it must have been lag, but it's over now

 

I am following two cars who are fighting for position, a Mclaren and a Jaguar. It is early in the race, and they are faster than me, so I am not thinking of any overtaking attempt. I am just trying to stay close and apply some pressure. We approach a right turn that requires heavy braking. The Mclaren is ahead of the Jaguar and on the inside. I see the first turn marker at 150m, and I line up behind the Mclaren with the Jaguar to my left, so that I have a bit more space ahead of me coming into the corner. As I pass the 100m marker I hit the brakes, but the Jaguar jinks to its right and I instinctively twitch the steering to the right as an avoiding action. There is a snap of oversteer and suddenly I am careening through the grass and out of control. I shoot past both cars and end up in front them at the corner exit, causing a collision with the Mclaren.

The replays show something very different happening. It appears the two cars ahead of me are side by side at corner entry. I line up behind the Jaguar, I brake at almost the 50m marker, and then I quickly veer right to avoid the Jaguar (it doesn't jink it at all) as I try to follow the Mclaren into the apex.  It looks like an overly optimistic maneuver that would have been hailed as brave and opportunistic if I had pulled it off. But then the snap oversteer occurs and I am out of control as I go through the grass and cut the corner, sliding into the collision.

It is bothering me now, that there is such a discrepancy between my perception and memory of the event and what was recorded by the server and shown on the replay. Online simulation racing can be a very idiosyncratic experience, with factors like graphics performance, network latency, controller input lag... One driver may have better framerate while another driver may experience stuttering because of the inherent capabilities of their respective PCs. Sometimes a car might blink or seem to warp across the track due to inconsistencies in the connection. A car or driver may behave differently depending on the type of controller that they use, wheel, mouse, keyboard or gamepad. On one terminal it may appear that one car has bumped the other into a spin, but on another terminal, it appears that the other car has just spun on its own. 

Are we even really racing against each other? Or do we each have our own little race, and these are just all occurring simultaneously? Is it just some individual imaginations that are coalesced into a mass hallucination through a myriad of computations? And then ye old paranoia kicks in, and I start wondering if the conditions of sim racing are an analogy of what actually happens in real life and the outside world. 

Maybe it is just my cognitive dissonance for making such a reckless error despite all my years of sim racing experience. Anyway, I apologize for the incident and accept the penalty.