iRacing Development Update: November 2024

Hello iRacers,

As we approach the end of Season 4, 2024, we will soon welcome a new year of competition, experiences, and advancements to the iRacing platform. In last year’s November update, I took an opportunity to reflect on 2023, which had been a landmark year for iRacing on many levels and seemed hard to top. Part of what makes iRacing special is it’s foundationally built for continuous improvement, and thanks to our amazing customers, we are in a position to invest extensively in our product and team. As a result, each of the four seasons of 2024 offered many reasons to celebrate, including the landmark iRacing Weather System, which has set the standard in simulation racing, as well as a host of significant advancements across the sim, UI, and infrastructure: Oval Refresh, the Road License Split, the completion of the Damage System, significant advancements in the tools we use to make cars (I’ll expand on this a bit later in this update), a full in-house CFD analysis program, and much more. We sure gave 2023 a run for its money, and I’d say we topped it, but what makes me the most excited is that the team we’ve been building up the last couple of years is just now hitting its stride, and we enter 2025 ready to set a new standard yet again. We have a lot to look forward to.

Let’s begin with a preview of the upcoming Season 1, 2025 build, which will be released on Tuesday, December 10th. This is after a once-every-four-years leap season that extends Season 4, 2024, from the usual 12 weeks to 13 weeks. This is to account for schedule drift.

Season 1, 2025 is loaded with great new cars and tracks, spanning multiple racing categories.  Let’s begin with the five cars that will debut:

2025 Season 1 Cars

Supercars: New Supercars barely missed the last build, and we are happy to report that work is complete – both Supercars Chevrolet Camaro Gen 3 and Supercars Ford Mustang Gen 3 will be released with Season 1. This is an all-new generation of Supercar, and our team has worked hand-in-hand with the teams at Supercars, Chevrolet, and Ford to build these new cars from the ground up, using our latest and greatest physics modeling, tire modeling, and graphical fidelity.  

To soften the hit for recent purchasers of the current Supercars Ford Mustang GT and Supercars Holden ZB Commodore, we will be issuing credits to all who purchased those cars within the 365 days prior to the release of the new cars on the 10th.  The amount of the credits will be determined by the recency of the purchase.  That offer ends as of that time.  The former cars will then be re-classified as [Legacy] content, and removed from use in racing series.

BMW M2 CSR: In collaboration with BMW Motorsports, we are thrilled to offer the BMW M2 CSR as the latest entry into our racing ladder at the Rookie level.  This car will be based around the 365hp Club Sport engine package, and our team feels that it’s one of the best driving cars for racers who are ready for a small step up in the level of challenge vs our traditional Rookie road sports cars. The M2 offers a nice increase in power, and, combined with its short wheelbase (responsive, but also edgy), the M2 is a great and engaging waypoint between true rookie cars and GT4 cars.

Given its position in the Rookie license class, we have decided to offer the BMW M2 CSR to all iRacers for free as part of our base content. We hope all iRacers will give the car a try, and we’re confident that you’ll be glad you did because it’s a blast.

In addition to the M2 racecar, we will expand our fleet of iRacing safety cars with the addition of an all-new iRacing/BMW M2 safety car. This car will be used at times in our series and will be selectable for you all in AI and Hosted iRacing.

Acura NSX GT3 Evo 22: We have been working closely with the great teams at HRC, Gradient Racing, and Racers Edge Motorsports, on the latest entry to our GT3 and Endurance series. The NSX GT3 Evo 22 features a 520 HP 3.5L DOHC twin-turbocharged engine and rounds off our endurance series (sponsored by IMSA) with a 10th GT3.  

Beyond being an amazing car to drive, the graphics and art team did an amazing job on the materials for this car.

