Hello Racers!

As some of you might have noticed, there is a new sim comming on the market. And thats brings us to the very old question, asked since the first game was ever created and offered in shops: "Is it worth it?" Unfortunatly you won't find the answer here, but a very fine report from Gavin (P1LOT), who had the chance to be part of the beta test of iRacing.

Better be prepared for a pretty long review. 

The whole ethos of this sim is very different from LFS, it is less about pick up and play and more about learning to race and improving your skills as you move up the difficulty ladder. This would suit those who get their fun more from real close racing instead of relaxed races with friends or messing about. Think of it as every race is a league race.

All servers are hosted by iRacing, and will probably remain so for some time to come. There are set times when qualifications and races start so you tend to plan around those times. There are single car series which run a particular track for a week, after 12 weeks the series is complete and winners announced before starting again.

Which cars you can race online depends on your licence level. You start at Rookie, then progress through licence D, C, B, etc.
You have a different licence level for oval racing and road racing. I must admit I’m not interested in oval racing so did not even try them, I chose to spend my limited time concentrating on the road racing so my oval licence remains on Rookie level while my road licence level progressed to D. 

There are two types of performance indicator to reflect your driving; a Safety Rating which is affected by the number and severity of incidents, and a skill rating known as iRating (or ttRacing for time-trial equivalent) which is based on your race finishes.

The only way to progress to a higher licence, and therefore more advanced cars, is to have a certain minimum Safety Rating at the end of the 12 week series (but upgrades possible every 4 weeks from Rookie level). This makes you very wary of pushing to the limit since you are aware there is a consequence to making mistakes. Although I’ve had bad races, they were only a minor set back which was quickly improved upon. The important thing to know is this stops wreckers and careless driving.

Even when you get incident points because of someone else’s actions you know this is due to a mistake and not intentional. I’ve only experienced the system during the beta phase with dedicated and passionate simracers, but I’m confident this system will stop wreckers in their tracks. The careless drivers will be destined to forever race at rookie level, decent drivers should find it easy to progress higher.

There are five modes to driving; test, practice, qualification, time trial and race.
All incidents are recorded, except they are not counted during test and practice. In increasing severity they are off track, loss of control, hit an object and colliding with an opponent, and how much these affect your record depends on the driving mode, race has the highest influence.

I had too many incidents in my opinion but still did OK. Some races I managed to be clean throughout, other races included off-road, spins and barrier collisions.

Your iRating is determined by your race finishes (or time-trials) and the strength of the opposition. This rating is then used to place you in servers with drivers of a similar skill level with the intention of close racing. There is a slight variation on this though; you might be occasionally placed amongst a strong line-up to give you experience, or occasionally at the front of a weaker field where you are expected to win.

I can only give my views of the road cars since I didn’t visit oval cars or tracks. You start in the Pontiac Solstice which is meant to represent a road sport car, imagine a slow RAC from LFS but easier to drive than an XRG. I still struggled to get to grips with this car in the first few days as it frequently under-steered off track, but that might have been due to unfamiliarity with the tracks also.

You soon learn to push this car to it’s limit, it’s fastest through corners when sliding on the power. This makes it easy to race and fun to corner with the back hanging out, though I suspect too predictable compared to real life. I have little experience of real life cars driven to their limit but I feel the knife edge of control is too forgiving. I suppose this makes sense for beginners.

Above a certain rating I had the opportunity to race the Solstice Advanced which is meant to be less forgiving and allows for more setting changes in the pits. I didn’t give this much time since there were more people racing the standard one during beta phase and I needed to improve my safety rating against others.

I recently jumped into the Skip Barber Formula 2000 open wheeler and am still learning it, so spins and excursions are a bit too common at the moment. Even though it’s low powered and low downforce it provides exciting racing. I’ve witnessed some excellent racing between others, nose to tail and wheel to wheel for several corners (after I’d crashed out).

Above that is a faster open wheel Formula Mazda which feels way to fast for me at the moment, and then the Radical SR8 which is just manic. I can’t give an accurate overview of these since my experience consists of trying to stay in a straight line only.

You can read about the oval cars elsewhere in plenty of places. There are no sessions for oval cars on road courses and vice-versa, but you can test any combination you want. I have heard some people say the little Legends car is a hoot on road tracks.

If most of the project money has been spent on the tracks, the results show it’s been worth it. They are great visually and OK for detail … I’ve mostly been on some small, little known US road courses which don’t even have sheltered pits (well OK, we’ve all heard of Leguna Seca and even that has open pits. Must be a US thing). I can only assume they are accurate.

They must have scanned all the bumps in the road because it’s not like driving on silky smooth LFS tracks, you feel every imperfection as you point down the road. Even with the force feedback on a low setting it feels alive in your hands.

The downside is that they are mostly US tracks with the exception of Silverstone (UK). I’m sure more European tracks will be added following demands from new users (most of the beta testers where American). The tracks I was using are great fun and just right for the speed of the car with plenty of interesting fast and slow sections.

The downside for me is that half of the tracks are ovals, I can’t understand why they need so many tracks for only turning left (says an oval non-believer)

Race Procedure

You visit the website and login to the member area. From there you can see the how many others are queuing for a series or choose another one. Races are every two hours so you don’t want to mess up and wait all over again, this makes for a lot of anticipation. After subscribing to a race (or other session) you watch the timer count down and the number of participants increase. If there are more than the maximum entrants allowed, the drivers will be split into different servers according to their rating.

