Racing simulators have a steep learning curve; beginners can get overwhelmed quickly, have a few bad races, and leave. Coach Dave Academy is here to support you by easing you into the world of iRacing with some information, advice and support to help get the best out of your iRacing career.
Before You Begin
iRacing is a racing simulator service, not just a racing sim or a racing game. This means you pay a monthly subscription to access the service and buy content like cars and tracks separately. Your iRacing subscription allows you to join practice sessions, races on official servers, and access the iRacing forums.
New memberships on the platform get a 30% reduction on the monthly cost, making iRacing $9 a month, with more extended subscription periods becoming cheaper. A 1-year annual subscription costs $77, and a 2 year sub costs $140, but there are often even more discounts during the Black Friday sales, although that is only once a year.
The base subscription model includes a range of cars and tracks to help you started without immediately having to buy any additional content. Some of this content includes the the Mazda MX-5 Cup car, Toyota GR86, Formula Vee and a number stock cars, 33 cars in total. Tracks include the excellent Laguna Seca and Oulton Park road courses, with 25 more to accompany.
Car & Track Costs
Additional tracks and cars cost $14.95 and $11.95, respectively. Tracks range from classic road courses like Spa in Belgium to the Indianapolis oval, dirt ovals, and rallycross tracks.
iRacing has just about any category of car imaginable that includes Formula 1, Indycar, Nascar, GT3, Le Mans Prototypes, Rallycross and even dirt track cars.
Content on iRacing isn’t cheap, but you do get a 10% discount if you buy content in batches of three to five and a global discount of 20% if you own 40+ pieces of content.
iRacing introduces new tracks at just about every single season update. These range from re-scanning of tracks to add a new surface or a brand-new track that’s never been seen before in iRacing. The tracks are laser scanned for perfect detail with every crack, bump and kerb captured in loving detail.
What Hardware Do You Need for iRacing?
iRacing runs on PC only, there’s no console version. The good news is it’s relatively light on system resources compared to other modern sims, so most reasonably up-to-date computers should be able to run it without issues. You can check iRacing’s minimum hardware specifications to make sure your machine is up to the task before subscribing.
Steering wheel and pedals (recommended): This is the way iRacing is meant to be played. A wheel and pedal set gives you the force feedback and pedal feel you need to understand what the car is doing, which directly translates into faster, more consistent driving. You don’t need to spend a fortune, however, as entry-level options like the Logitech G29 or Thrustmaster T300 are perfectly capable of getting you competitive. For a deeper look at what’s available, check out our guide to the best wheels for iRacing.
Game controller (possible but limited): You can race on a controller, and iRacing does support it. But you’ll be at a significant disadvantage as the lack of force feedback means you can’t feel what the car is doing, which makes it much harder to catch slides, trail brake accurately, or be consistent lap to lap. If a controller is all you have right now, it’s enough to try iRacing and see if you enjoy it, but investing in a wheel should be your first upgrade.
Virtual reality (the ultimate experience): If your budget allows, VR in iRacing transforms the experience completely. The depth perception and spatial awareness you get from being inside the cockpit makes judging braking points, positioning in traffic, and looking through corners feel natural in a way that no monitor setup can fully replicate. It’s not essential, as plenty of fast drivers race on single or triple monitors, but if immersion matters to you, it’s worth the investment.
Initial Start-up
To install iRacing, visit iRacing.com and signup for a subscription. After you’ve signed up and logged in, you will see a message that the iRacing service isn’t running with options to download the software. Select the software to download and then install it.
The installer will place an iRacing icon on your desktop that you can click to launch the iRacing service and start downloading the default cars and track. Once this is done, you can close the downloader and choose Settings from the menu on the iRacing web page. You can then choose for iRacing to auto-configure your graphics settings. This configuration is an excellent baseline and should work fine for now.
Once that’s done, choose the Mazda MX5 series and join a practice session. You’ll find yourself sitting in the car in the garage. From here, you can open Settings and configure your steering wheel and pedals. It’s important that you choose the correct rotation value for your steering wheel when setting it up. For example, most Logitech wheels have a rotation of 1080 degrees and iRacing normally detects this automatically. However, if it isn’t auto-detected, then dragging the “Wheel Range” and “Map Range” sliders within the settings menu should fix it.
We recommend that you also configure a button for the Pitlane Speed Limit and the Black Box that you can use to change between various information windows while driving. Once this is done, you can leave the garage and drive your first laps.
Car Setups
Get all our perfected iRacing qualifying & race setups for new and experienced drivers alike.
iRacing includes baseline setups for all cars and tracks that are ok for beginners. They’re not particularly fast but are stable and forgiving at the limit. You can load these setups from the setups menu when you’re in the garage.
You’ll quickly find though, that once you’ve run a few races or progressed to a category that allows for open setups, the default iRacing setups will be slower and fellow drivers tend to be faster than you.