Ferrari 499P:  Together with Ferrari, we are so excited to bring the beautiful Ferrari 499P to iRacing.  Our development collaborations have been extensive, including a visit to Ferrari HQ in Maranello, Italy, and collaboration with the real-world development team and drivers.  The end result is fantastic – the 499P is incredible and thrilling to drive.  The 499P will join our now 16-car-deep Endurance Series, as well as the BMW M Hybrid V8, Cadillac V-Series.R GTP, Acura ARX-06 GTP, and Porsche 963 GTP in a reconfigured/reconstituted Prototype Challenge Series. 

This road-car-heavy build is stacked, and oval racing fans have a lot to look forward to in three short months in the March build (read on for more info).

2025 Season 1 Tracks

Now for tracks.  Season 1 offers an assortment of new road and oval tracks, as well as a continuation of our effort to get our older tracks up to current quality standards.

Thruxton Circuit: With the release of Thruxton we are expanding our UK offering in back-to-back builds, and have really assembled a great regional collection of road racing circuits.  Often referred to as the “Fastest Circuit in the UK”, this 3.79 km circuit hosts a wide variety of racing in real life, including BTCC, TCR UK, and recently British F3 and British GT, and has seen cars reach speeds of over 190 mph.  Visually, the circuit has some similarities to nearby Silverstone, and both were RAF airfields in the 1940s.

The iRacing art team has really done a spectacular job with Thruxton, building upon the processes they used at Cadwell that incorporated drone-captured photogrammetry into the in-sim artwork.  At Thruxton, you will find incredible detail across the landscape, including a fully drivable infield airstrip (save your explorations for local testing and privately hosted events, please!😀)

Huset’s Speedway:  Announced last quarter and now ready for release, Huset’s is a 3/8-mile dirt oval in Brandon, South Dakota.  Huset’s has a long history of racing, going back all the way to 1953, and was renewed in 2020 with new ownership and was featured on the All Star circuit.  As well as being featured in the iRacing sim, Huset’s Speedway will eventually be released in World of Outlaws: Dirt Racing 24 as DLC.

New Hampshire Motor Speedway (Refresh): New Hampshire (NHMS) is one of the closest race tracks to iRacing HQ and is a special location for many iRacing employees who race or who have raced there in the past, both on the oval and road course.  NHMS was also one of the first tracks added to iRacing, making its debut in June 2009.  A lot has changed between now and then, both in terms of the facility, but also how we make tracks at iRacing and the quality of artwork that we produce today.  

New Hampshire marks the first track in a product-wide initiative to refresh all NASCAR tracks and bring them up to spec.  We’re calling this project “NASCAR Refresh”, and are happy to update the tracks for such an important group of iRacers and one of our closest partners.  

NASCAR Refresh updates will be automatic and free for all who already own the tracks.

Las Vegas Motor Speedway (Refresh):  Las Vegas (LVMS) is also being updated alongside NHMS.  It’s a bit farther behind in terms of progress, and there’s a chance we’ll just miss the Dec deadline, but we’re very close, and the update looks amazing.  

2025 Season 1 New Features

Debris Refresh: iRacing has the best dynamic track dynamics (DTD) system in sim racing, supported by multiple devs with experience creating dynamic track systems in three racing sims/games.  This foundational system powers a multitude of elements and factors that dynamically change around our tracks, where weather, track activity, and time can all create change to the surfaces and on-track experience.  DTD evolved considerably with the addition of rain but hadn’t seen a core improvement before rain for some time.  With the S1 build, DTD will be improved to track and render dynamic gravel and mud.  It will also be enhanced so we can “set dress” areas of the track to be debris-strewn, a factor in real life that we don’t currently have.  For example, the shoulder of the road along Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans is littered with debris in real life, and racers avoid it.  In iRacing, it is pristine and has led to unrealistic lines.  Debris Refresh solves this problem.

Future evolutions of Debris Refresh sets a foundation for additional tire-related features, such as puncture damage.

