iRacing Accelerator – Part 1

If you are wondering about signing up to iRacing or just getting started over there and are perhaps a little overwhelmed, confused, looking for hints and tips or simply trying to get to terms with everything faster, then read on ... 

After taking the time figure things out for myself, I more recently helped fast-track several other friends to get up to speed on iRacing …

In this series of posts will be information that might help you accelerate your learning curve on iRacing or help get you the tools to better get yourself settled in, drive safer and be more comfortable in your new cockpit.

Note: I am an A license, and mainly drive “Road” cars, however a lot of what is written here is relevant to all license classes, so should be transferable.

Hint: You can either read this post from beginning to end (especially useful if you are new to iRacing), or simply skim to just the bits that you are interested in.

Things to know before you sign-up

Pay to play
  • First, iRacing is a “pay to play” service – be aware of this and accept it now to save yourself (and others) a lot of negativity later.
  • Once you sign up you will have a basic set of content to start your iRacing career.
  • You pay a time based membership fee, then you pay for whatever content you wish to drive, cars and tracks.
Licenses
  • You start with a Rookie license, after proving your worthiness in the free, slower cars, you should be able to increase Safety Rating and earn your “D License”
  • Licenses start with “Rookie”, then move up through D, C, B, A and possibly even Pro.
Safety Rating, Incidents and Crashes
  • License progression is controlled by your Safety Rating (SR). You start with SR 2.5 then depending on if you drive cleanly and without “incidents” such as crashes, off tracks, loss of control or similar then you either gain or lose safety rating.
  • Another thing you simply have to accept is that when someone crashes into you, iRacing is not able to have human stewards for every single race, so you are both awarded “incident” points for contact.
    • There debates all over the internet about this, however, the quicker you accept it as fact and figure out how to avoid “dive-bombers” or similar, the faster your SR and license progression will be. You will also enjoy more track time and spend less time in pits waiting for a car to be fixed.
License Progression
  • License class progression becomes more slightly difficult the higher you climb, so less forgiving of mistakes and having to prove you can drive for longer durations or perhaps more shorter races with fewer incidents … in return for you proving your worthiness, you unlock access to faster cars and can race in more challenging racing series.
  • To progress to the next license class you need to drive in a set number (4x) Minimum Participation Rating (MPR) races for your license class whilst increasing your SR to over 3.0 at the end of the current season.
  • Alternatively, if you have met your MPR requirement and can get your SR over 4.0, then you will gain an instant license promotion. In this way, if you prove you can drive safely then you can “fast track” your license promotion.
  • Licenses can be lost as well as gained though. If you drop below SR 1.0 in any class you will be instantly demoted, or if you are below 2.0 at the end of the season then you will be demoted.
Seasons
  • iRacing runs 4x Seasons per year, each Season has 13 weeks, the first 12 of which run hosted race series.
  • Hosted races run to a schedule, if you are a member already you can find this here. Most races run every one or two hours. There are Practice and Race sessions for each series. You can sign up for a practice server without being committed to race.
  • Safety and iRating are not scored in Practice sessions, however bad conduct can still be reported, so always respect the iRacing rules and your fellow racers
  • Week 13 is often a bit more of a fun free for all, allowing people to race different cars and classes than they normally would where races are neutralised, so SR and iRating are not gained or lost.
iRating
  • iRating keeps a score of your on track results and is used to determine which “split” you will race in – so this endeavors to match people with similar iRating in the same race.
  • Once everyone has signed up to race, lets say there are only 20 physical slots on the grid but 60 racers sign up, then iRacing ranks all the people signed up using their iRating, then “splits” them into 3x different groups of 20, each group races on a different race server.
  • To roughly understand how “strong” the field is on your race server, Strength Of Field (SOF) is calculated by taking an average of everyone’s iRating on the server. Higher the SOF, tougher the competition, but also more chance to gain more iRating.
  • iRating is gained or lost based on race results only. Safety , qualifying position etc has nothing to do with this. Based on your finishing position you either “take” iRating from the people you beat on your server, or you lose some of your iRating to those who beat you (see more info on how this works here).

More soon – in the meantime sign up to iRacing here:

If you appreciate this article then please do sign up to iRacing with this link so I get a bit of referral credit from the people over at iRacing – this is at no cost to you and will help me bring you more helpful content to the site.
Play nice, have fun, and be safe!