Coach Dave Delta vs VRS: Which One Is Best for You?

You’ve probably seen both names thrown around in the iRacing subreddit, Discord servers, and sim racing YouTube comments. Coach Dave Delta. VRS. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion on them, and the debates rarely go anywhere useful.

We are here to bring you a comprehensive breakdown of both platforms, what they actually do, where they’re strong, where they fall short, and which one makes sense for your situation.

What Are Delta and VRS?

Before getting into the comparison, it’s worth being clear on what each platform is trying to do, because they have similarities in places, but they’re not really the same type of tool. We imagine, however, that if you are here, you do have some understanding of both and want to crack on with the best choice for you to improve in iRacing.

Coach Dave Delta

Coach Dave Delta is an app made by Coach Dave Academy. It started as a setup management tool and has since grown into something closer to a full coaching companion, covering setups, telemetry, AI-coaching, reference laps, leaderboards and more across multiple simulators, with input from multiple real-world drivers and top-level pro sim racers.

The core idea is convenience. Open the app before you race, and your setups are automatically installed. Run your laps, and the AI coach gives you feedback on what you’re doing differently from the reference lap. It’s designed to remove friction and get you faster, faster.

Delta currently works across seven simulators. Full setup support with auto-install is available for iRacing, ACC, Le Mans Ultimate, and Assetto Corsa Evo. Gran Turismo 7, Automobilista 2, and the original Assetto Corsa are also supported, though the feature set varies slightly across those three. No setups, but telemetry, reference laps, AI Coaching etc being available.

VRS (Virtual Racing School)

VRS (Virtual Racing School) is a web-based coaching and telemetry platform that’s been around since the early days of competitive sim racing on iRacing. It’s built its reputation on Data Packs across all the licences and series in iRacing with bundles of telemetry, setups, replay files, and coaching notes produced by professional iRacers around the world.

More recently, VRS expanded into a proper coaching marketplace where you can book 1-on-1 sessions with real coaches, plus group coaching through Team VRS. But it is narrow in its capabilities, only supporting iRacing.

Simulator Support

This is the fastest way to eliminate one platform entirely, depending on your situation.

If you race anything outside of iRacing, VRS simply doesn’t exist as a tool for you. Delta now covers seven simulators, and for multi-sim drivers, that gap is enormous, as the same Delta features are present for all 7.

VRS’s narrow focus is intentional; however, the depth of iRacing integration is part of what makes it good. But if you ever move away from iRacing or race across multiple platforms, your VRS subscription becomes pretty much useless overnight.

Car Setups

Both platforms give you professionally built setups by some of the best iRacing drivers on the planet. Both setup builders have 10k+ drivers working on them. The quality gap between them is smaller than some people make it out to be, and the biggest difference is in how you actually get the setups into the game.

How Delta Handles Setups

Coach Dave Delta auto-installs your iRacing setups. You open the app, you open the game, and the correct setups for your car and track are already sitting in your garage. No downloading files. No navigating to AppData folders. No managing folder structures. For iRacing, these are updated weekly with new variants to match the iRacing season series across Road, Formula and Short Ovals.

For ACC, Delta even adjusts tyre pressures automatically based on current track temperatures, which is a genuinely useful feature that saves a lot of manual faffing around in the garage.

Setups are built by a team of professional sim racers and engineers and cover multiple variants per combination. Typically, a safe/balanced option and a more aggressive build are available. Each setup comes with notes explaining the key characteristics and what to watch out for, reference laps to follow, telemetry data to study in the app and the AI coach to help you improve on the setups.

How VRS Handles Setups

VRS setups are bundled inside Data Packs and are manual downloads. You grab the file, drop it into the iRacing setups folder, and load it in-game. It’s the standard way most iRacing setups have always been distributed, so experienced iRacers won’t bat an eye. But it’s meaningfully more friction than Delta.

The quality argument for VRS setups is real, though. VRS do provide setups for Road, Formula, Short Oval, Oval, Dirt and Off-Road. Packs are built by top-level iRacing drivers who are pushing these cars to the absolute limit in the highest competitions, namely the Porsche Cup Car. If you’re racing at the top of this series and every tenth matters, the VRS setups are arguably the most competitive you’ll find anywhere. The rest are more evenly matched. Both Delta and VRS have 10k+ iRacing drivers on their setup teams, respectively.

Telemetry & Data Analysis

This is where both platforms have invested serious development time, and both are genuinely good – just in different ways.

Delta’s Telemetry

Delta records your laps automatically in the background without any configuration. The post-session interface is widely regarded as the cleanest and most visually polished telemetry UI in sim racing.

You can compare your lap against a pro reference, see your racing line overlaid on the track map, and click any point on the data trace to jump to that exact track position to see the differences in racing line, throttle, brake, gears, tyre temps, steering and more.

It’s designed for drivers who aren’t engineers. You don’t need to know what suspension frequency analysis means to get something useful out of it. The data is presented in a way that makes the problem obvious.

Delta’s AI coach is an added layer that is pretty revolutionary, as it takes your telemetry data, studies it, pinpoints where to improve instantaneously, and gives you clear instructions on what to do in real time.

VRS’s Telemetry

VRS’s telemetry syncs from iRacing automatically after sessions and is accessed through the browser. It’s more comprehensive in terms of raw channels, i.e., you can dig into more granular data if you know what you’re looking for. The comparison against the Data Pack reference laps is detailed and side-by-side with the pro’s inputs.

There’s also a free tier that gives you one session’s worth of comparison per week, which is useful for trying before committing. The trade-off is that VRS’s telemetry rewards drivers who already have some data literacy and know what they are looking for. Otherwise, it can be a minefield. It’s powerful, but you need to meet it halfway.

