I grew up racing Papyrus/Sierra products for nearly a decade. But I have had very little exposure to iRacing. Well, there is now a weekly series with many Nascar drivers. I have to say it looks exceptional, but I am seeing cars wink out, other cars pass thru cars while leaving the pits. Some very real damage while other collisions are ignored. Regular Fox announcers including Jeff Gordon. I think the experience of regular simmers compared to some of the real drivers(Jimmy Johnson)became apparent. there were periods of good driving with some really awful pileups caused by guys who normally wouldn't be in such situations.
For the self proclaimed #1 sim I don't think they rate their customers skill very high. Ghosting cars a couple of pit bays away of your pit bay. Blame the ovalteenies. I gave up a few years ago because of the shocking collision prediction even with good pings. When the cars are a metre apart and you get "contact" messages even though there is no noise or car movement as a result of these "contacts" there is something wrong. In rF1 & 2, I can race in Aus on a NZ server 2500km away, bumper to bumper with a friend 9500km away in Japan. /rant
I tried iRacing for a couple months a few years back but wasn't impressed, seemed like a Forza with slightly improved physics and a greatly improved weeding-out factor for crash drivers. As for the race substitution it will serve for IndyCars tomorrow, I'll tune in, it's better than nothing, and hopefully it will surprise me.
Please. "iRacing seemed like Forza", what a load of nonsense. The physics on iRacing are a par to any of the other sims including rF2. They've got massive numbers of laser scanned tracks of very high visual quality. They've got a massive, fully formed competition infrastructure. They've got content from most of the major series except F1, and its being used for just about every eSports "pro driver" competition that's out there. Last weekend there was IMSA Super Saturday, where real world Pro drivers ran Sebring using GTE cars in a 90 minute race. Production of the YouTube stream including the real Radio Lemans commentators, and from a production/TV standpoint, it was as fully professional a presentation as you could possibly imagine. No reason the IndyCar one today won't be of the same production value. Meanwhile, NASCAR are showing the next race from Texas not only on FS1 this Sunday, but on 'big daddy' FOX. And nearly a million people tuned in last weekend. Are there some compromises made by iRacing? Yes. You mentioned the 'pass through' cars on pit lane. Some comments about a lack of pit crew during tire changes on the TV broadcast: that exists, they just disabled it for the NASCAR event. There's likelihood of cars dropping out any time there are network/comms issues on any sim, and several of the drivers were having those. Now, iRacing do have a tendency to have disappearing cars as opposed to effectively have AI paths control a car with connection issues, which they prefer to having cars suddenly warp on them. The fact that AI paths are not utilized for the collision detection also tends to result in some apparent differences from what you see versus what happens on each client, since the car path seems to purely be function of most recent velocities not a true prediction based on track layout. Plus, the collision boxes are much less tolerant of overlap than many other sims, which makes collisions more likely. But its a well proven, reliable multiplayer setup with fewer "netcode" issues than many other sims. The biggest problem on iRacing continues to be the tire model. The rest of the car physics is very good. People complain about the FFB, but there's not much wrong with it: most other sims are over-exaggerated and manipulate the output. The tire model still doesn't properly gain heat, retain heat, lose heat properly. Its as sophisticated as any other for tire construction and physics (twisting and other modes) other than compounds and heat management. Recent tire model changes have not interacted well with their "real road" implementation, which fully models road temps, rubber, dust/debris/clag etc. This means that recent gains in multi-groove racing, especially for NAACAR ovals, has dropped off from where it was a few builds ago. There's still too much benefit on low tire pressures/high camber angles and lack of real downside that means you wouldn't run like that in real world. Other than this they have just the same challenges of doing BOP and fully integrating complex mechanical and aero parameters as any other sim. It's a fine sim, but it has its quirks like any other.
I can understand how folks who have never really spent much time at the track driving and tuning cars would feel that way. Maybe they've totally revised the physics since then. But at the time I was running iRacing tuning changes ie, dampers, springs, ARB's had little fidelity to how the real cars would respond, in some cases (dampers in particular) were nearly the opposite. Moreover the sampling rates for tire grip were a fraction of the rate what rFactor2 was running. Again maybe they've done some upgrades since. Keep in mind few of the rFactor mods accurately model the real suspension geometry, spring rates, damper rates, and tires. One of the best one is the MAK 962, and we have a few that were modeled after cars we supported to use for baseline setups. The tuning changes are a near match for some of the better modeled tracks, but not all tracks are accurate even with laser scanning. Laser scanning is a point of Caveat Emptor. It can provide a very accurate geometry indeed, but also is prone to shadowing error on uneven surfaces. S397 Sebring is a good example of that issue partly because there are abrupt changes on the concrete block section that are very prone to shadowing with the typical roof mounted laser scanning equipment. Further systems that lack a sensitive enough 9 axis accelerometer also increase the surface anomoly rate. There are 3 different laser scanned versions of Nurburgring that were done in the same 2 month period with significantly different results while there were no changes to some of the same sections of pavement as detected by onboard data acquisition files. So its really nearly impossible to have 100% confidence with laser scanning. However when you're in the business of making many virtual tracks its a very cost effective way to do so, and some really good tracks are made that way. No doubt iRacing offers the most realistic opportunity for large scale online racing, but from past experience its not even close to rFactor2 in the capability for fidelity. Folks who spend their time racing GT3's are easily satisfied particularly with the copious driver assists. Few of them could really tell the difference between iRacing and rFactor2 as they both aren't examples of cars with the level of fidelity that rFactor2 is capable of. Bit of an update to add: halfway through the IndyCar race Hinchecliff made an interesting comment about iRacing physics "setups don't behave the same as the real car, sometimes to the contrary". Than again, what would Hinch know about that...
