iRacing stakes its claim as the premier online sim racing platform through a comprehensive range of different series that you can race in, from hourly sprint races to gargantuan endurance races. To progress through to the highest of disciplines, you have to upgrade your license through a series of performances.
This article will explain how the license system works, the best ways to optimise your license gain, and what is unlocked where within the system.
What Are The iRacing Licenses?
When you load up iRacing, you’ll be greeted by five different licence categories, each its own racing discipline:
- Sports Car
- Formula
- Oval
- Dirt Road
- Dirt Oval
Every driver carries a separate licence for each discipline, and you progress each one independently — all the way from Rookie up to A-Licence (and Pro/Pro WC beyond) as your Safety Rating climbs. Your iRating is tracked separately for each category too, so your pace in one discipline never affects another.
Quick note if you’ve been away a while: iRacing used to have a single “Road” licence. In 2024 it was split into two separate disciplines – Sports Car and Formula – with your old Road progress copied across to both.
Sports Car
The Sports Car discipline is home to iRacing’s GT, prototype and production-car racing. It advances from Rookie series such as the Fanatec Global Mazda MX-5 Cup all the way up to A-Licence competition like the European Sprint Series.
Along the way, Sports Car contains many of iRacing’s most popular series. At the C-Licence level you’ll be able to race in the likes of the Porsche Cup Series, while at B-Licence you become eligible for the IMSA iRacing Series and the VRS GT Sprint Series – all of which you’ll find setups for as part of our iRacing Setups.
Formula
The Formula discipline covers iRacing’s open-wheel, single-seater racing, and it’s a ladder all of its own. Drivers start out in Rookie machinery like the Formula Vee, before stepping up through the junior formulae – cars such as the Skip Barber, Ray FF1600 and Formula 4 – at the D and C-Licence levels.
Higher up, C and B-Licence drivers can jump into faster single-seaters like the Dallara F3 and Super Formula Lights, before A-Licence unlocks the quickest open-wheelers in the game across series such as the iRacing Grand Prix Series. Many of these formula cars are covered by our iRacing Setups too.
Oval
Completely separate from the tarmac road racing, and miles away in driving style, is Oval.
The Oval discipline sees drivers advance from the iRacing Advanced Legends Cup and the Fanatec Street Stock Series up to the NASCAR iRacing Class A and NASCAR Next Gen Cup Series, both of which offer some of the best oval racing competition in sim racing.
Dirt Road
Next up you have Dirt Road, a mix of Rallycross and off-road Pro Truck racing.
The Dirt Road discipline advances from the Rookie-class iRX Volkswagen Beetle Lite Series and the Rookie Pro 2 Lite Off-Road Racing Series up to the B-Licence iRacing Rallycross Series and the mixed Pro 2 & Pro 4 Off-Road Racing Series.
Dirt Oval
Similar to Dirt Road, Dirt Oval drivers progress from Rookie class with series such as the ButtKicker DIRTcar Street Stock Series up to B-Licence series offering a blend of Sprint Car, Late Model and UMP Modified racing at the highest level.
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How Do You Advance Your License?
In each discipline, you are ranked in three conditions.
- Safety Rating
- iRating
- ttRating
Put simply, to advance your license all the way up to A – which is the highest license level barring the Pro Road and Pro Oval license, which you can learn more about in our guide here – your Safety Rating must be at or above 3.00 after having carried out enough “Placement Races.”
At the Rookie license level, this total is 2 races, for every other license it is 4 races or Time Attacks. Once you meet these conditions, you will get promoted at the end of the season, with the exception of Rookies who get promoted to D-License immediately.
With the others there is the opportunity to “fast track” and get promoted early, but for that your SR needs to be at or above 4.00.
Safety Rating
The primary factor to watch out for when looking to advance your license is Safety Rating (SR).
- It’s rated between 0 and 3 for Rookies
- Between 0 and 5 for D-License drivers
- Between 1 and 5 from C-License to A-License
The key to obtaining Safety Rating is, in essence, to drive safely. However, the amount it increases after each race depends on a set of factors including your own “Incident Count” for the lobby, the length of the race in distance and time, the rest of the lobby’s counters and the relative Safety Ratings for the field.
For example, whilst it is common for drivers to gain between 1 and 1.5 SR in an endurance race, it’s often hard to gain more than 0.4 SR in a race that’s shorter than 30 minutes.
Furthermore, you’re less likely to gain SR from a race that’s below your current license. Racing in the Fanatec Global MX5 Series, a Rookie and an A-license driver could both finish without any incident points, but the Rookie would gain noticeably more SR.
