How did you get into online racing?

I dont know how people see me so I am setting this thread up to show appreciation to all my mentors and people who have got me to where I am. I see myself as the kid from no where starting in div6 moving up to 3 in just 2 season and I am so proud of myself. I started off by getting gt5 and racing on controller. I met a guy called POPEAGLE on Nascar 11' the game and he was a great bloke (aussie) and raced with him a few times then never saw him again. I never raced serious on gt5 only drifted and cruised. One night I thought about trying racing for seriousness but couldnt find a good room. I saw one called Aussie Bar. A person in there was eaglepop so I joined and questioned him about POPEAGLE. Sure enough it was him he made a new profile. Me being a squeaky young 14 year old I was quiet for the first few times I raced with these people as they were grown men. One of them was @kevkumkwot . Others were Hremp Farro also great blokes. I think pop and kumkwot (shall be known as geffro) took a liking to me i hope. They encouraged me all the way gave me tips and hints and every track and so on, I raced with them all the time. Time flew by I never won a race I got close, one day pop gave me a setup for the same car he was using. I grabbed a win my first win I still remember that night like it was yesterday, or like a sunday night. He called me a little lol. Time flew by I gradually got more wins, soon enough I got hooked up with a wheel a DFGT, took me 2 hours to get the feel. I started loving racing. I had the DFGT for 6 months. Xmas time in 2013 I got a G27. By that time I was so happy with racing and I still raced with all these blokes. Jan 2014 I signed up for rooz but never raced with them because I lost a spark for racing. Comes April/June It ignited for fuel on a fire and I came back to life on forums and started racing again, I still talk to all those blokes, Mainly geffro/KevKumKwt and eaglepop. So here I am racing my heart out at the age of 16 with another great bunch of blokes. Thanks @kevkumkwot for getting me here

Good thread Pykey
I have been playing GT since the original came out, i was never and am still not a huge gamer but i've always loved motor racing. I finished GT 1,2 and 3 but by the time 4 came out i was a bit over it, i got about half way through but gave up on it. When GT5 Prolouge came out i was pumped for it again and smashed through it pretty quickly and hung out for the full game. i had a crap steering wheel on my ps2 back in the day that had no force feedback and was just to use and that really put me off getting another wheel until my wife bought me a G27 for Christmas in 2012 i was half way through the Le Mans 24 Hr (a-spec) race when i un wrapped it and i plugged it straight in and it blew me away.
Up until that point i was using a controller, auto transmission and using the chase cam so it was like learning how to play the game all over again

i think i only tried online racing in GT5 a couple of times but was really put off by the level of quality of the racing so i never went back. GT6 came out and i was pretty disappointed at how easy it was to finish it then my mate @Killercarlcox69 got a rig and GT6 and started doing some online racing at Bathurst in the XR8 which i jumped in on and it was good fun and good hard racing and a did few races with a room full of Germans at Nurburgring for a challenge.

From there Killer and i started running some NASCAR in the dirty NASCAR rooms which was just for a bit of a laugh, after a trip to the states in Nov 13 i did a NASCAR driving school in Las Vegas and i was hooked on turning left so i stopped playing GT and went onto NASCAR12 for a few months.

Then i was on facebook one day and a post came up for ROOZ, i had been watching some iracing replays on youtube and was interested in some serious racing so i liked the page and followed season 2 with the McLaren from afar. I didn't even know that there was organized racing leagues in GT so i was pretty interested. When the call came out for Season 4 i had to give it a shot and to my surprised qualified straight into Div 4.

I had no idea how my speed compared to others on track and i was pretty shocked that i found myself fighting for the Div 4 championship on my first crack. I remember back to my first Sunday race at Deep Forest and i was like a kid on Christmas morning and i have been hooked ever since. Now at the end of only my second season i have found myself as captain of my beloved BHR team.

Similarities between us in some parts not bad at all, I also remember that race at deep forest

I didn't have internet for soo soo long so all i ever did was practice and practice and practice around circuits on all games trying to get as good laps as i can in a wide variety of cars. I eventually got internet just 15 months ago today actually, and as usual for a 15yo at the time, i was on facebook, found a facebook page i liked, they had a racing league, i decided to give it a shot. For some reason i was quite nervous about it and i totaled my car in the pitwall in qualifying and they thought i was , well, not the greatest racer..... but then came back to get 7th-3rd in the race, a few races later i was challenging for the title, and N64TheStig007 told me about this other league he raced in called ROOZ, i decided to do both leagues, in one i am now the most successful driver in that league and in the other im racing in the top category Not a bad turn around for 15 months

Well my online gaming experience started on the PS2 with V8 Supercars 3 when i was ing around one day and saw that that hole in the back looks just like the Ethernet cable that goes into the modem! So plugged a cable in (WiFi was a while away yet) all 15m of it and loaded up every game to see what happened.
Saw that a few people were playing V8 3 so played for a bit, then notice that mates from school said they where playing, it so ended up playing it with them for hours on end. Wasn't until like 2011 when I got my wheel which I bought for myself, and started playing every racing game I could, Even tried GTA 4, and took to it like I have been doing it for ages.

