The High Cost of iRacing

Now that iRacing allows hosting races with multiple car types - but requires every participant in such a race to own all the cars in that race - the clubs I race with are debating whether to adopt multiplayer racing. One of the big concerns is the cost of buying the cars.

I'd like to weigh in here on the "high" cost of iRacing. Compared to other sims, yes, it's more expensive. Three cars roughly equals the cost of most other sims. But with iRacing you get so much more: incredibly detailed car models, which all feel drastically different from each other, plus constant development, improvement, and expansion, and a large, well-supported online community.

This is very unlike other sims, where ostensibly very different cars often feel so similar that it's hard to distinguish between them in terms of handling; where the community is fragmented; and where you're lucky if you get a handful of patches in the multi-year wait before the next release.

And you can drive iRacing's cars on amazingly detailed and accurate laser-scanned tracks, which are not available anywhere else. (The tracks scanned for rFactor don't compare, because rF's track modeling uses polygons, which hides the details, and the scanning is not anywhere as high resolution as iRacing's.) I've driven Mosport, NHMS, Watkins Glen, Summit Point, and Lime Rock in real life, and I can tell you that the accuracy of iRacing's versions of these tracks is astonishing.

Instead of comparing the cost of iRacing to the cost of other sims, I prefer to compare it to the cost of real-world track time. After all, with the accuracy of the car and track models, and the superb force feedback, iRacing is pretty darn close to the real thing.

What do you miss out on with iRacing that you'd get in real life? The inertial feedback, of course, and the wind in your face and the sun on your skin. These are nice - unless you get a sunburn!

You also miss out on the risk of wrecking your car and hurting yourself. And the huge cost and effort of maintaining a car for the track and getting it and yourself there and back. When I was running my Cobra in seven or eight two-day time trial (not racing) events per year, I was spending four or five thousand dollars each year - not including development of the car. That could be thousands more.

This was for track days which were mostly practice sessions, with single-car, three lap time trials on the afternoon of the second day. No wheel to wheel racing at all, ever. If you want to do that, you have to go with a club like SCCA or NASA, and you spend much more.

Compared to those costs, iRacing is a fantastic deal. For what I'd spend for a handful of events in the real world, I can race for years in iRacing, and own every car and track they produce.

Fifteen bucks each for a car that I can drive on fabulous race tracks all over the world, with never a lick of maintenance?

I'll take it.