- We're sharing a drink we call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone.
- It's the Work from Home Cup, in which we take on Road & Track and Autoweek in Forza Motorsport 7 online racing on Twitch.
- This week, our bunch of buffoons will do our best or our worst (it's not at all clear) to enrage a real race-car driver, IndyCar's Conor Daly.
In the unprecedented shift of priorities that has accompanied whatever the heck is going on in the world right now, our living rooms have become Cheetos-dust desert wastelands, we've found our dogs to be indispensable conversationalists, and we have managed to twist Friday afternoon video gaming into a regular work responsibility.
To keep our Miata-drifting skills sharp during quarantine and to engage in some mostly friendly—and often literal—bashing of the competition, we've been challenging the staffs of Road & Track and Autoweek to online racing in Forza 7 each Friday afternoon for the past seven weeks. Each staff picks a track and a performance level (cars in the game are rated on a 100–999 scale). We won't admit who's emerged as the undisputed best driver (and/or cheater), but C/D staffers usually occupy at least one of the two lower steps of the podium.
This week, however, that finishing order will be challenged by Conor Daly, whom you might recognize as an actual Ed Carpenter Racing IndyCar driver with 44 starts in the series. That certainly gives him an advantage, although as the racing community has learned over the last couple of millennia (or however long it's been), a good sim racer's familiarity with joysticks, mostly realistic physics, and a field of largely inept drivers can best the unquestionable real-world superiority of a professional driver.
Want to watch other people play Xbox? Tune in to Twitch this afternoon at 3:30 p.m. EST.