iRacing

This is a continuation of my 3 month and 6 month reviews of iRacing, I’d suggest reading them in order to get the full scope of the review and get a flavour of how things have developed.

Coming to the end of a full year of iRacing, I’ve climbed the license requirements and have an ‘A’ license in both the Road and Ovals but I guess you could say this is written from the perspective of mostly being a road racer.

I haven’t really run the ovals at ‘B’ or ‘A’, there wasn’t really a realistic option in my ‘B’ season as the Silver Crown was pretty unpopular and although I have the option of the Impala Nationwide (‘B’) or Impala COT (‘A’) this season I decided to concentrate fully on road racing in the Riley Daytona Prototype as finding the time to get even vaguely competitive at this level is really, really tough!

I thought I’d revisit the format of my 3 month review and update and revise it.

The iRacing web experience

The basic navigation of the site hasn’t drastically changed since launched and whilst most of the service functions perfectly adequately, some aspects are still needlessly clumsy, for example, trying to see how many club points you’ve scored in a particular series requires WAY too many clicks and unless you know exactly how to access the data, you probably won’t be able to work it out.

For a very stats-heavy service, there still seems to be stuff missing too, for example, I’d like to see a graph of my iRating, ttRating and Safety Rating to see how they’ve progressed over time. I can see that data through a 3rd party website but it should be incuded on the iRacing site.

I’d also like to see iRacing open up the data through an API so we can use it in other ways, I’d love to be able to show my stats on this blog for instance.

One area that has improved a lot is the “Results Archive” where you canview all your results and those on your friends/studied lists. This gives you access to the results and stats of every session you’ve run in iRacing which you can sort and filter in pretty much any way you want.

We’ve now also got access to full race replays (saved locally) through the web interface. The replays are improving and we can now edit the camera’s, it’s really easy to use and makes it simple to share replays. This has led to many more iRacing videos popping up on YouTube and the like which must help iRacing get the word out.

iRacing have also installed their first race servers outside the US in Australia. Ping is an issue when you are on a server sitting half way around the world so this allows drivers in that region to race closer with more confidence they aren’t seeing any lag. I’d assume we’ll be getting European based servers at some point when the driver base grows anough but I haven’t had any problems on the US or Aussie servers so far.

The iRacing in-car experience

If I go a week or so without driving in iRacing I still get that “WOW” feeling when I get behind the wheel again. My only experience in a real race car is 40 minutes at Silverstone in a Formula First car but iRacing really does feel amazing real to me. This was highlighted again with the introduction of the Lotus ‘79 which is an absolute beast of a car and gives an amazing seat-of-the-pants sensation.

Resets have now been turned into being towed back to the garage and although repairs still aren’t implemented it’s a much more severe penalty for mistakes and I welcome that approach. Since resets were eliminated from the higher series, the racing got a lot cleaner.

We’ve had the addition of a ’spotter’ to communicate important events throughout the race, I think this is mainly aimed at the ovals drivers but I’ve found it pretty useful in road races too.

Competition

iRacing is really tough and has got tougher each season. I consider myself an average simracer (and my iRating bears that out) but in the Riley Daytona Prototype last season it was a real struggle to get into the top 2/3rds of qualifying times. There are some frighteningly fast drivers in iRacing!

I guess this is my major reservation about iRacing. I’ve still had some good races but there needs to be a good cross-section of abilities to really keep things interesting. I’m hopeful that as the Lotus ‘79 is open to ‘B’ licence we’ll get some big fields and some race splits to spice things up. 

Content

The amount of content available is growing at an impressive pace, the creation of a NASCAR sanctioned series being introduced in 2010 seems to have accelerated the introduction of oval tracks and there’s now a whopping 23 ovals available. Road tracks outside the US have been confirmed with Zandvoort, Brands Hatch and Oulton Park in the pipeline.

New road cars have been introduced with the Spec Racer Ford now included in the basic subscription. The long-awaited Lotus ‘79 is here and the VW Jetta TDi will be available in a few weeks.  The Corvette CR-6 is on the horizon and we have a big announcement at the end of August to look forward to which is assumed to be a deal with Indycar.

I think iRacing need to be careful with the amount of content available not to offer too much and dilute the members into too many series. They’ve shown they are willing to limit the number of races to avoid this happening but it’s still a concern. The marketing efforts seem to be upping the number of subscribers so hopefully as the membership grows, more options will be available. Some series though will naturally start to fade and lose popularity though but this needs to be managed closely, if you’ve paid $15 for a car it’s difficult to accept that you can’t use it.

Pricing

iRacing have done a lot of work introducing discounts and offers for existing and new subscribers but it’s still a big financial commitment, especially as the £ has been struggling against the $ this year!

I’ve re-subscribed for another year and I’m finding as I’m being more picky about the content I buy (sticking to road content only) each season is relatively cheap even though I’m buying pretty much all the content on the road side.

 I’m happy I’m getting good value out of iRacing and it’s really only my other commitments that prevent me from spending a whole lot more time with it!

If this review has helped you decide to subscribe to iRacing, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider adding my email address (popabawa AT gmail DOT com) as your referrer

 http://www.iracing.com/membership/subscriptions.php?lc=2