Your hardware is sorted, your setup is decent, you’ve watched every YouTube tutorial going, and you’ve spent weeks grinding lap times. Yet the gap to the top drivers isn’t closing.
This is where the apps you run alongside your sim matter almost as much as the hardware. The right tools give you AI coaching, telemetry analysis, automatically installed setups, and tell you in seconds how to improve your driving.
Most of the “best sim racing apps” guides list the same five free tools and call it a day. They won’t tell you what each app actually does well, and which ones are worth paying for. That’s what this guide is for.
Free vs Paid Sim Racing Apps – What’s Actually Worth It?
Before we get into specifics, it helps to understand what you’re actually buying with paid apps versus what the free tools give you. The general consensus is:
Free tools tend to cover immersion, dashboards, and race management. SimHub, Crew Chief, RaceLab’s free tier, etc., and these are genuinely excellent. Most sim racers should have at least two of them running alongside some more advanced apps.
Paid tools are almost always focused on one thing: making you faster. AI coaching, professional setups, telemetry analysis, and reference laps from the top 1% of drivers. If you’re serious about improving your lap times, a paid coaching or setup app will return more time per pound than almost any hardware upgrade.
The way to think about it: free apps improve your race day experience; paid apps improve your lap times. It’s good to have a mix of both.
Best Sim Racing Apps for Getting Faster
This is the category that matters most if your goal is genuine improvement. It’s also the most rapidly evolving part of the market. AI coaching tools have changed rapidly over the last year, making what’s possible for the average sim racer easier.
Delta – AI Coaching, Setups, and Telemetry in One App
Delta is the flagship app, and we’d back it as the most complete sim racing tool available right now. But don’t just take our word for it, 12,000+ sim racers are using it daily to get faster.
Here’s what Delta actually does:
Auto Insights (AI Coaching): The moment you start a session, Delta’s AI analyses your telemetry every lap in real time. It breaks down each corner into four phases – Braking, Entry, Apex, and Exit – and tells you exactly where you’re losing time and what to change. “Your apex speed was 5 km/h slower than the reference lap” is more useful than any amount of staring at a speed trace.
Automatic Setup Installation: Delta automatically installs the right setups for your car and tracks the moment you enter a session in one of the supported sims (ACC, iRacing, LMU, AC Evo). No downloading files, no dragging folders, no version confusion. Just open Delta, load your sim, and the setup is there waiting for you.
Telemetry Data: Compare your lap against any reference lap in Delta. Pro drivers, Global Leaderboard entries, friends. Overlay braking points, throttle application, racing lines, and gear selection to understand exactly what the faster drivers are doing differently.
Leaderboards: See where you rank globally for any car and track combination. The Leaderboard Challenges feature sets you specific targets and links them to Auto Insights, so you know which corners to focus on to get faster and climb the leaderboard.
Never Lift Coaching Course: Is a specially curated coaching course you can complete in your own time, with 11 fundamental driving courses to teach you how to be a better driver in the sim, made by some of the best pro esports drivers and engineers in sim racing.
Delta supports: ACC, iRacing, LMU, Gran Turismo 7, Automobilista 2, Assetto Corsa, and AC Evo. It really is one subscription, and every sim (almost).
One Subscription For All
Unlimited setups for Le Mans Ultimate, iRacing & ACC. AI Coaching, Pro Reference Laps, Telemetry & Leaderboards for 7 different sims. Everything you need to win.
Track Titan
Track Titan is an alternative in the AI coaching space, particularly for drivers who also race on console or in F1 and Forza titles. Its Coaching Flows feature guides you through the biggest mistake you’re making on a lap and exactly how to correct it, without requiring you to build a dashboard or interpret raw telemetry.
Track Titan supports iRacing, ACC, Assetto Corsa, F1 series, Forza, and LMU. The platform claims an average of half a second improvement in lap time after your first session analysis, which, in competitive GT3 racing, is substantial.
RaceData AI
RaceData AI is a telemetry tool with a clean, accessible interface that turns complex data into straightforward insights. It’s particularly well-regarded for iRacing, ACC, and Assetto Corsa, and works well for drivers who want detailed post-session analysis without needing AI hand-holding for every corner.