AI Behavior Improvements: To make our AI racers feel more lifelike, our AI engineers have started the foundational work to give individual AI more lifelike behaviors.  To begin, they will flash their headlights at you in a racing-appropriate way, such as in multiclass racing when a prototype approaches a GT car at high speed or is coming up on a lapped car.  Later, this system will be expanded to give the AI more distinct behaviors.

Tire Model enhancements: Our latest release-ready tire version will be added across the GTP class and LMP2.  Work is also underway to add this tire to NASCAR Cup, and later other Oval cars.  The benefits of this significant tire model evolution include…

• Primary Benefits
  • Improved dynamic response.  They feel more like real tires.  Whenever you first load them, they respond quickly.  As you sustain loads, they soften up, and you can lean on them.  They feel much more in sync with your driving inputs.  With previous tires, you might have felt like you were waiting (waiting, waiting!) for the tires to respond.  This is much better now.
• Secondary benefits:
  • (1) Degradation -> introducing a new degradation mechanism:  the long-term conditioning state.  The tires tend to decondition as you run, which reduces grip.  This is a great tool, as we don’t need to rely on other mechanisms like temperature and cure that tend to feel quite bad as the grip goes away.
  • (2) Compound -> we are running more realistic, grippier compounds that feel more “in the track” while still producing appropriate grip.
  • (3) Construction -> we are using more realistic, softer constructions, as we’re not trying to create a dynamic response in the tire with super-stiff carcasses.

Note that this is our newest and most advanced release-ready tire model, but work never ends at iRacing. Dave Kaemmer, Terence Groening, and the physics team have been hard at work on their next tire version, which we expect will be a revolutionary advancement in iRacing tire modeling. More info is available below in the ongoing/future development section of this update.

Series Redesign: Our UX team, designers, and web developers have been hard at work redesigning and streamlining some of the most heavily used and important pages on iRacing: the series pages. The modal-based page (the pop-up) is gone, and the replacement is more expandable for future functionality and also permalinkable! 

Graphics Engine enhancements: We recently shared the exciting news that our (stacked!) graphics team has begun the incredibly important and extensive task of building a new graphics engine for the iRacing sim. This engine will transform iRacing graphically and also in terms of performance.  However, that will take some time, and it is not our intention to leave iRacers without graphics improvements between now and then.  We are super excited that Season 1 will include a significant improvement to our specular lighting model, where we have refined our environment map filtering to more closely align with our PBR lighting model.  We’ve also improved math which formerly led to a result that was less realistic than desired.  Previously the reflected scene was both too bright and too blurry.  Additionally, we are no longer rendering specular into the cubemap.  This had led to shaded areas appearing too brightly lit and even shiny.  The combination of these changes helps bring new life to iRacing’s models and environments.  

Take a look at the screenshots to see for yourself.  Note how the orange color of the IndyCar pops with clarity never before seen on iRacing.  Note the cladding near the movie theatre sign, and how it now comes to life and interacts with the sky and light.  Note the sky imparts far more impact, both on the world and the car in the brighter Porsche GTP scene than it does in the darker one (which is the old lighting.)  Additionally, we had made an effort to correct the overly strong influence of the color yellow on our rendered world.  Now, through our more advanced lighting, the remaining inaccurate hue will be addressed – we’re really excited about that.

Bump Start: We’d hoped to have bump starts when we debuted the GTP race car category last year.  However, it’s a small feature in concept, but far more complex when it comes to implementation the iRacing way (a true physical and mechanical simulation of the process, the systems involved, and all the nitty gritty details required to make that happen). With the S1 build, bump starts have been added to our entire GTP fleet, and support will debut in Dec.  For now, enjoy the below recording:

Season 1, 2025, will include a lot more than I’ve shared above, but we can’t cover everything in this format. We’ll save some surprises for the release notes, which will drop as we get closer to Dec 10th.  

