Kevin Ford still leaning on iRacing experience as he chases another Berlin championship
Last season, Kevin Ford won four races in the Better Baker Sportsman division at Berlin Raceway on his way to a track championship.
This year, he’s already surpassed his 2022 win total.
Ford picked up his fifth victory of the season last week at Berlin, a NASCAR-sanctioned, 7/16-mile paved oval in Marne, Michigan. All of Ford’s success behind the wheel of the race car is made even more impressive by the fact that he’s only been racing cars for three years.
Since about 2009, Ford competed solely on iRacing. During that time, he also helped on the pit crew of a friend who races at Berlin.
About three years ago, another friend decided to buy a car and start a race team. The friend asked Ford if he would like to drive.
“It was a little new direction for us,” Ford said.
The transition from the simulator to the real thing was a relatively easy one for Ford; he felt he had already learned the fastest way to get around different tracks and had a good idea of how to approach race craft in real life.
He thinks his time iRacing gave him a leg up on other inexperienced drivers.
“On iRacing, you know how to start and restart a race, you recognize the people around you and how to pass. All that stuff plays in,” Ford said. “It’s not dead realistic, its not a one-to-one conversion anywhere, but it definitely gets you pointed in the right direction and gives you a head start on people. If you didn’t have iRacing or real racing, I think you’d need an extra season or two to really get your feet underneath you.”
There is one big, obvious difference that Ford has found when it comes to the real car.
“It’s easier and it’s harder in different ways,” he said. “iRacing is harder to drive the car at times because you don’t have the seat of the pants feel that you would want. In a real car you can feel the tires a lot better, and I think that makes it a lot easier to push the car to the limit.
“But, you go to real life and you have to add in fear, of course. Then it gets harder. You don’t have the free reset you have in iRacing. There’s no money involved when you wreck a car in iRacing. There’s no injuries involved when you wreck a car in iRacing. So you get all these new sensations like, ‘Oh, I can wreck a race car. But I can also see the concrete wall,’ and that takes some of that away from you. Add fear into the equation, that gets a little tough to do in real life.”
Ford had his first brush with danger three weeks ago when he crashed into the frontstretch wall at Berlin. It was the first time in his career he’s had to do major repairs to his car.
“We’ve been fortunate and it’s been bound to happen eventually,” he said. “You don’t race very long without getting involved in an accident.”
It was a struggle for a couple weeks, and Ford saw himself fall in the standings. He bounced back over the weekend and got back in the win column at the “Battle at Berlin,” one of the track’s biggest races of the season.
The victory was not only special for Ford, who said prior to the race it was one he wanted to win more than any other, it also officially surpassed his win total from last year, which was a goal coming into the summer.
Ford is currently second in the Sportman points at Berlin, 76 points behind leader Brian Thome.
He’s fourth in the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division III standings, 24 points behind the leader.
“It is much, much closer than it was last year,” Ford said of the Berlin points. “I think we picked up a couple extra competitive cars for this season so far. It’s been a little more work all year, actually. We actually made the car faster this winter and struggled more out of the gate than we did last year with a faster car than what we finished the season with. That was tough to realize right away that we were going to be fighting tougher competition than last year. Trying to repeat as champions was definitely going to be difficult.”
He’s still holding out hope for another Berlin title, and he wants to work to continue climbing the national standings.
More importantly, the rest of the year is about continuing to have fun behind the wheel of an actual car.
“It’s definitely more fun to race the real car,” he said. “A lot more adrenaline involved. It’s a lot more fun to actually do it. Real racing comes with a lot more stress than sim racing, too. You have to keep the car up to shape, you’re worrying about a season-long points battles. You’re worried about sponsors that you’re trying to keep happy and run well for them. There’s a lot more stress off the track… but when it actually comes to green flag, I’d rather be in a real car all day long.”