At this point you can choose to use custom setups from Coach Dave Academy. These are built by pro esports drivers with 10k+ iRatings, for you to be a faster more consistent driver every single race, every single series, every single season.
iRacing Licenses and Safety Rating (SR)
When you start you will automatically be categorised as a Rookie, and will only be allowed to compete in the Rookie category races. This typically involves driving the Mazda MX5 with a fixed setup over relatively short-distance races. To progress up from a Rookie license to a D license, you need to have your SR above 3.0. This will allow you to be promoted to D license at the end of the 12-week race season. Alternatively, you will be promoted immediately if you have your SR at 4.0.
SR will be increased every time you complete clean laps and races. If you run off the track and touch the grass slightly in a race, your SR will decrease by a small amount. Spinning out or hitting a barrier or another car will cause a more significant reduction in SR. It’s therefore advisable to focus more on finishing races cleanly early on in your iRacing career to ensure that you have a high SR and get to the license class you need.
Certain cars are only available to race in the higher licence classes, so it’s crucial that you spend time practising consistency before entering a race. This will give you the best chance of having a clean race with minimal incidents and the fastest path to reaching the license class you desire.
iRating
Your iRating is more or less a measure of your skill as a racing driver and is calculated automatically based on your results. As soon as you are out of Rookies, this is activated. The more opponents you beat that have a higher iRating than you, the quicker your total iRating will increase.
If you crash out of a race or just finish towards the back because of a spin or any other incident, you will probably have a reduction in iRating. Simply put, the higher your iRating, the better chance you have of racing against other drivers of a similar skill level resulting in safer and more enjoyable races.
When you get to full Series and Special Events, your iRating will determing which split you compete in. But don’t worry about this, just go out there and do the best you can.
How To Behave On Track
You must never forget that the cars and drivers out on track with you in iRacing are real people, not AI, unless racing offline. Smashing into them or driving unnecessarily aggressively isn’t acceptable behaviour.
iRacing uses a points system against incidents. The aim is to end with zero incident points every race. You’ll get a threshold you will need to stay within before you get disqualified from the race, and the amount changes based on the amount of laps or length of race.
iRacing allows for drivers to be reported by fellow drivers which means that your bad behaviour on track may result in a punishment that could be as severe as a short-term ban or worse, permanent banning from the iRacing service. Refer to this excellent write-up on racing etiquette for more information on how to behave while driving.
Flags
iRacing uses similar flags to real racing. In real racing, a white flag is shown denoting the race’s final lap, and iRacing does the same. However, just as in real racing, ignoring flags may result in penalties. Here’s a list of some of the most common flags used in iRacing:
| Flag Name | Description |
| Black Flag | You need to serve a penalty by returning to the pits |
| Blue Flag (with yellow diagonal stripe) | You’re about to be lapped by the leaders |
| Checkered (Chequered) Flag | The race is over |
| Disqualification Flag (black with white diagonal stripe) | Your race is over |
| Green Flag | The race has started |
| Meatball Flag | Your car is damaged. Return to the pits for repairs. |
| White Flag | Final lap of the race |
| Yellow Flag | Slow car/s ahead |
Communities
The official iRacing forums are an excellent place to ask questions and get information from other drivers and iRacing staff. However, Reddit has a thriving iRacing community that may provide a second avenue if the first one doesn’t give you the help you need. You could also join the Coach Dave Academy Discord which is full of information and helpful people.
Enjoy Your Racing
iRacing has a lot of rules and is not easy in the beginning. It can be very intimidating for beginners, and they can get so caught up with trying to keep up their iRating that they tend to forget that they should enjoy racing.
The whole point of iRacing is to race regularly and over time, become a more complete racing driver. You will eventually win races, and if you work at it hard enough, you can start winning championships.
The satisfaction of practising, improving laptimes, learning tire management and eventually entering and winning a race is immeasurable. Chasing down an opponent, trying to pass them and even going side-by-side through a couple of corners is what racing is about. You can’t win every race but you can still enjoy most of them.
You can also “pimp” your experience with some of the best iRacing apps that can take care of everything from setups, overlays, liveries, pit crew messaging and more.
Final Thoughts
iRacing has a steeper learning curve than most racing games, and it’s normal to feel overwhelmed in the first few weeks. Don’t worry about your iRating, don’t chase wins, and don’t buy a garage full of content on day one. Focus on three things: learn one car, finish races cleanly, and build your safety rating. Everything else follows from that.
Once you’ve got your feet under you and you’re ready to start chasing lap time, Delta can accelerate your improvement significantly. It automatically installs professionally developed setups for whatever car and track you’re racing, and Auto Insights AI coaching breaks down your driving corner by corner so you know exactly where to focus your practice, with no telemetry experience required.
If you want structured guidance on the fundamentals of fast, consistent driving, the Never Lift course covers everything from braking technique to throttle control across 11 detailed lessons and it’s included with your Delta subscription.
Have fun on your iRacing journey.
- Sports, Formula & Oval iRacing Setups
- Race Telemetry - Brake, Throttle & Racing Lines
- Corner by Corner AI Coaching To Gain Seconds
- Challenge Racers on the Delta Leaderboards