Incident count
So, how does the “Incident Count” work? Each type of “incident” has its own multiplier, and these stack up over the sessions to create a total.
- Going off the track has a 1x multiplier
- Hitting a wall or losing control has a 2x multiplier
- Car contact has a hefty 4x multiplier
Sometimes, these can stack up. If you spin off of the track into another car, you’ll only get 4x instead of 7x, but the punishment can be more lenient. If you lean on another car, for example, it’s typically 0x unless the other car goes off the track or spins, in which case you get the same “points” as they do.
The rules can be slightly different in different sessions, so in official Practice and Qualifying your incidents carry half the weighting they do in the Race.
On Dirt, the multiplier is also roughly half that it is racing on tarmac.
iRating and ttRating
Outside of your Safety Rating, drivers can also earn iRating (iR), which decides the sorting for lobbies but doesn’t mean anything to your license. iRating is merely designed to rate you based on your results, and this number will either grow or shrink depending on where you finish a race in relation to the lobby’s Strength of Field (SoF) – the average iRating.
Finally, there is ttRating (ttR), which is sorted by your Time Attack results. Again, it doesn’t really affect much apart from your relative ranking to others.
The Progression Tree
While the progression ladders and series variety change from discipline to discipline, one thing stays consistent pretty much throughout iRacing: at each level, there’s more than one way to get to the next.
Be that GT cars versus touring cars and prototypes on Sports Car, the different junior ladders on Formula, trucks versus rallycross on Dirt Road, or sprint cars against stock cars on Dirt Oval – there’s almost always a second option at the very least.
Sports Car
On the Sports Car ladder, there’s a huge variety of series to choose from as you look to upgrade your licence. After starting out in a simple GT-style series, the doors quickly open up.
Rookie
As a Rookie in Sports Car, your home is the Fanatec Global Mazda MX-5 Cup. It’s one of the most popular starting points on the whole service thanks to the car’s simple handling and forgiving nature – which you can learn more about in our guide here – and it’s populated with free circuits to give drivers as much track time as possible. (Prefer single-seaters? The Formula ladder below starts with the Formula Vee.)
D-Licence
At D-Licence you have a wide array of tin-top and GT classes. There’s the Sim-Lab Production Car Challenge – where the Global Mazda MX-5 Cup car races alongside the Toyota GR86 – and the Turn Racing Touring Car Challenge, plus the iRacing Spec Racer Ford Challenge for something a little different.
For GT racing, you have the BMW M2 Challenge, Ferrari GT3 Challenge and the Ruf GT3 Challenge, along with a taste of endurance racing in the sporadic events of the BMW Sim GT Cup and Nürburgring Endurance Championship.
C-Licence
C-Licence brings even greater variety: the Supercars of Australia series, the Radical Racing Challenge, a return of the MX-5 with the Fanatec Advanced Mazda MX-5 Cup Series, and a mixed bag of GT racing with the Porsche Cup Series – which you can learn more about here – the Heusinkveld GT Challenge, IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge and Kamel GT Championship.
There’s also a real taste of endurance racing with the Creventic Endurance Series, VRS GT Endurance Series and the VRS Global Endurance Series.
B-Licence
At B-Licence things get more specialised, with a strong line-up of GT and prototype racing: the Fanatec GT3 Challenge, its twin in the VRS GT Sprint Series, the IMSA iRacing Series and the LMP2 Prototype Challenge.
A-Licence
At A-Licence, the crème de la crème, the European Sprint Series rewards the best drivers with the most elite GT road racing on the platform. Events are a lot longer here than at lower licence levels, leading to more committed fields and closer championship battles.
Formula
The Formula ladder is all about single-seaters, and it has just as much variety as you climb – from spec junior series to the fastest open-wheelers on the service.
Rookie
Every Formula career starts in the Formula Vee iRacing Series, a lightweight, low-power single-seater that’s perfect for learning open-wheel craft. Like the Rookie Sports Car series, it runs on free circuits to keep you on track as much as possible.
D-Licence
At D-Licence, the open-wheel choices open up quickly, with series such as the Cooper Tires USF 2000 Championship, the Skip Barber Racing Series and the FIA Formula 4 Challenge all offering a different route up the ladder.
C-Licence
C-Licence, has even greater variety, including the Grand Prix Legends series and two Dallara F3 series – which you can easily install Coach Dave Academy setups for now with the Coach Dave Delta app – as well as the Indy Pro 2000 Championship for a mixed bag of road and oval courses.
