history of the team
Hello, I’m Julio Martins de Almeida, CEO of the former Nismo Racing team, now known as Martins Virtual Racing; here is the story of our team.
The team was created in the simulator Live for Speed at the beginning of 2006; I was an inexperienced driver with little skill. I played LFS offline, away from the servers; when I learned how to create my account, I moved to the demo mode. I didn’t have a good PC, so you can imagine how terrible the FPS was—completely awful; anyone familiar with LFS knows that frame rate is essential, especially to stay out of the slipstream.
I started spending a fortune at local LAN houses just to enjoy playing with good FPS, even though I had a PC at home; I kept watching YouTube videos of events that players organized. I saw drivers drifting and promoting their teams—for both drift and normal races—and it was fascinating; in my mind, that was everything, and I dreamed of becoming a true virtual racer.
Like many others, the beginning was hard; but for me, that didn’t matter. Even while hearing jokes and laughter, over time—and with a trackball mouse—I explored every straight and every corner, absorbing everything other drivers taught me.
In 2007, I discovered S2Pro, a cracked league organized by Rodrigo DK; using LAN houses and my own PC, I tried to catch up with the S2Pro drivers, who at that time were very skilled, each with their own specialty—some in drifting, others in racing. But I had a problem: work. When I wasn’t working, I used my Intel Celeron 510 with a modest 65 MB graphics card and 1 GB of RAM; another problem was the internet. Only those who had Telefônica’s Speedy service could survive on the LFS servers, both official and demo.
In my case, I even used that Claro USB stick, which offered only 1 GB of data before cutting off; I stayed with that stick for three months until I managed to get radio internet in my city. Even so, the connection was poor; it was very difficult to get quality broadband because the best option—Speedy—was for a lucky few, and I wasn’t one of them.
After a long time practicing without much sense of racecraft, I didn’t know how to duel and drove dirty in races, until the bans came; that forced me to change my attitude.
In 2008, finally, with a friend’s help, I obtained the original S2 license. His name is Leandro Krisak, and I’m happy to mention him; he was a member of the old LFSBR. That only fueled my desire to race more. That’s when I met drivers such as Gabriel Corrêa, Gabriel Garcia, Jorge Alberto, and Diego Coil Coil, among others; our team once had more than ten active drivers.
Unfortunately, even with such a strong lineup, I, as CEO, couldn’t take part in the races because of high ping and critical FPS; over time, many of those drivers moved on with their lives—married and started families—and I was left behind.
In 2012, like many men, I decided to hit the road as a truck driver; I ended up leaving the team in the hands of our friend Jorge Alberto. I don’t remember exactly what happened afterward, as new drivers joined—some who had never even heard of me—and I carried a certain resentment.
When I returned, I joined a team called Virtual Race (VR) because I didn’t want to interfere with Jorge and the drivers he had recruited; since then, I followed the team online as it changed hands.
In 2014, I was diagnosed with mild schizophrenia, something that brought me back to LFS; in 2015 and 2016, I began treatment. While staying at my sister’s house, I had the chance to race on a laptop with a good internet connection.
From 2017 to 2018, my sister supported me and started paying for my internet so I could stay at home; I thought I needed to work, but she convinced me to keep racing in LFS.
Between 2018 and 2020, I bought my first G920 wheel and a used gaming PC with an AMD FX-8 Black processor and a 2 GB NVIDIA graphics card; with that, I was able to join other simulators, such as iRacing and Assetto Corsa.
By 2022, I purchased my first brand-new gaming PC, assembled by my sister’s husband in exchange for a few beers (haha); I bought all the parts myself, and he built an excellent setup with a Ryzen 7 processor, which I still use today. In 2023, I had to step back because of BPC/LOAS benefits; in 2024, I managed to buy my G29, my first Xtreme cockpit, and CMC Evolution pedals, which I currently use.
Today, the team has four drivers.
Web Page Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/martinvirtualracing
Email:
[email protected]
youtube
https://www.youtube.com/@martinvirtualrace/featured