Ongoing/Future Development

While our devs and testers are hard at work testing and preparing the Season 1 release, as always, we are also balancing multiple diverse projects that have been weeks, months, and years in the making. Let’s take a moment to catch up on some you are already aware of and add a few more to the mix…  

New Sim UI: For those who have yet to hear, we’ve been working on an all-new and modern UI for the sim!  The New Sim UI will provide a platform to build advanced functionality for many years and is on schedule to complete development this year.  The New Sim UI entered alpha testing recently and is largely feature-complete.  However, as excited as we are to get this huge project and product improvement into your hands, we’re going to give it a few months before release to thoroughly put the UI through its paces and make sure we deliver a solid and stable experience.  

When the New Sim UI debuts in March, you will find an experience familiar to you in terms of layout and functionality. Our goal is to nail the essential iRacing experience while sprinkling in some targeted enhancements. Once we accomplish that goal, we will have a UI platform that provides the framework to build and expand with significant new features, functionality, and customization.  

This was a huge project. It was not quite at the scale of Rain, but it was still one of our larger multi-developer initiatives. It required the implementation of several thousand variables, thousands of buttons, droplists, sliders, and tables, 14 screens, and the removal of 25+ years of cruft.

Below, I’ll share some shots of what to expect upon release and some concepts we’re exploring for the future. We’d love to hear from you on what you’d like to have most in your future iRacing sim UI.

Day 1 New Sim UI approximate design

Future UI Functionality exploration

• Dynamic maps
• Customizable UI
• Open multiple black boxes
• Modern look and better organization
• New Garage and utility pages/UI
• Telemetry in-sim
• Improved admin interface/interactability
• And more

Graphics: We previously shared that the team completed their due diligence on the various paths available for our future graphics engine. In summary, the best way to accomplish our goal is to build the engine ourselves.  

Our graphics team has been attacking the project with urgency, including lighting which quite honestly is one of the most significant shortcomings in the existing iRacing render.  Enjoy some screenshots showing progress in the area of specular lighting, night lighting, and the world-debut of iRacing shown in a deferred renderer, instead of the forward rendering path we’ve utilized for the last two decades. This is a big deal. The future of graphics in iRacing is frankly thrilling for us here and will transform iRacing for years to come.

After/Before specular lighting

First image of iRacing using deferred lighting

Physics Development: Dave, Terence, and the physics team have been improving our core physics systems, emphasizing FFB (force feedback) and our tire development.  Ultimately, the project will result in the release of V10 tires across the whole service (the first time we’ve mentioned a tire version # in years, but double digits is notable!).  Improvements will include:

• Double-precision physics calculations
• Better FFB – Work is underway on a FFB calibration tool that will deliver more consistent and better-tuned results to customers
• Better contact patch modeling, with more slices and handling of state/heat/conditioning per slice
• Better tire shape and differences in how the temperature builds and wears across the shape
• Better tire compound modeling
• A better grip model that will help with multi-groove and polish
• Better modeled heat buildup and tire memory
• Better “moments” – these are the torques or twisting forces the tires create that have a big impact on what we feel through the steering

The result of all of these efforts will be a significant step forward in tire modeling in iRacing, and we are all very excited about focusing on these core systems.

V10 tire contact assessment simulation

In addition to the significant R&D work mentioned above, we have an entirely separate team that has been tackling improving driving physics and driving feel in iRacing from a completely different angle: improving the tooling that our Vehicle Dynamics Engineers (VD) use to build the physical models of our racecars.  

To provide some context, at iRacing our cars are developed exclusively by former real-world race team vehicle dynamics engineers.  These engineers used to work at various F1, NASCAR, IndyCar, and professional sports car teams and designed and built some of the most advanced and competitive race cars in the world.  When they join iRacing, the first task, historically, has been to teach them how to code. 

To accomplish this goal of improving car modeling development, two significant engineering projects have been underway.  The first has been the creation of a bespoke in-house car physics construction tool that we refer to as “Car Builder”.  Car Builder takes tasks that our engineers used to perform in cryptic code and streamlines the process with a visual interface and library of customizable and repurposable racing car components and systems.  The result is a more approachable process that is more consistent, faster, easier to iterate, easier to share, and ultimately, a race car model that drives better and more accurately than ever before possible.