I had my first GT game back on the original PS and played it from top to bottom and absolutely loved it. Had a friend who liked it too and would bring his memory stick to my place so we could race each other's cars.
We then left university and started working, so became time poor like everyone else, but would still gather with three other friends to play soccer World Cups on Friday nights, all the way into early morning... so awesome.
After that really didn't play it anymore as I found it quite boring racing against the AI, but still played the F1 games of the time.
Had every PS console and kept buying the GT games only to drop them quite quickly, no fun by myself and my mate was already off the radar caught up with real life.
When GT5 came out my wife got it for me, but hated the poor connection quality and idiots on the road, dropped it again.
Then very unexpectedly a mate from work nominated me for an award and got 300 dollars worth of JB Hi Fi vouchers, which almost goes into a GPS... But then It happened, saw a G27 at the store and knew exactly what the money was for.
Being this the random purchase that it was, I quickly found out that the wheel needed a firm structure and the ironing board would not cut it . So did some investigation online and found the pagnian website and their range of everything, so ordered their wheel stand. And yeah, they had a video review of the wheel stand by a guy from ROOZ, and one thing led to the other.
Did the first couple of races with the controller and then switched to the wheel as soon as the stand arrived, what a difference... Have not raced with the controller ever since, can't see the point anymore .
Two years onwards I'm still enjoying it, have made some great mates and has now become a permanent part of my life.
Love ROOZ and racing all the guys here, whether they are faster or slower, it always makes for great clean racing.

Having grown up with racing games all my life on the N64, and PS2, it was not until 2009 I ventured into online racing when finally bought a wireless modem. After much head scratching, I was able to get into online racing!
...With Mario Kart Wii... No matter, I played it enough to reach a VR rating of over 8000. The Wii had some truly fantastic games, but sadly most of the racing games I had, they didn't bother adding online for them. I grew tired of playing the same games over and over and not with friends. So I bit the bullet and got myself a PS3 for my birthday in Aug 2011. It made me realise how mediocre of a console the Wii truly was. Nintendo will always have a place in my heart, but the Gamecube with Motion controls instantly became a dust collector, as Black Ops became my main game. Still the best CoD to date IMO.

A month afterwards, I purchased GT5. Mainly I was just mucking around with mates from school. I managed to get several people to get GT5, and for a brief period, having 15 mates from school in the same lobby was something real special. But too often I was dominating them so online became stagnant until I began joining other people's lobbies. Got some good runs in and became good mates with a guy named Stu, who is in his mid 50's. We played together for about a year or so, and still do to this day. Around about December 2012, I received a PSN message from Stuart170773 asking me to check out ROOZ. I merely presumed it was my mate Stu's alternate account but as it turned out, it wasn't. I couldn't find ROOZ stu on my recent players list so I ignored the message (from memory). Then he sent me a friend request, and kept hassling me to race with him and here I am sitting thinking, when the hell have I raced with this guy? Xmas 2012, and my awesome parents scored me a cheap, brand new G27. I was pretty handy with the DS3, obviously not at the skill levels Razor and CAGM are now, but I always wanted a wheel after trying it out at a mate's place. My PS2 wheel didn't work on the PS3, so the G27 was a welcome addition.

Despite my initial resistance, I saw Stu had a room open, and thought why not? and joined the lobby. I soon realised that I met Stu, Aussie man and a couple of others when they were driving RX7's at Fuji. And sure enough, there were driving these RX7's again. I was pretty rusty, still getting used to the wheel and car as I only really raced around on RS tyres. But I persisted and with persuasion from Stu, Anon, Aussie and Zamps in that lobby. I signed up to ROOZ on the 10th of January, 2013. And the rest is history. A win on debut, one GTLOZ title, nearly 30 wins and 8 community titles later, here we are now. It took a bit to get me here, but now I'm sitting here thinking, why the hell didn't I join earlier?!? Since then, I've seen ROOZ shrink and grow, and it's a true testament to the mods to have survived the Sunday races shrinking to just 2 divs, to rising to 6 divs even a year after GT6's release. ROOZ has without shadow of a doubt, provided the most fun I've had in not just online racing, but video gaming in general. We've had a few bumps along the way, but these are the best bunch of guys I've raced with, and with guys like Dan, Warrior, MINT and Rotor supporing ROOZ with their insane pace, they serve as the ulitmate motivation to try to match their speed and consistency. Only in ROOZ will you find guys these fast and be willing to help people get faster, and not act like complete snobs about it! My skills behind the wheel have improved dramtically since joining, and hopefully will continue to improve enough to challenge for a Div 1 title! Not likely however!

ROOZ, you are awesome.

rooz is love..rooz is life..