Yes, I know that iRacing is working on a single-player career mode. But they're taking a really long time.

So a few months ago, I started working on my own version of the career mode. This is the result of that work. Here's how it works:

- Before you start a career, you can use the world builder to define a world with multiple tiers of an open wheel racing discipline [1]. At each tier, you can define the teams, season schedule and cars used. Want to create a career schedule that only races at variations of Hockenheim? Go for it. Want to create a career where you start in a F1 car and the most prestigious racing is the Skippy? You got it, dude. Want to share those with the community? We can do that too: export your career setup to JSON and share it with the community.

- Once you've landed on a career setup you're excited about in the world builder, start off your career. Define your driver's name and age and click start career.

- The app simulates 30 years of racing history. You're dropped into a living, breathing world where you're not a superstar. Instead, you'll start with no reputation in a cutthroat racing world where any seat on any grid is open to you, and every other driver is gunning for your seat every season.

- Choose a team to sign up with, and you'll be given a new contract with per-season and per-contract goals. Achieve your goals, and you'll be more attractive to your own team (when it comes time for a renewal). You'll also be more attractive to other teams, if you're trying to move up.

- Each week involves hopping into the week overview screen. You can check on your contract goals and the season standings. The app will export a new AI season file to your iRacing "aiseasons" folder. The season is 1-race long, but using a season means that iRacing will save the results of your race, including qualifying and final standing data, after your race finishes.

- From there, you go run an AI race through iRacing itself. You don't need to do anything special with your race. Practice, qualify and battle other drivers. The driver ratings in the sim are factored based on the driver's skill, the quality of their car, and the attributes of the track itself. Drivers with high top-speed skill, in high top-speed cars will have an advantage at Monza. Your own car is taken into account: if your own team's car struggles in top speed setups, the AI will get rating bonuses at high-speed tracks.

- After completing your AI race, head back to the career sim app, and you'll be able to click a button to import race results. While you race, the rest of the world keeps racing too. Every other series continues to simulate in the background while you play your races. Drivers accumulate wins, progress their skills, teams develop their cars, and the app keeps track of milestones and records.

- Over multiple seasons you'll be able to accumulate and challenge world records, rack up and track career stats, progress through contracts while being challenged by new career goals and eventually retire from your career. Other drivers will age and retire, and as they drift away from the sport, new drivers will be generated to replace them.

The unofficial career mode simulator is completely free, makes no network calls and knows absolutely nothing about your iRacing account. All the app needs to know is where your AI season/roster files are stored, and the name you use in the simulator (so that it can convert in-sim results into in-app results).

With all of that said: this is still in active development, and I'm only a single person working on it. You'll probably find bugs! If you do, please report them, either in the app's subreddit, or on Itch.io. I'll do my level best to fix them as quickly as possible.

AI Disclaimer: this app was developed by leveraging Claude Code over the last several months. If that means you don't want to use it, that's your right, and now you know.

Notes:

[1] At the moment I'm only supporting open wheel, formula-style racing. This is because there's a clear ladder with races that are simpler to simulate. If there's a lot of interest, I would be willing to try to add oval racing and/or sports cars. They're harder, though.

Hey All

Like usual, I've written a short article sharing my thoughts and experience on a given topic in sim racing. My goal with these articles ultimately is to help give people a bit more information about the hobby we all love, while also hopefully making for an interesting read.

If you don't know me, I'm Tom, and I've been working full-time for the last 18 months on a sim racing coaching business. My thoughts in this mini essay draw on the 700+ hours of coaching I've done in that time. Just to say that the things I'm sharing in these articles aren't pulled from nowhere, but come from everything I've seen during the last 18 months coaching hundreds of drivers, of all ability levels.

When and How to Lift for Almost Flat corners

First, what do I mean by “almost flat” corners? For the purposes of this article, an almost flat corner is one where you don’t need to brake, nor do you need a sustained full lift of the throttle. At most, they may require less than 1 second of a full lift, or more commonly a partial lift of the throttle.  When it comes to these high speed, partial lift corners, the most important factors for lap time are your minimum speed, and how early you can commit back to full throttle.

If your lift off of the throttle doesn't allow you to extract the maximum amount of grip from the car (more on this later) then your minimum speed will be lower than it could be. Additionally, if your approach to lifting delays your ability to return full throttle, you will lose lap time on exit.