When the timer reaches zero you can join and the simulation starts loading. The webpage remains in the background to show you stats after the race. You now have 5 minutes to go for a practice, incidents are still counted so you have to careful. Then place yourself on the grid ready for the race (there are rolling starts for oval racing). The number of laps is fixed depending on the length of the track, expect at least 20 minute races.

Everyone tended to be very careful into T1, I hope that continues after going public. There are usually opportunities to gain places as others slip off the track, I found myself doing the slipping an equal number of times.

It was about 18 months ago I changed to use cockpit view in LFS. Obviously this gives you less view for watching opponents and corner apexes, and I know plenty were unhappy with the removal of looking back. iRacing has even more restricted view, 90º left and right are the only directions you can check. The inside of the Solstice was extremely dark with a little rear view mirror, hence the need to race carefully with others. There is one concession for simracing in that you can also have a virtual rear view mirror which has a fisheye lens effect. I think this has been proven from some other sims and allows you to know when someone’s at your back corner because they will almost fill that virtual mirror! If they’re a couple of car lengths back they will just be a dot. 

Outside the textures and lighting seems decent, I’m not sure I saw many shadows, I expect others with high-end systems will get more impressive effects.

You can tell the sounds are sampled and after a while it started to grate on me. The engine sounds gruff when spectating the Solstice, yet is very muffled when racing inside, but this is meant to be a showroom stock car I suppose. The tyres squeal a little when pushed but I was disappointed by the same tone over and over again for turning right (and a slightly different pitch when turning left). Going over rumble strips sounds good. There was little ambient sounds from the venue because these were the equivalent of local track races. I expect things like crowd cheering will appear at the top levels of competition.

As I explained earlier I am no authority on how cars should handle, I tend to think it’s just a case of learning the feel of a new sim since your senses are so far removed from real life information. But besides that, the bumps in the road make the cars feel alive in your hands and rarely are you left scratching your head as to why you lost control (mostly from going into a corner too fast). 

I’m understand you can flatspot your tyres and even get a blow out from pushing them to hard. You can see the front suspension moving in the open wheelers. Tyres need to be warmed up before getting maximum grip, careful on lap 1 again.

I’m paranoid about collisions with opponents and the limited view in the Solstice makes it a challenge. But the car is so easy to drive that you can safely position the car exactly where you want. I expect close racing will be common. I found that racers where either way faster than me or much slower, I expect I’ll find more similar opposition after going public.

The single seater is too new for me to have found close racing yet, at least the view ahead is unobscured. Because of the length of the races I’ve had a few exciting races watching guys slowly catch up who had an incident on the first lap. Concentration is definitely needed when you could be doing as much as 20 laps. 

There’s no method for painting your car in a specific scheme. You have a choice of approximately 20 designs using three colours and the choice of those colours. This gives plenty of variations. So no skinning, but the system is easy enough that everyone can paint their own cars to their liking. Same for helmets and suits.

Where’ve I seen those colours before?

I felt a bit of an outcast since most testers were American. There were a few LFSers in the mix but I never met them on the track, I think they weren’t as active as me and I didn’t class myself as fully utilising the experience. A lot of talking was going on in the forum, again connect through the member webpage, and the majority was cordial and valid. It appears the majority were from GPL or Nascar, I expect a more European influence after going public. My experience of this was probably in part due to me being placed in the International club instead of West European club, the reason for the club system wasn’t fully obvious to me apart from there being a points score to see how your area is doing. Maybe they have plans for competitions limited to each area in the future.

I don’t see the benefits of teams fitting in with their system as it’s more about the individual - no skinning and no reason to group yourselves together at the moment. I suppose the proliferation of teams in LFS is down to friendships.

There’s no doubt this will be more expensive than any other sim. I’m sure you’re all wanting me to tell you whether it’s worth it or not, well that depends on your priorities. For me personally I could stretch to the monthly charge by justifying it against other pastimes, and based on the amount of time I spend with racing sims. I have a harder time justifying the outlay of additional cars and tracks. I would estimate the default content would entertain you for 3 to 6 months before you’d look for more, you might even be desperate enough to try the ovals. After that you should know if you want to continue with the purchase of an additional car and tracks for a particular series.

So I found the testing quite lonely since I knew few others and I didn’t have many close races. I did get one win which pleased me, I then ruined the great feeling by racing 2 hours later when I was obviously too tired.

The test phase was not a true representation of the experience, how much fun it becomes all depends on how many jump to the new sim. I’m hoping for a large intake which means plenty of full races with very similar competitors. I’ll be paying for the service for a few months to see if this is the case, I doubt it will be quiet.

There are several features missing which many would view as required, e.g. weather, damage, spotters for ovals. The general consensus is these will follow in a timely manner since they have a paid team to do the work, plenty of updates should come along regularly.

I raced LFS for 5 years before finally getting bored with the content. This nicely coincided with opportunity to test iRacing, but I’m adamant I will return to LFS at some point, sooner or later. Even if it’s just to have a bash about and compare. The sim part of iRacing is very good, it just needs to prove itself for fun now.

I’ve now rambled on for far too long so if there’s anything you are left wanting to know I’ll try and answer it.

Website http://www.iracing.com/
Unofficial video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBBCf2n18e8
SRT preview http://insidesimracing.tv/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=148&Itemid=206