Coaching: AI vs Real Humans

Delta comes three-fold on this front, with AI Coaching, Never Lift and 1-on-1 coaching sessions.

VRS has straight-up 1-on-1 coaching available at request, with three different tiers and prices offered.

Delta’s Auto Insights (AI Coaching)

Delta’s AI coaching system, called Auto Insights, analyses your telemetry and generates plain-language feedback. Instead of handing you a graph and leaving you to figure it out, it’ll say something like “you’re getting on the throttle 0.3 seconds earlier than the reference at Turn 6, which is costing you stability mid-corner.” It runs in real time while you race and gives a broader summary post-session.

For most amateur drivers, this gets you 70–80% of the benefit of structured coaching without needing to book anything, pay extra, or schedule around someone else’s availability. It’s not going to replace a proper coach wholly, but it’s genuinely useful, and it’s included in the base subscription.

You can still choose to book 1-on-1 coaching sessions with professional coaches from the Delta app, and having Delta gives you a further 10% off coaching sessions, so that’s handy. It typically involves a driver coach finding fundamental issues in your driving which can be improved for better consistency over the long term, rather than just improving at one track or one section.

As part of the Delta package, you get access to the Never Lift coaching course, worth $80 on its own. You get 11 highly detailed lessons, all beautifully illustrated, taking you through a comprehensive road map to improve as a driver in your own time. This makes Delta the winner on its own.

VRS’s Human Coaching

VRS has a proper coaching marketplace built into the platform. These sessions typically involve reviewing your telemetry and replays together, with the coach giving personalised feedback based on your specific driving style and weaknesses.

The difference is more in the ecosystem. VRS has built its coaching marketplace over a longer period, and it’s more tightly integrated into the data platform.

A good coaching session can unlock things in 60 minutes that AI feedback might not surface, because a coach can ask you what the car feels like, understand your perception of a problem, and diagnose issues that the data doesn’t fully explain.

VRS also offers group coaching, both for your team or as an individual to join a bespoke group to learn about setups, driving techniques and racecraft.

Data Packs & Reference Content

Delta’s Reference Content

Delta includes pro reference laps, telemetry data and hotlap videos for each car/track combination. The interactive Racing Line feature – where you can see your line vs the reference overlaid on the track map, sequenced for you for bite-sized learning – is particularly good for visual learners. The Leaderboards let you see how your lap times compare against the other Delta subscriber pool globally. With Auto Insights suggesting immediate improvements to your lap.

VRS Data Packs

Each VRS pack covers a specific car and track combination and includes the setup file, the coach’s full telemetry trace, an iRacing replay file you can load to watch exactly how they drive, and often video walkthroughs of individual corners. Packs are updated every iRacing season to reflect the current setup meta and any track or physics changes.

User Interface & Experience

The UX gap between these platforms is real and worth accounting for, especially if you’re newer to sim racing tools.

Delta is a polished, purpose-built app with UI at the forefront. Everything is in one place. You launch it, it does its job quietly, and the data is right there when you need it. Most users are up and running within a few minutes of installing it. The visual design is genuinely the nicest in this space – it feels like a product that’s been thought through properly.

VRS, on the other hand, is a web platform, which means you can access it on any device with a browser. The interface is functional and comprehensive, but carries more of a learning curve. It rewards investment, and the more time you put into understanding the platform, the more you get out of it.

Pricing

Delta is $11.99/month or $109/year – the annual plan works out to around $9.08/month, saving you roughly 25% compared to paying monthly. That covers all seven simulators, AI coaching, auto-installed setups, and SimGrid Pro.

1-on-1 coaching sessions through Coach Dave are priced separately – typically somewhere between $40–$100+ per session, but having Delta gets you an extra 10% discount on these sessions.

VRS has three pricing tiers. The free plan is a genuine starting point, but limited to a short weekly window for data comparison. Dedicated ($4.99/month) unlocks one data pack. Competitive ($9.99/month or $99.99/year) is the tier most serious iRacers end up on, with full access to all data packs.

1-on-1 coaching sessions through VRS are also available but are priced separately, also typically somewhere between $40–$100+ per session.

Who Should Pick Which?

Go with Coach Dave Delta if:

• You race on more than one simulator – Delta now covers seven
• You want your setups to work without touching any files
• You like the idea of AI coaching for faster improvements
• You’re a beginner or intermediate driver who doesn’t need to interprete graphs
• You want fast iRacing setups following the season
• You race ACC, LMU, or AC Evo competitively
• You’re a GT7 or AMS2 player looking for pro-level telemetry and data
• You want the cleanest, most convenient experience possible

Go with VRS if:

• iRacing is the only sim you care about
• You want a more niche telemetry tool focused on iRacing
• You race across all disciplines on iRacing, i.e., road, formula, ovals, dirt
• You take iRacing competition seriously
• You’re comfortable analysing telemetry data yourself
• You want to try before you buy (free tier is genuinely useful)
• You’re preparing for a specific iRacing series and want season-relevant data packs

The Bottom Line

For most sim racers, Coach Dave Delta is the better starting point. It’s more versatile, significantly more convenient, and the AI coaching is genuinely useful without requiring any technical knowledge. The multi-sim support alone makes it the obvious call for anyone who races outside of iRacing, and the class-leading UI experience is wholly better.

VRS has an edge for dedicated iRacers who want the niche data tools and understand how to read iRacing telemetry. They also offer the larger setup range across sports car, formula, dirt and ovals. If iRacing is your only sim and you are an advanced sim racer who can handle top-level esports setups, then VRS is the one.

Pricing and features are accurate as of February 2026. Always check each platform’s website for the latest plans.