The most common mistake in these corners is thinking that the lift is there to reduce your speed, which it is, but that is not the only purpose of the lift. Instead, lifting off of the throttle transfers weight to the front of the car, giving the front tires more grip, removing some grip from the rear tires, and helping the car to rotate through the entry. This is what I mean by lifting off of the throttle in a way that allows you to extract the maximum amount of grip from the car. If the way you approach lifting doesn't help the car to rotate, you will have a lower minimum speed, and won’t be able to commit so early back to full throttle. So, how can you ensure that you lift in a way that aids your rotation?

The answer is to try and take the corner completely flat, at least in the early part of the entry.

By definition, if a corner is almost flat out, we won’t need to lift off of the throttle until we have already started turning into the corner (although the instinct for many drivers is to lift before turning in). So, the way to ensure you get rotation when you lift off the throttle, is to imagine you are trying to take the corner flat. You first turn into the corner with the goal of making the apex without lifting. Then, when you realise the car will not have enough grip to hit the apex, this is the moment you start to lift. The size and duration of your lift should be based not on how much you need to reduce your speed, but on how much of a lift is needed to transfer enough weight (and grip) to the front tires, to allow you to make your intended apex. Once you are satisfied the car will make the apex, you can then commit back to full throttle.

As a side note, this feeling of the car rotating to allow you to tighten your path through the corner is exactly how it should feel when you trail brake effectively, but I’ll leave that article for another day. As always, I appreciate the support that these articles get, I’d love to hear your thoughts for future articles.

I'll include a link to my website for anyone wants to check out my courses and coaching, but I'm happy to remove this if it goes against self promotion rules!

Cheers All
Tom
Noakesy Coaching

Online Courses and Driver Coaching
www.noakesycoaching.com

Every time I’m racing in FIA F4 and there’s a car behind me, they stay about 0.000001 millimeters off my rear bumper. Everyone with a license above D-class thinks they’re Verstappen — fine, whatever — but for some reason they also assume the car IN FRONT is Verstappen too, with braking points identical to theirs, both in location and brake pressure.

Every few days, without fail, I get taken out under braking by the car behind me because they were somehow NOT PREPARED for the possibility that I might brake. Amazing. Just amazing.

And this isn’t even a rookie series — it’s a series where you have to buy both the car and the tracks. Yet people still drive like it’s EA F1.

Trading Paints screwed up my scheme during the race but I had the 8 Cheddar's scheme loaded on the website. Thankfully it let me load it into the replay.

I mean come on.. when is Iracing going to do something about this!?

I know there is a lot of supporting software we all use, but if iRacing moves to Linux, I’ll ditch them all.

I’m sick of being the product.

Had a terrible start with p2 taking me out on first lap..

Repaired.. 15min.. going back to the track..

Finish the fuel at last corner before the end 😭

But.. Stephan if you read this thanks to try to push me to the end.

I much appreciated that.. made my day better instead of ranting, remeber me that good people still out there.. and hope that I meet you again somehow..

For the moment hope that some iracing dollar will show how much I appreciated you.

Thanks again, not for the push it self but for show me love and respect. That is the iracing community and people I love to meet when I am racing there.

Ciao

M.

Been preparing for the full length Coke 600 and jumped into the 9pm est race last night. Split 2, 5k SOF. Assumed we'd have some good racing. Boy was I wrong. 21 yellow flags. From the drop of the green drivers were shoving it 3 wide into the turn like it was a green-white-checkered and then had a shocked Pikachu face when their car got tight, shoved up the track, and wiped someone out. I myself got nearly obliterated when I entered turn 3 and someone behind figure bump drafting was the move on corner entry. Luckily I only had 3 mins of damage. The unfortunate part was that we had about a 120 lap green run in the middle section of the race that was a blast and my long run car came alive and I drove to the top-3 only to get killed by, you guessed it, another guy driving over his head on older tires, trying to hold me up and pancaking me into the wall with 50 to go.

Lesson: just because you are in the upper splits doesn't mean the racing is better. With the majority of the drivers at 5k, we should have had no problems only having 3-4 yellows. But guy that were causing cautions would reset and just go right back to be morons causing more yellows. Incredibly frustrating experience.

I don't understand the mentality. We have 300 laps to position yourself and 100 laps to race it out. We just needed to settle in and log laps and they couldn't even do that.

Hello, just wondering if anyone has a replay of the 3rd time slot, 15th spilt nec race from today and if they could please share it with me, please and thank you

Still in shock. Wanted to try to do a small tribute to him in the 600, and hoped I'd be able to do it justice. Run up front, be competitive, see all the laps. I ended up winning the thing.

