How unbeatable was Dustin Leger in a 410 sprint on iRacing? So unbeatable his league kicked him out after winning his second championship. So how did Dustin scratch his racing itch? Bought a hobby stock before this season. This past Saturday at Worthington Speedway he won his first hobby stock feature.
“It felt good to have gotten kicked out,” Leger, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said. “I loved iRacing, but the other drivers were just sick of me winning.
Leger had raced street stocks prior to sprint cars on iRacing.
“One thing I learned from iRacing [with] street stocks was less is more,” said Leger. “I needed to slow things down to win. I was overdriving when I started out this spring. This past weekend I started in fifth and worked my way to the front. Being in the lead, I didn’t know how close the second-place car was. I just kept to my pace.”
With 22 cars in the feature, Leger closed in on the back of the pack.
“Cautions helped keep me from dealing with traffic,” Leger said. “Real racing is not like iRacing, where you can just hit [the] escape [key] and get a brand-new car.”
Likewise, there’s no maintaining a race car in iRacing.
“Maintenance hours after work are important, even if you finish your workday at eight or nine in the evening,” said Leger. “You just can’t sit in front of a computer. You have to have both a great car and a knack for driving.”
This past Saturday, Dustin Leger had just that, winning his first real-life feature. It was a dream come true.
“I went and bought a hobby stock so I could keep on racing,” Leger said. “I always wanted to do real racing, but I never pulled the trigger. It’s better late than never.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
