Apex Online Racing
Welcome to our fourth Community Spotlight! This week we caught up with FisiFan91, the admin for one of the most renowned racing leagues around – Apex Online Racing.
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How many platforms does your league support?
We have several leagues for all of the F1 2013 game’s three supported platforms; Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. We also aim to jump onto the next-gen platforms whenever Codemasters take this step with the F1 series!
If people wanted to join your league how would they go about it?
To join the league, you will need to register an account on our website – ApexOnlineRacing.com – and then locate the Sign-Up topics within the league forum for the platform you want to sign up to. The sign-up process is detailed within these topics and is slightly different between the platforms, but with the intention being to show that you’re committed to taking part for a lengthy period rather than just a few races, and to give us an indication of your speed on the game. Upon completing the sign-up process, you will be assigned to a league judged to fit your skill level, in order to keep the leagues as competitive as possible!
It must be noted that our leagues are based around races mainly being held on Sunday nights (UK time), apart from some of the PS3 leagues which run on Thursdays. However, our members do also organise frequent social races on other days during the week as well, which you are free to join regardless of whether you are part of a league, as long as you have the intention to respect our rules of clean racing. While the most ideal scenario of course is to join the leagues before the start of a new season, it is also possible to get involved whilst a season is ongoing.
Tell us a bit more about how your league was started.
The community started off properly in 2010 under the ARL name, when the founder decided to bring together a group of people who wanted to experience clean and fair racing, as opposed to the free-for-all atmosphere you usually get in the public lobbies of most racing games. When Codemasters announced their initial F1 2010 game, this triggered the interest in organising leagues to emulate real Formula One racing, and create an environment of clean and fair competition to the extent that this is possible. Since starting off quite humbly in 2010, the league – along with the community as a whole – has grown a lot both in structure and quality!
How’s your current season/championship going?
We have seen 7 largely successful seasons being completed up until now, with a regular cycle of two full seasons per new game (each season covering a full F1 calendar of 18-19 races). Season 8 started off just recently, with a total of 15 official leagues being run across the three platforms; 6 Xbox 360 leagues, 5 PS3 leagues and 4 PC leagues.
Within each platform, we have a tiered league structure with quicker drivers at the top and slower drivers at the bottom, giving everyone a chance to experience close and competitive racing. We’ve seen some great races already this season, and hope our drivers will continue to find enjoyment in the racing as we continue through the season and towards F1 2014!
How would you describe your league to someone that hasn’t heard of it before?
Much has been mentioned already in the previous paragraphs, but I would underline that we are an online community with passion for league racing, and passion for F1. Everyone involved with running the AOR leagues do so in our free time simply because we enjoy it, and because we want to offer a special racing environment to our drivers. As long as you are a clean and mature racer who respect the community for what it is, we will do our best to give you as a driver the best possible experience by creating leagues that will offer competitive racing regardless of your skill level, while maintaining a good standard of driving by enforcing proper clean and fair racing rules to the best of our ability. As you can imagine, with something like 240 drivers competing throughout our leagues, this isn’t the easiest of tasks, but we have a good team in place, and with the help of our drivers it’s mostly been going well so far!
Our top leagues contain some of the quickest drivers on the F1 2013 game, with some extremely tough competition, but our lower leagues are also well balanced with drivers of varying skill levels, so most drivers should be able to fit in well. We don’t see any shame in being a bit slow on the game – the most important thing is that you race cleanly and enjoy yourself!
Out of all the league races you’ve witnessed which one has been your favourite?
There’s been so many great races over the years, and each driver would probably pick a different race based on their own enjoyment and achievements in a particular race, but in recent history there’s two races from our top Xbox 360 league that spring to mind in particular.
Firstly, the Season 7 Belgian Grand Prix, which was the first race in the era of the new AOR name, after having gone through a tough process of transition, but our drivers put on an incredible show, with constant close battling from start to finish, topped off with a first-time winner and a debutant on the podium!
Secondly, it’s gotta be the Season 7 Brazilian Grand Prix, which turned out to be one of the most competitive league races we’ve witnessed. The top 10 racers stayed within touching distance for the vast majority of the race and were all separated by less than 15 seconds when the chequered flag was waved. It also included what was arguably the overtake of the season from the driver who went on to win in the end.
And finally, if you had to describe your league in three words, what would they be?
Clean, Fair & Competitive
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