iRacing Pros Say The Driving Standard is it's WORST Ever. Are They Right?

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[turbo_marc]

The driving standard is so bad because everyone complains about it instead of doing something about it.

[cruisinwithcorey]

2016-2020 was also peak level dynamic track. You could drive anywhere and everyone wasn’t fighting for one lane

[JDMcHaley]

I think people get mad too easily.. imagine if sportsmanship was really embraced.

Well.. I'd probably need different content lol.

[TeamAbrams]

I don't know or care about the Pro series, but I'll put it this way as far as NASCAR iRacing in general. The first NiS races I ever did at Martinsville, 250 lap races, minimum 3500 SOF, had between 6-9 cautions in each race the first two years I did it. Today, it's more like 20-25 cautions per race. Any race at a short track or 1 mile track is guaranteed to be a 10+ caution wreckfest nowadays in officials.

[rockyday]

Great vid DJ! A topic that needed to be talked about among the people that follow the series.

I was lucky enough to race in all 3 car eras in the Coke series (I'm Blake Reynolds if my @ is different). IMO, the most fun was 2013-2018, the most frustrating was 2019-2021, and the most competitive was/is 2022 on.

I started in 2017 so I raced the LDF Gen 6 only two years. The new dynamic track model worked wonders for the racing. It was really exaggerated which almost made it feel like dirt racing. Most of the cautions were self spins just going off of memory/no data. We'd get in a long run then someone falling through the field would just lose it. There were a few races where people stayed out on old tires and then we'd have a few restart crashes back to back. This was also before the sim racing boom so the quality of drivers in the back of the field was not that great. It was a really great era for the drivers though. That's why the staple names of the series love this era.

2019-2021 the racing at big tracks was fine usually. Qualifying decided your race. You just couldn't get any runs or race hard without the tires wanting to fall off super hard or dirty air unsettling the car. The short tracks is where we had issues. It was a combo of the car and track grip at the time. There was one fast line and you had to fight for it usually with contact. If you forced someone off line or overdrove, it was like you were in the marbles and basically would crash. 5:04 you can see this perfectly. The 33 gets too low and is basically out of control and washes up. Not my favorite era, but I did have success at the start before everyone figured it out.


Next Gen era has been refreshing IMO. Indestructible car, a tire you can push harder on, new tools like side draft and mega bumpdrafting... its just fun. This era is more mental than skill to perform well if you ask some people. The cautions now is just everyone being able to race all over the track, filling every hole that opens, and not worrying about damage ruining their race if they wreck correctly. Add more prize money and teams being more involved, I'm not surprised the racing has gotten tougher and cautions increased due to it.

[grahamcrackergaming]

Tbf when it comes to iRacing in general, a lot of drivers don’t really know what they’re doing half the time or just play by THEIR rules instead of sporting code. Take the IMSA iRacing Series for example, people still don’t know what blue flags actually mean when lapping someone of the same class. In irl IMSA, blue flags r there to let the driver know that a faster car is about to lap u and that faster car is to pass u safely, not just to slower class cars but also cars of the same class. U can let them by if u want but it’s mainly on the faster car to overtake. And that’s what iRacing’s blue flag system is like. But a lot of these guys in like GTP and LMP2 just think it’s F1 rules where if you’re given the blue flag u have to move over for the lead lap car. Like did someone forget they’re not in an F1 car? If ya wanna race in something with rules or sporting code similar to F1 go do something that’s open wheel. Hell even IndyCar has a blue flag system similar to IMSA.

[ZoneXV]

I still think that the shortening of the races has made things overall worse. Originally I believe they shortened the races to hopefully get them on TV after the pandemic which had some races on TV, but with that not an option, they need to go back to 50% races. Shorter races causes people to be more impatient and not give and take as much. Pro series races should never be shorter than NiS races IMO.

[MxDeNaglowska]

I'm about done with it, honestly. Every time I'm on there, I get taken out about someone wrecking into me

[markc]

The number of cautions hasn't gone up in ARCA...

[joenathan]

iRacing has always had driving standard issues. The pro series has been a wreckfest for years now all because there is no give, only take.

[oIRONITEo]

The biggest problem with the Coke series is race length. The premier series should not be running 100 lap races where there's no real strategy available and qualifying well is more important than anything else. The second problem is the damage model. Like you said, there are no consequences for being an idiot. 3rd reason is the tire model. there's no reason to ever take 4 tires because it doesn't provide enough of a benefit to lose the time. Then there's a fact that the drafting model is atrocious. No one can pull away and open a gap. Every track just becomes a nose to tail drafting track, and you can't pass.

[hi_im_sota]

“Art imitates life” even though it’s a “game” we have the same issues racing the current car the pros have irl. It’s harder to pass for all the same reasons.

[scottthompson]

I'm pretty new to iracing, but have raced in the past. I'm disappointed but not really surprised with the lack of driver etiquette. Driving arcade like games such as forza kinda created racers with zero regard for etiquette

[MrSanJose]

Great post. I totally agree. The standard needs to be raised. I have noticed way too many wreckers. Too many people from arcade racings games come to iracing thinking it is the same and they constantly wreck fields

[AustinOgonoski]

This is just a byproduct of what I like to call "late-stage sim racing."

No matter how realistic a sim is, it's still never *quite* a real car and people will always drive way over their heads and do things that would otherwise never happen in racing because it's NOT REAL.

Sim racing should be something you do for fun in the off-season, or during off-weeks as primarily a fun thing.

The moment it became a replacement for actually driving a car, and a replacement for a real career via eSports and qualifier series and such, the sport literally stops working because there's no true incentive to *not* treat it like a demo derby. You will never have to answer to guys at the shop or the finance team after junking the car for the 7th time in a row. You will never put yourself in risk of bodily harm if you misjudge a divebomb, climb someone's tire and flip into the catch fence. You are encouraged to be a sociopath all the time.

The solution has always been to just go start running sport compacts or street stocks at your local track and see what happens, but too many people didn't want to hear it, were talked out of it, or thought that running some sort of local car was "beneath" them.

[shawndixon]

I thought the rise in popularity of sim racing that spiked during the pandemic would have had something to do with it. Kind of surprised that during the pandemic, the incident numbers actually fell.

[steveo]

The problem is that the drivers who cause the cautions are not held accountable by iracing. Alot of issues nowadays are caused by idiots aggressively overdriving corner entry and not making the turn. Iracing needs to bring the penalty system to the A open series and the NIS series.

[Bryce]

Being a top split A class oval driver, it isn't the drivers as a whole, it's certain ones/teams who keep doing the same shit each race and don't get punished

[TimiVision]

On one hand I can understand the complaints. I've seen enough of the shorter fixed races devolve into complete chaos, and not everyone wants to build or buy setups in order to run the longer open races (and these races aren't guaranteed to go any better), but on the other hand, and maybe I've been lucky so far but my best racing experiences on iRacing completely outweigh the negatives. Coming from GT7 and NASCAR Heat online races, trust me y'all it can be a LOT worse.

[sdothalligan]

An appropriate question to ask on the weekend of the MX-500 special event, where the top splits for all 5 timeslots averaged 37 cautions for 187 laps 💀