There are always debates about the popularity of sim racing and each individual title. So it’s helpful to see some official numbers, as it’s revealed that the 2026 iRacing Daytona 24 Hours featured 21,208 drivers across the weekend of the special event.
As one of the biggest races, and marking the start of the special events season, it’s always popular. 2025 saw a recording breaking 23,397 total drivers across 5,633 teams. This year the total driver numbers were down slightly, but there were more teams competing – a total of 6,072 across 104 splits. So it seems a slightly smaller number of participants were doing more of the heavy lifting across the race sessions.
In total, 3,535,282 laps were completed, at a total of 12,585,603 miles and 106,231 hours. Which are also all significantly up on the statistics from 2025. So either everyone is getting faster, or there were a lot less incidents.
To put this into perspective, enough laps were completed of the 3.56 mile Daytona Sports Car Course that the distance is equal to 26 return visits to the moon. And it means the Daytona 24 Hours remains one of the most popular events across all of sim racing.
If you missed the coverage of the top split, the LMDh and overall victory went to Drago Racing for the first time, with Grid and Go winning LMP2 and Williams F1 Esports taking the flag first in the GTD class. Next up on the calendar are the Daytona 500 on February 11-18th, and the Bathurst 12 Hour on February 20-22nd.
Comparing the iRacing Daytona 24 Hours to other games and sims
There are always comparisons made between the popularity of sim racing as a whole, and iRacing versus other titles, but I’m not sure we should draw too many conclusions from one event which requires teams to commit to 24 hours of continuous racing. Personally, I’ve yet to do a 24 hours race, despite Team ORD driving in the Bathurst 12 Hour last season, and competing in multiple races each week.
As long as the playerbase is growing enough to sustain a range of sim racing titles and developments in hardware, it doesn’t need to ever reach the levels of Call of Duty or League of Legends. And in some ways, it’s better off remaining largely for enthusiasts of virtual motorsport without an influx of cheaters, casual wreckers and trolls that are easily found in more mainstream gaming.
And well done to all the teams and drivers that took part in all of the splits. Even getting a group together and committing to racing for 24 hours is an achievement in itself, and reaching the finish line is impressive regardless of your overall position, or which split you were in.
If you want to take part in any future events, then you can sign up to iRacing, here (and credit your referral to ORD, which we’d appreciate!). You can also browse all available cars 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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