The likes of F1 2017, Project Cars 2 and Forza Motorsport may have been hogging the headlines recently, but for lots of motor racing fans iRacing is the go-to sim, with the online-only game offering a thriving community, a diverse choice of formulas and one of the most authentic racing experiences around.
It first popped up in 2008, with iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations founded by David Kaemmer, the man responsible for Papyrus and iconic games like Grand Prix Legends, and the subscription model and frequent updates have kept it relevant and fresh.
One of the most recent updates to iRacing saw the introduction of the Red Bull GRC (Global Rallycross) series, with challenging new cars, tracks and features on offer. We talked to Steve Myers, Executive VP and Producer at iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations, to find out more.
Starting off with GRC, how have you gone about replicating the cars for iRacing and is there any difference from other formulas?
We have a pretty long list of requirements for building any car for our sim, and the GRC cars are no different in that respect. What was extremely valuable was having Graham Quinn, lead engineer for the Andretti Autosport Red Bull GRC team, and Scott Speed, three-time Red Bull GRC champion involved in the development of the cars and the VW Beetle specifically. I'm not sure if we've ever received more information on a car than we did on the Beetle, because both of these guys are big fans of iRacing and wanted to see their car accurately modeled.
It was a pretty long development process, and both Graham and Scott drove the car throughout, providing incredible feedback to get the cars driving as accurately as possible. Scott spent quite a bit of time driving the sim and giving us feedback right before the Indianapolis race weekend and went on to pretty much destroy everyone that weekend. I sent Graham a message somewhat jokingly after the weekend saying that all that sim time must have helped and his response was, "That topic did come up in our debrief!" This is the type of feedback that makes the development team feel really good about the job they did.
What were the biggest challenges in introducing GRC cars and how do they drive in comparison to other cars in iRacing?
By far the biggest challenge was the tracks and that process started all the way back in 2016, when we started working on the dynamic track surface and dirt oval racing. I think our dynamic track and how it works with dirt is ground-breaking. I feel like we've always been at the forefront of introducing new technology to racing games – for example, laser-scanned race tracks and this dynamic track model, and specifically how it works with dirt, is truly amazing.
We have a terrific broadcast on Friday nights on our website called DIRTnight, and it starts with a Red Bull Global Rallycross event. If you watch the broadcast, you can see how the track changes from session to session and it adds so much to the experience. The dirt is thrown and dragged to new places on the track and you can even see it wear away so the asphalt under the dirt starts to come in, which changes how you drive the car and track. As far as I know, nobody in the dirt racing gaming world is doing this and I think it sets us apart, but it wasn't easy to implement.
As for how the cars drive, I think the biggest misconception I had before we started this process was that you need to throw the car around a lot on the dirt to go fast, but in reality, it's the opposite. You're trying to have the car sliding as little as possible to be fast on both the dirt ovals and GRC tracks. The GRC cars, in particular, are very difficult to get slowed down for corners and to gain traction exiting them in the dirt sections of the tracks.
What sort of response have you had from the iRacing community to the GRC cars?
The response has been beyond anything we expected to be honest. This isn't a shot at anyone else in the dirt racing space, but I don't think a realistic dirt racing sim has ever been made until we released dirt oval and Red Bull GRC this year. I think this was an underserved community of gamers and they're flocking to the service right now. It's going to be hard to keep up with the demand for new content for it.
There are a couple of GRC tracks in iRacing now so what's the process for creating an entirely new circuit?
The GRC tracks are new designs using existing tracks. What I like about the Red Bull GRC series is that the cars can pretty much race anywhere so, in theory, anything we create on an existing track could potentially be used in the real world. When we build a track from scratch, like the newly released Knoxville Raceway, it will take us about four months to complete. This is after we've laser scanned the track and taken thousands of photos to create the artwork.
Creating a Rallycross configuration at a track we've already built takes around half that time, but the bulk of the work is essentially playtesting to see if the layout is fun and challenging. Scott Speed was really helpful in this process as he would drive (along with all of our other testers) and give us feedback on the placement of tyre stacks, jumps, dirt and even the depth of the dirt on sections of the track.
Will we see more GRC cars and tracks in iRacing in future?
Absolutely, in fact I just signed our first European Rallycross track, although we won't be able to collect the data to build it until the spring. Subaru will be joining us this year in our virtual Red Bull Global Rallycross series and that car is already in production.
We also have a few rallycross configurations in the design process and we hope to have at least one new one in our March release. One of the great things about our business model is that we have four major releases a year so new content is pretty much coming out every three months. What's hard is balancing the release of content in the many forms of racing we now have at iRacing, which is another unique aspect of our product.
What other sims and games do you look towards when you're developing the game – is there another title that you particularly admire?
Dave Kaemmer has been doing this for 30 years and many of us are close to 20 years working together so there isn't much we've not thought of, designed or at least discussed regarding what to do feature or content-wise in a racing sim.
Personally, I enjoy playing games outside of the racing world because I find it allows me to see the innovative and unique ideas that developers come up with when they have pretty much a blank canvas to work with. I talked a bit today about how Uncharted 4 has the best 'tutorial' I've ever seen in a game and that you don't even really know you're in one. Those are lessons or ideas that we can take into account as we redesign our user experience, as we continue our process of rolling out a new website and UI system.
What are you own personal favourite cars in iRacing and why?
Answering that question is like trying to answer which one of your kids is your favorite. One of my favorite things about what we do is that we strive to get each car we build as close to the real world as possible. With that, some of the unique qualities of each car come through with how they drive.
As an example, our Skip Barber RT2000 is probably the car that has received more development attention than any other because Dave Kaemmer has probably 1000 laps in that car in real life. It's the car he uses to test new tire models and vehicle dynamics concepts, because he knows exactly how it should drive. The customers love this car and I absolutely can't stand it. Again, because of the detail we go into in creating these vehicle models, the Skip Barber car is very much a car that you have to drive 'on throttle' and this doesn't suit my driving style.
How do you decide what cars, tracks and formulas to include in iRacing and how involved is the iRacing community?
We have a great community who are very vocal in what they want and this is a great tool in helping to come up with ideas, but we also like to maximise the return on our R&D expense. Once we did the dynamic track surface project, we immediately went to work on dirt racing because all of the engineers that created that technology are already up to speed with the code. This led to dirt oval racing and GRC, and will lead to another exciting project this year with short-course off-road trucks.
Another clue on what we should look at adding is what people are racing. With our service being entirely online, we can see all kinds of data on location and what people are using, and that can help us to make decisions on what to build next. We were quite surprised by the fact that early on Australia turned out to be a huge sim racing market, which led to us going to Australia to build Bathurst, Oran Park, Phillip Island and the V8 Supercars.
Finally, how does GRC racing stack up against other racing series' in the virtual world?
One thing I like that Red Bull GRC brings to the table is the format of their racing and the unique characteristics of the cars and tracks. It's made for Esports. With the heat racing format, you can run an entertaining hour-long broadcast online that I feel is equal or better to any broadcast you see on television. Check out our iRacing youtube channel on Friday nights to see for yourself.
I'm also optimistic about the excitement our release has generated for the series and I think this is going to lead to some innovative and unique opportunities that the sim racing world hasn't seen before. When two of the biggest stars in the sport, Mitchell deJong and Scott Speed, rave about how accurate our GRC offering is, I think we did a pretty good job of capturing this format of racing.
Want to get behind the wheel of a virtual GRC car or check out any of iRacing's other championships? Check out iRacing here.