To appreciate a second tooling improvement, you must first understand that, as much as we focus on the tire model, we also rely on tire design to capture the feel and performance of the many types of tires found on iRacing cars.  To design an iRacing tire, the iRacing vehicle dynamics engineers set more than forty (40) independent physical parameters.  We could have the greatest tire model in the world, but the actual tires and user experience will only be as good as each tire design.  To better tackle this large multi-variable tire design problem,  we have built for our VD team a Design of Experiments tool.  This tool lets our engineers test concepts and changes through a process that leverages the power of computing – rather than run tests manually and iteratively, our DoE tool allows us to run tens of thousands of tests in mere moments, and optimize the results to hit performance targets.  Just like with Car Builder, why this matters for you the iRacer, is that the end product results in a race car model that drives better and more accurately than ever before possible.

Single Player Career Mode: Career Mode has been split into two significant phases. To begin, we will launch “AI Championships,” which will serve as a foundation for the later release of our full Career Mode.

We hope to ship AI Championships in 2025 and will follow up with Phase 2, which will be a full-on Career Mode with the systems and interactions racers would expect from such a mode.

Race Control

Race Control is a collection of systems that perform functions required for proper racing, and includes pacing, cautions, rules, and penalties. We were recently joined by a decade-long sim racing engineer with extensive experience in such systems in other sims (among a host of other systems). His addition to the team has accelerated projects related to these systems, and we are happy to be shipping a great number of race-control-related bug fixes in the next build. Beyond that, we are also working through all-new race control functionality for the future, including a look at doing a better job with multi-class race starts.

Save Game

A proper mid-race save game is a feature rarely implemented in racing games and sims.  We had it back at Papyrus Racing Games in NR2003, there’s another sim that has some save functionality, but for the most part, it’s a very uncommon feature.  There’s just so much state to keep track of, save, and then reload, that it’s a significant challenge for modern sims. That said, we’re working on a save system for AI races in iRacing, and are excited about the possibilities the feature will create. I’ll save additional details for a future update…

Future Content

Cars:  Oval Racing fans get ready, we’ll soon enjoy a great number of significant oval racing additions, including Gen 4 stock cars, multiple ARCA manufacturers, a from-the-ground-up Legends redevelopment, a new NASCAR Cup tire model, and an IndyCar physics refresh.  Further collaborations are also underway with Ferrari, and additional scans have had their airline tickets booked.  Much more in the works, but that’ll do for now 🙂

Tracks: Our track team is as busy as ever, balancing work on new tracks, refreshing existing tracks, and rebuilding many tracks that have seen recent repaves. The next couple of tracks we’re ready to share that are actively being worked on are Portland International Raceway and Miami International Autodrome.

If you’re in Adelaide next week, you just might see a large contingent of iRacing photographers and scanners getting that great city track digitally captured as well. Feel free to say hello, but do look out for that laser beam! 

—

We’re just scratching the surface here, and I’d love to keep going with more. I’ll be back in touch with another update before you know it, and in the next few weeks, our marketing team will provide a host of additional teasers, trailers, and information as we approach the imminent Season 1 release.  

We appreciate you all, and the part you played in this amazing year of competition we’re about to complete.  We are fortunate to have the best and most knowledgeable community in simulation and gaming and look forward to our future experiences together in 2025 and beyond.  Make sure to check out our Black Friday sale, which offers some deep discounts for new customers, renewals, and returning customers.  You can read more here: https://www.iracing.com/blackfriday/  Also don’t forget about our referral program, as it’s a good opportunity for your friends to join us at a discount, and for you to benefit from their referral.  Read more here: https://www.iracing.com/the-iracing-referral-reward-program/

Thanks and see you all out on the track.  As always, we hope you enjoy the preview screenshots and media.

Greg Hill

Executive Producer

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