While it’s always been seen as the leader in competitive online sim racing, the single player AI experience has always been pretty good in iRacing. But it’s about to get a lot more interesting as Adaptive AI opponents arrive with iRacing 2025 Season 2.
AI racers were first introduced towards the end of 2019 and start of 2020, and since then more cars and tracks have been enabled for AI racing with every subsequent season update. While you’ve always been able to set the difficulty of the computer drivers, when Season 2 is deployed on March 11th, 2025, they’ll start learning and adapting to your skill level.
When you select a single player race against the AI, you’ll be able to select from four skill levels, with Easy, Medium, Hard and Extreme. But from there, the AI will progressively adapt to your pace, speeding up as you improve, for example.
We’ll find out which cars and tracks allow for adaptive AI when the update is released, although the explainer video shows the FF1600, Toyota GR86 and NASCAR racing, suggesting that it will probably be rolled out across everything currently enabled for AI opponents.
Adaptive AI has appeared in other racing sims, including RaceRoom, and the Sophy AI agent in Gran Turismo 7. But the iRacing application is interesting both for the improved single player experience, and the fact iRacing announced a collaboration with Microsoft in November 2024 on AI and Large Action Models (LAMs) which could improve “AI-based drivers, AI-based coaching, crew chiefs, and many other possibilities”. If this is the first stage, how long will it be before iRacing adds coaches and crew chiefs using AI? That will have implications for the sim, but also for the various third-party providers who have been offering free and paid solutions for a long time.
As with any new update or feature, you can probably expect the occasional glitch when Adaptive AI launches with Season 2. But it’ll be interesting to see how it impacts the experience of single player racing, and if the AI behaviour will replicate human drivers even more than in the past.
You can sign up to iRacing, here (and credit your referral to ORD, which we’d appreciate!). And see all vehicles included in your basic subscription, or what you can access by paying more, in our full official iRacing car list, here. Or check out all of the included circuits, and the others you can buy, in our full official iRacing track list, here. And keep up with all the latest iRacing news, updates and eSports, here.
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