Racing on-line with iRacing.com

Last week I had the pleasure of trying one of iRacing’s simulators at their headquarters in suburban Boston. I have zero experience in racing simulators and haven’t driven a racing car in twenty-five years so I was surprised at how quickly I took to it and how much I enjoyed it. The iRacing experience is available on-line at iRacing.com where you can buy a one-month subscription for $20 or a one-year subscription at $13 per month. I highly recommend giving it a try.

The beauty of iRacing is that you can not only practice in a wide variety of cars on an equally rich variety of road courses and oval tracks but you can also race against a field of drivers with roughly equal skills. iRacing was launched at the end of August and has already attracted 7,500 subscribers, including race-winning drivers like Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jacques Villeneuve, Justin Wilson, Alex Gurney and A.J. Allmendinger. All five have become huge fans of iRacing and if you are able to step up to their level, you can race against these guys on a regular basis from the comfort of your desk or couch at home.

The company was founded in the autumn of 2004 by Dave Kaemmer and John Henry and many years of development went into the software, hardware and track-mapping required to launch iRacing. Kaemmer is a successful amateur racer and software engineer whose previous company, Papyrus Design, created a number of racing simulators, including Grand Prix Legends. Henry is the primary owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team and co-owner of the Roush Fenway NASCAR team through his Fenway Sports Group.

Kaemmer and Henry wanted to create a racing simulator that was more realistic than anything else and would therefore encourage not only fans but also real-life racers to use the iRacing experience to learn every detail of the tracks they have mapped. They imagined drivers and teams using the iRacing system to practice, test and gain advantages, and in the two months iRacing has been on-line they’ve gathered many advocates. Right now, they’re talking to a handful of car builders about developing purpose-built systems to help in the testing and development of their cars so it will be fascinating to see how all this interest shakes out.

One of the secrets to iRacing’s virtual reality is the detailed track-mapping system the company has developed. It uses lasers to gather up to 250 million points of reference from some 5,000 photos of the most complex road or street circuits, costing around $100,000 per track. So darn near every little bump and variation in the pavement and subtle changes in the camber of the road surface are there for you to negotiate just like in the real world.

Again, I have no experience in simulators and therefore no reference points of my own but I was immediately struck by how iRacing is unlike most video games I’ve tried. It provides a tremendously realistic feel for the car and the track. In my brief test run I drove a Star Mazda car round the Lime Rock road course and a late model stock car on the tiny South Boston, Virginia oval and in both cases it took only two or three laps before I was able to settle into a rather slow but steady pace.

I couldn’t have enjoyed my hour or so of driving more and I suggest going to iRacing.com to take a look at everything on offer and give it a run. I’d be surprised if you’re not soon sold on becoming an iRacing regular.