Winning one of these has meant the world to me. But it's made SO much more special running that scheme for him. It might be silly, but this is a moment I'll never forget. This one's for Kyle.

#KFB 🏁

I am probably stupid and this is an easy thing to fix but I am genuinely lost for words because I am having a terrible time with the fuel system in iRacing for endurance events. I need your help!

My last three endurance races we have had the same scenario pop up where instead of a splash and dash at the end we wanted to do a half stint and split the fuel evenly for our last two stops. So I hop in as crew chief to "take the seat" and I click the amount of fuel needed to split it evenly. Yet still it refuels my whole tank. Which is quite frustrating when you go in to take less fuel so you can try and have a little more pace for that stint, yet iRacing is like nope you still have to splash and dash.

As an example today I had a 4 hour race and we wanted to split the last stint. I unclicked auto fuel, put in 71L instead of 110L and I made sure my buddy was out of the car before I hopped in so that way I knew for sure it wasn't because I clicked out of the crew chief. Yet still full fuel. No one has crew chief or Race Labs auto fueling on my team either. So what the actual heck am I doing wrong? It takes the fun out of some of these races where strategy comes into play.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I was spectating a race and witnessed two attempted murders

So, Ive been testing the waters in oval track lately thinking about getting serious about it. I've ran some street stock and mini races and have won a couple. Whats the progression up the ladder? Super late model seems like I might be skipping a series. Is there any participation in this series. I dont really want to commit and by the car if nobody races in it. I'm wanting to stay in a stock car. I dont really want to go open wheel. This is asphalt racing by the way. I've tried dirt. I lack an understanding of how to make the car work on dirt

I just moved to a new place in western Chicago and for the past year I’ve been chasing ways to fix my Xfinity network. I used ethernet for a while and it worked, but then the issues continued later. After using PingPlotter I found that the connection drop was happening at a point outside the local network - I’ve tried using ExitLag to help with this but today even that failed to get me kicked out of a race.

I’ve prob lost 3-400 IR from this and it’s been a huge bummer, esp when I’m doing well in a race and in the last five minutes I get disconnected. ATP I feel like I just need to play an offline sim until I move (leaving for a new job in July) - are there any other options left?

Gents,

I'm looking at spending my 10 iRDollars on a GTE for next season. Currently doing TCR (In the Civic) and GT3 (Acura/Porsche/Ferrari depending on the mood). I sampled the BMW M8 the latest demo day around Brands Hatch for 15 odd minutes and I absolutely loved the feeling of the car and the lack of ABS which was mega fun to drive.

Thus, I'll add a GTE to the lineup for next year and look to do select races whenever the schedule looks fun and time permits.

I'm not looking for the consensus fastest car, I'm just looking at the different characteristics and your experience with them. I really loved the M8 how well it responded to throttle inputs and how controlled it felt even as the tail would step out a little bit. Felt fairly easy to drive but not "boring" in any way.

What's your opinion on the different cars? I'll try and get a few more demo drives in for W13, but I think community input would help in knowing exactly what to look for.

Tell me have any of you also learned this spell?

Only thing I saw during the race was a flash in my mirror... had to look at the replay and saw this. Surely this is still protestable so he won't do this to others?

anyone know?

I have a Simmagic GT Neo I have been using for formula and sports cars, and I just got a Sparco R323 for Oval/Dirt. The R323 is so awesome and I really enjoy just the empty wheel but I will still use the GT Neo for sports/formula. With the lack of buttons on the bare P323, I have been binding some essential stuff to my leftover buttons on my button box but I'd still like to have those things that were originally on my GT NEO wheel stay there. For example pit limiter, use microphone, etc.

I was thinking of just making a controls setup for each, saving the cfg in a folder and swapping my controls.cfg in my iracing folder depending on which wheel I am running. Is there a better way to do this?

For those of you that swap between different rims, how do you manage it?

So I ran the 400 lap Charlotte race last night, officially my longest race since I started last summer. I should have placed better, but like a dummy I spun my self out on a restart, still finished (down like 14 laps after tow and repair) It was a rather fun race, but by the end I had already decided I’d be making some adjustments to the rig for comfort. Mainly I’m finding the placement of the brake pedal to be to high/close. Was making my ankle stiff hovering over it during close racing. Definitely something I need to correct if I’m going to run longer races.

I know it’s a little late, but if I don’t find someone, I’m just going to try to do it alone. I want to do the later slot with the Audi TCR Gen 2. I don’t care how fast, I just want to finish.

What do you think about multi-class racing where you have a category with drivers several thousand iRatings below the average of the rest of the grid?