Trophi.ai
A newer entrant worth watching, Trophi.ai takes an adaptive training approach – building improvement programmes based on your actual skill level and evolving them as you improve. Its data analysis covers billions of telemetry data points from across its user base. Good option for drivers who prefer a more structured, programme-led improvement process. A unique factor here is that Trophi.ai will actually guide you through a lap verbally, and in real time, telling you what and how to improve as each lap passes.
Best Sim Racing Apps for Dashboards and Immersion
SimHub – The Essential Free Tool
SimHub is essentially mandatory. It’s free (or pay what you want for premium features), and it does things no other tool matches: custom dashboards on a secondary screen, tactile feedback integration with bass shakers and haptic motors, and wind simulation using fans or hardware rigs.
SimHub works with virtually every sim racing title and can display almost any data you want, ie the gap to the car ahead, fuel remaining, tyre temps, sector times. You can download pre-made dashboards from the community or build your own.
If you have a secondary monitor, a tablet, or any haptic hardware, SimHub is the first app to install. Full stop.
RaceLab
RaceLab’s strength is in its overlay system and community setup library. Its intelligent layouts adapt automatically to the car you’re racing, and its streaming-friendly overlays make it a favourite for content creators. The free tier is genuinely useful (up to 10 overlays), while the Pro tier at around €3.90 a month unlocks everything.
RaceLab also has a community setup database – useful as a starting point, though for competition-ready setups developed by professional engineers, you’ll want something more reliable.
Best Sim Racing Apps for Race Engineering
Crew Chief – Your Free Virtual Race Engineer
Crew Chief is one of the most beloved apps in sim racing, and it’s completely free. It acts as a voice-activated spotter and race engineer, calling gaps to the car ahead, warning you about blue flags, giving tyre temperature updates, estimating fuel to the end of the race, and flagging incidents around you.
What makes Crew Chief special is how natural it feels. You can ask it questions mid-race (“How long to finish?”, “What are my tyre temps?”) and it responds like a real engineer. For iRacing, ACC, rFactor 2, and Automobilista 2 users, this is a near-essential tool.
It won’t make you faster in the telemetry sense, but it frees up mental bandwidth during a race, which absolutely does make you faster in practice.
MoTeC i2 and Cosworth Pi Toolbox (Advanced)
For serious data analysis beyond what consumer apps offer, MoTeC i2 is the professional standard. It’s the same software used in real motorsport. But learning it takes time, and the depth of analysis is unmatched. If you don’t know what you are looking at or for, however, there’s no point using it.
Worth noting: in 2025, Cosworth entered into an official partnership with iRacing to deliver live remote telemetry support via the Pi Toolbox solution – a first in sim racing. This is the level of data analysis that professional motorsport uses, now available to serious iRacing competitors.
Best Sim Racing Apps for Setups
Getting your car setup right is one of the highest-leverage things you can do to improve your lap times. A professionally developed setup will typically be worth 2-3+ seconds over the default, and that’s before you’ve changed a single driving input.
Coach Dave Delta’s Automatic Setup System
If you’re a Delta subscriber, this is already handled. Delta auto-installs the correct setup for your car and tracks every time you enter a session in ACC, iRacing, or LMU. The setups are developed by professional sim racers and engineers and cover every car and track combination.
It’s the closest thing to having a team engineer in your pit box – except it’s included in your Delta subscription.
Go Fast Apps Auto-Install Setup
Go Fast is Go Setups’ version of an auto-install setup app, much like Delta, and it gives you two options: either install setups manually or have one-click manual installs. Adjusting tyre pressures in ACC just like Delta does.
Aside from these two specific apps, there really aren’t many more out there that have automatic setup installation or an app for setups at all. Especially for iRacing, most setup shops still operate the old-fashioned way, by downloading a setup file that you need to install manually onto your PC before using it.
One Subscription For All
Unlimited setups for Le Mans Ultimate, iRacing & ACC. AI Coaching, Pro Reference Laps, Telemetry & Leaderboards for 7 different sims. Everything you need to win.
Best Sim Racing Apps for Customisation
Lovely Dash
The Lovely Dashboard is the world’s leading Simhub telemetry dashboard, and it delivers all the data you need in a clean and consistent UI across all simulators. It’s trusted by professionals like Tony Kanaan and David Perel, as well as sim racers of all skill levels. It has a free option and a paid option, and is worth checking out.
