Why iRace…

Last updated on December 20th, 2019 at 02:04 am

There is a fundamental need in all of us that drives us to be great, to be the best and god willing be recognized as such.  It is a driving force in our lives and without it; we would all aspire to absolutely nothing.  It is the reason we have great athletes and the reason kids can admire those athletes.  We all want to be great.

I have followed quite a few sports in my life and have had many people I looked up to.  But NASCAR drivers, especially ‘The Intimidator’ Dale Earnhardt Sr, were the most influential athletes I knew.  They are the reason I am a member of iRacing.

Daytona 500 13 image by jbspec7 on Flickr (CC Licence).

It is a long story with many different influences and possible outcomes, but I have always loved racing. I don’t group myself into being a NASCAR-only fan, but that is where my roots lie. Where I am from, it’s the motorsport I’m most exposed to, and that’s where my heart is. I always dreamed of being a professional race car driver, but unfortunately never had the resources to do it.  But thanks to technology, my dream has finally come true in a roundabout type of way.

Technology has allowed us to recreate the conditions and technology of racing and the physics involved with racing a car.  While the tech isn’t perfect yet, it grows in leaps and bounds every year, and as it stands right now the king of the Motorsport simulation world is by far iRacing.

Many will argue that it doesn’t have the best physics compared to other games, but what it lacks in physics it makes up for in experience. iRacing provides a structured community that is a renaissance of sorts where motorsport simulation is concerned.  When people call iRacing the NASCAR of Simracing it is a very fitting metaphor.  NASCAR was the organization responsible for bringing together race car drivers under one banner and allowing a structured environment for them to race.  iRacing has done the same in the sim world by allowing simracer’s that same type of structured environment. A sanctioning body called FIRST provides rules and regulations, and not just a bunch of random online servers for anyone to jump in.

This is a large leap, and may be the single largest development the world of Simracing has ever seen, even ahead of the sim wheel.  We have a structured environment to race in with a great selection of cars and a large and accurate selection of tracks.  The biggest benefit of this comes in the form of structure.  From entering a practice session and fine tuning your setup, to jumping into qualifying sessions to trim off that last .001 from your time, to capturing pole on the grid, or at the least a good starting position, the structure makes it feel like a true racing experience. And once you get in a race and are grouped with people of the same skill level as you and feeling some intense high speed door to door racing, there truly is no other way of feeling this type of adrenaline without spending your life savings.

No sim is perfect and iRacing does have faults, it is still new in its development but it is still developing ever season brings with it new cars and new tracks not to mention updated physics graphical enhances and little details that sim racers love.  This is why I joined iRacing, and why I would suggest others to at least give it a shot.