishes in her first few races, there may not be a lot of hope for her for Cup.

Taking into consideration the kind of learning curve a driver has to go through when transitioning from open-wheel race cars to full-bodied ones. Look at Juan Pablo Montoya, for example. He’s been in the sport since 2007 and it wasn’t until this year that he started to make a real splash in Cup. A.J. Allmendinger had a rough start to his NASCAR career in 2007 as well (though Team Red Bull and Toyota in general struggled that year) but he’s making a name for himself.

Danica is expected to make her stock car debut in the Daytona ARCA race in February.

The pressure Danica might feel will more than likely come from the expectations she places on herself. And it’s okay if she doesn’t come out guns blazing when she settles into the #7 Impala for the first time next year. But at some point she’ll go from being the rookie getting her feet wet to the pushover that everyone expects to see wrecked on a weekly basis.

From the marketing perspective, she’s a dream come true for JR Motorsports. Since the Navy left the 88 car after the 2008 season, JR Motorsports has struggled to piece together a sponsorship package for both the 5 and 88 teams, even with the Dale Earnhardt Jr. name attached to it. The struggles have continued. Danica’s arrival will likely inject a strong dose of attention from her IndyCar sponsors as well as other potential suitors. In fact, I would be willing to bet that Boost Mobile would make the jump from IndyCar over into the Nationwide Series should she prove she can handle the cars.

Danica also has a strong support network with JR Motorsports. She’s guaranteed to have the best equipment. She’s got NASCAR’s most popular driver, Dale Jr., for a boss and support from NASCAR’s most successful car owner, Rick Hendrick. And the fact that she’s taking the transition to stock cars at a slow pace is a smart move. It may offset the shock factor of going from precision-engineered rockets on wheels to bulky, primitive stock cars, and that’s been a problem in the past for open-wheelers.

Personally I think she can do it. She’s an aggressive driver. That aggression doesn’t necessarily translate well in open-wheel cars because racing hard in open-wheel cars is keeping at least a 3-feet space between your wheels and the other person’s wheels. In a stock car she can lean on people, race them hard, and use all of that aggression to its full extent. She can do it. She just needs to settle in and get used to driving a stock car. If she has as much drive and determination as she leads everyone to believe, I would dare to say that she’ll be the first female driver in the modern era of NASCAR to win a race at the national level. And as I’m sure many people have said already, I now have a reason to watch the Nationwide Series again.

The Future of Sim Painting

With the announcement that iRacing will be including templates for Photoshop with their next build release, I’ve given a lot of thought to the future of sim painting. It seems that the trend of being able to paint one’s own race cars is catching on with game publishers – and rightfully so. There isn’t a game on the market nowadays that doesn’t allow for some kind of customization and personalization. For example, Forza Motorsport 3’s livery editor is a powerful tool (even if it’s difficult to use as opposed to Photoshop) and, if you’ve seen them, there are some mind-blowing all-original designs out there in the Storefront and Auction House. That said, there is something to this trend. With technology making it increasingly easier to create and share one-of-a-kind works of art, it’s my belief that the line between sim painting and professional graphic design is about to be blurred.

In a way it already has. Pardon my shameless plug, but Coast2Coast Racing Designs was started last year in anticipation of this line being blurred. From my own point-of-view, I am not simply a “sim painter.” I am a graphic artist. What I have learned on my own in the last year-and-a-half has allowed me to take the things I could only imagine and make them semi-real. With that knowledge, I realized I could easily take a virtual representation, send it to a team, and it could become a reality.

Before Photoshop and 3DS Max, race teams basically sketched out a design, cut out pieces of vinyl and paired it up with a coat of paint to make a paint scheme. And it worked for simple designs. But as technology advanced and more effective methods of designing cars were made available, the complexity and intricacy of paint schemes grew. In place of paint, some cars are now one complete vinyl wrap. This is extremely apparent in the dirt track racing community.

A prime example of the kind of designs you see on a dirt car these days.

If you go out on any given Saturday night, you will more than likely find cars that are wrapped in vinyl rather than painted. These wraps feature intricate patterns, weaves, lines, and gradients that were previously very difficult to impossible to do by hand – and if they were done by hand, they were one-off designs as they could not be replicated exactly.

This revolution in design and conceptualization led to the birth of different design companies but none can rival the original company, Motorsports Designs. They’ve been around since corporations started plastering their logos on the sides of stock cars. They made the motorsports graphic design industry what it is. In that respect, car design changed forever.

And it’s about to change again. Thanks to NASCAR Racing 2003, rFactor, and later NASCAR 09 and iRacing, there is an enormous community of talented designers. Some are just doing it for fun, but there are others, like myself, who look at sim painting as an opportunity to branch out and make a living out of designing paint schemes for race cars. The revolution that’s coming is one where these sim painters become graphic artists for race teams and design companies. Websites like C2C will grow from mere sim painting sites to full-fledged graphic companies – and possibly much more than that as well.

Back in 2007, Kevin King, a well known painter in the NR2003 community, was tapped by Dale Earnhardt Jr. to design his paint scheme that he would drive at Hendrick Motorsports in 2008. The design process was overseen by Dale Jr. himself in addition to his sponsors and team owner, Rick Hendrick. Not only did Kevin King get the chance of a lifetime but he also proved that something bigger was coming.

Since then there have been others who have had their designs turned into reality, and there’s more to come. It’s only a matter of time before a huge influx of amateur graphic artists make it into the professional design job market, particularly in motorsports.

Who’d have thought that a video game would’ve led to this?

Random Thing of the Week

Okay, if you’re like me, you enjoy looking up random stuff on Youtube. It doesn’t start as one particular thing that you’re looking for, you just type something in and wind up watching whatever looks amusing or interesting. Well, I had one of those days the other day and I happened to punch in “pranks gone wrong.” And to be honest, sometimes the pranks going wrong is just as funny as the pranks themselves.

So this week I’m spotlighting a prank (obviously it’s fake) that involves two friends pranking their roommate by posing as aliens. The extraterrestrial kind, not the illegal kind. You’ve probably seen it already but it’s bound to get another bout of laughter out of you, I’m sure. If I had to rate it for appropriateness, I’d say it’s PG-13, mostly for language. Enjoy.

Chad Hates Aliens