B-Licence
At B-Licence, the machinery gets seriously quick, with the US Open Wheel B Dallara iR18 series and the Dallara Formula iR series, complemented by the Classic Lotus Grand Prix and the iRacing Formula 3.5 Championship.
A-Licence
At the very top sits the iRacing Grand Prix Series – the most elite open-wheel racing on the platform, with longer events that reward the sharpest, most consistent drivers.
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Oval
In the Oval Discipline, you have two Rookie offerings in the Fanatec Street Stock Series and the iRacing Advanced Legends Cup.
From there, the D-license offerings are the iRacing ARCA Menards Series, the two SK Modified Weekly Series, as well as two iRacing Late Model Tour offerings.
C-license gives you two Super Late Model Series, two NASCAR iRacing Tour Modified Series, two NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series, the iRacing Street Stock Series as well as the Indy Pro 2000 Championship and the IndyCar Series for Oval. You also get entries into Special Events, as well as the NASCAR iRacing Series for the Cup Cars.
At B-license you can have a taste of the two NASCAR xfinity Series as well as the iRacing Sprint Car Cup, the iRacing Silver Crown Cup, and the NASCAR Legends Series for some classic oval racing. T
The top brass A-license series are the two NASCAR Cup Series as well as the two NASCAR Next Gen Cup Series.
Dirt Road
On the Dirt Road progression, you can get a taste of trucks and rallycross at each level. At Rookie, you have the Pro 2 Lite Off-Road Racing Series and the iRX Volkswagen Beetle Lite – Fixed Series.
At D-license the two offerings are the open-setup iRX Volkswagen Beetle Lite series as well as the Pro 4 Off-Road Racing Series – Fixed.
At C-license the two offerings are the fixed-setup races of the iRacing Rallycross Series and the Pro 2 Off-Road Racing Series.
The top of the ladder is B-license here, with the open-setup iRacing Rallycross Series and combined Pro 2 & Pro 4 Off-Road Racing Series.
Dirt Oval
Dirt Oval has the most complex ladder. Despite it appearing that there are two Rookie series, only the ButtKicker DIRTcar Street Stock Series is available to Rookies. The iRacing Dirt Legends Cup, despite appearing as available, will only become available at D-license.
In addition to that, D-license holders get access to the Fanatec DIRTcar 305 Sprint Car Series, the DIRTcar Limited Late Model Series, and the Engine Ice DIRTcar 358 Modified Series.
At C-License level, you have no less than 7 unique series: the DIRTcar Class C Street Stock Series, the fixed-setup World of Outlaws Late Model Series, the RYCO-Motorsports.com DIRTcar Pro Late Model Series, and the SUPER DIRTcar Big Block Modified Series are met with the Sprint Car-style racing of the UCAS 360 Sprint Car Series, the DIRTcar 360 Sprint Car Series, and the iRacing Dirt Midget Cup.
As with Dirt Road, the top progression on Dirt Oval is B-license. Here, you have the two World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series as well as the World of Outlaws Late Model Series, the AMSOIL USAC Sprint Car Series and the DIRTcar UMP Modified Series.
Conclusion
As we said at the start of this article, iRacing has a comprehensive range of series that are spread out over 5 ladders. These can be climbed in a variety of different ways and, with each step, the competition gets rougher and tougher.
If you’re looking at making the next steps and wondering which cars and tracks are the best for you, be sure to check out our Ultimate iRacing Car Guide and Ultimate iRacing Track Guide for more information.
There are five: Sports Car, Formula, Oval, Dirt Road and Dirt Oval. Each is its own discipline with a separate licence, iRating and Safety Rating, so you progress every one independently.
Promotion is driven mainly by your Safety Rating, not your speed – race cleanly, keep your incidents low, and once you hit the required Safety Rating (with enough races completed) you’ll be promoted to the next class, from Rookie through D, C, B and A. Pace matters for your iRating, but it’s clean, consistent driving that moves your licence up.
Your Safety Rating measures how cleanly you drive and controls your licence class; your iRating measures your speed and race results relative to other drivers; and your licence sets which series you’re eligible for. They’re all tracked separately for each discipline.
iRacing split the old Road licence into two separate disciplines – Sports Car and Formula – back in the 2024 Season 2 build. If you raced Road before then, your progress was copied across to both, so you’ll have a licence and iRating in each.
Most newcomers start in Sports Car with the Fanatec Global Mazda MX-5 Cup, thanks to its forgiving handling and free tracks. If single-seaters are more your thing, the Formula Vee is the equivalent easy entry point on the Formula ladder – either is a great place to learn the basics before climbing the licence classes.