Trading Paints
If you race in iRacing, Trading Paints is the essential livery app. It automatically loads custom paint schemes in-session, so you and everyone around you sees the custom livery you’ve created or downloaded. It’s free to use and completely seamless once it’s running. It does have a paid option also.
RaceControl Livery Hub
Whilst technically not an app, we felt it is worth putting this in due to Le Mans Ultimate being such a popular sim right now. RaceControl’s Livery Hub is the go-to place for LMU liveries of all kinds. It syncs with your race team in-game, letting you instantly upload or change your race liveries whenever you want. It also works like Trading Paints, where you can upload your liveries for others to use.
iRacing Companion App
The official iRacing mobile app is genuinely useful for race management outside the sim. You can register for races, check your iRating and Safety Rating, monitor upcoming events, and stay connected to your iRacing profile without being at your PC. Not a performance tool, but a solid quality-of-life addition.
Which Sim Racing Apps Do You Actually Need?
The temptation is to just install everything, but resist it; instead, here’s a practical starting point based on your level:
| Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced | |
| AI Coaching | Delta (Auto Insights) | Delta (Auto Insights + Telemetry Data) | Delta + MoTeC i2 |
| Setups | Delta (auto install) | Delta (auto install) | Delta (auto install) |
| Dashboard / Immersion | SimHub | SimHub | SimHub |
| Race Engineering | Crew Chief | Crew Chief | Crew Chief |
| Overlays | RaceLab (free) | RaceLab Pro | RaceLab Pro |
| Liveries | Trading Paints & Livery Hub | Trading Paints & Livery Hub | Trading Paints & Livery Hub |
The one-subscription answer: A Delta subscription covers AI coaching, automatic setups, leaderboards, data analysis, and the Never Lift driving course – all in one, and provides value for SEVEN sim titles, which is unmatched.
Final Thoughts
The sim racing app landscape in 2026 is genuinely excellent, and there are tools available to the average sim racer that professional racing teams were using as recently as five years ago.
The key things to take away:
- SimHub and Crew Chief are free essentials that virtually every sim racer should have running
- AI coaching tools have changed what’s possible – Delta, Track Titan, and Trophi.ai give you corner-by-corner feedback that used to require a professional data engineer
- Automatic setup installation removes one of the biggest friction points for competitive sim racers, and Delta does this the best for ACC, iRacing, and LMU
- Build a focused stack of apps, not just a collection of 12 apps you barely use
If you want to go deeper on iRacing specifically, our guide to the 10 must-have iRacing apps covers the full toolkit needed to succeed on that platform.
If it is Le Mans Ultimate that you are invested in right now, take a look at our top 5 apps for Le Mans Ultimate guide that will set you up for victory.
One Subscription For All
Unlimited setups for Le Mans Ultimate, iRacing & ACC. AI Coaching, Pro Reference Laps, Telemetry & Leaderboards for 7 different sims. Everything you need to win.
Sim Racing Apps FAQ:
For beginners, the priority should be getting a good setup on the car and understanding the basics of telemetry. Delta handles both: it automatically installs a competitive setup when you load into a session, and Auto Insights breaks down your driving in plain language without requiring you to interpret raw data. Pair it with Crew Chief for race day information and SimHub if you have any haptic hardware.
Yes – particularly because of the automatic tyre pressure adjustment feature. Delta detects track temperature and conditions and adjusts your tyre pressures before you leave the pit lane, which alone can be worth several tenths. Combined with professionally developed ACC setups and corner-by-corner AI coaching, it’s the single highest-value app purchase for ACC competitors.
SimHub and Crew Chief are the two standout free apps. SimHub for dashboards, immersion, and tactile feedback; Crew Chief for real-time race engineering. RaceLab’s free tier is also genuinely useful for overlays. Between those three, you have a solid free stack – though you’ll be missing the performance-improvement capabilities that paid coaching and setup tools provide.
Most of the advanced telemetry and coaching apps (including Delta, for its AI coaching features) are PC-only. Track Titan is one of the few exceptions, with console support for F1. SimHub also has some console integration for tyre temperature displays. If you race on PS5 or Xbox, your options are more limited. Gran Turismo 7 users can still use Delta for telemetry tools purposes, and Coach Dave Academy have the Console Wizard for ACC.
