Video game development is rarely about one man, but if it was, then Terence Groening should certainly get a mention for his contributions to the genre as the man responsible for the physics of Sportscar GT, EA’s PC F1 and NASCAR games of the early 2000’s, rFactor, rFactor 2 and every title and rFpro simulator that spawned from ISI’s engine.
This interview with RSC details his early life and career, through to him joining iRacing in 2021.
As a direct ancestor of iRacing, the ‘Grand Prix Legends engine’ had multiple stock car racing false starts, before eventually releasing as NASCAR Racing 4. The original NASCAR 3, cancelled and replaced by one that used NASCAR 2’s engine, is barely remembered.
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I took an extended break over the holidays, taking the time to disconnect, something it appears I very much needed. It can be hard sometimes to keep this place going with a family, new health complications and full-time work competing with it for my time. While I am pleased with where the site has gone to and grown since I brought it back online in July, 2019, I am disappointed just how many times I’ve been unable to get a review, planned article, interview or posting done due to flare ups in health issues or just life getting in the way.
That said, 2023 was the best year for the site in a long while. Not including the forum (which doesn’t get much posting activity) 224k visits were recorded, resulting in almost 400k views, and the biggest post of the year in terms of raw views ended up being my – now confirmed – accusation that Rennsport were using rFactor 2 physics parameters. The growth the site has seen in just raw stats is encouraging, but leads to it’s own complications where I end up feeling guilty taking time away, knowing that a developer’s news isn’t getting seen or that users might miss a news item they wanted to find out about.
RSC started a podcast in 2023 and that has actually been a ton of fun to record. Though Jon, Simon and I have struggled to find recording times where one of us wasn’t sick or just not feeling it that month, the times we have I believe the insights and general chat on sim racing past and present is well worth listening to.
I re-coded much of the site this past year and fixed many issues that caused the layout to not work properly on desktop after it had been cached first by a mobile user. I’m self-taught in HTML, CSS, PHP, so gradually improve my understanding over time. I began to add Print Ads from magazines and coded a searchable index for videos going back to 1982, but I think the biggest addition to the site this past year has been archived Web sites, allowing you to view certain old Web sites like Blackhole Motorsports or even the iRacing Web site as they were publicly viewable in the past. While many sites are available on archive.org, my archives are indexed by search engines and often contain fixed links or extra pages that I had saved in my own archives.
Anyway, at the time of posting I realize I’m a couple of weeks behind in sim racing news. I’ll catch up, as always. This is, apart from the Podcast, very much a one-man operation. In the meantime, a Happy New Year to everyone in and around our little hobby.
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About RSC
A site by a sort of sim racer, for sim racers, about racing sims. News and information on both modern and historic sim racing software titles.
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Podcast
Join Jon Denton, Tim Wheatley and Simon Croft as they discuss sim racing and racing games past, present and future.
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