New to iRacing, asking some tips...

[Giovaneveterano]

Hi folks, iRacing is tempting me! I have some years of experience in simracing, with mostly of my time spent in rFactor and Assetto Corsa and casual play in other racing titles.
I think it's time to move on and find new challenges.
iRacing is something that I desired since ever, but there are some questions that I can't answer anywhere:

1. How the "career" unfolds? I mean, unlocking new categories is just based on my irating or there's more?
2. Can I immediately race with GT3 or Prototypes cars or I have to earn the licence first? What about instead just practice with those cars?
3. Do you NEED to buy some specific tracks (= race there) to improve your licence?
4. Is there a "strategy" to buy content to save money? Discount offers, gift cards, other?

Cheers,
Federico

 

[Ryan Robbins]

You get a few free cars and tracks to start. At first you can only race rookie class...in an official series. You can progress through the classes by racing in 4 official races in your current class, or 4 time trials. But you can only advance if your races or time trials are "clean" without many incidents (wrecking or running off track). There is a separate class for oval, road, Dirt oval, and dirt road.

You can immediately race with any car you buy in hosted sessions and/or private leagues which are unofficial...there are thousands of them, so no problem finding a good match. I have only raced official series.

Your iRating is your speed or talent, your Srating is your safety rating. iRacing servers automatically match drivers with similar iratings.
You can progress pretty quickly through the classes if you wish...as you get higher class you may need to buy more cars and tracks. you will have to buy a lot of tracks to truly compete in every round of an official series.

If you want to race official only as I do, find out what is popular in your time zone and what tracks you may need for upcoming season.

Try the irffb plugin for better force feedback in iRacing (in the opinion of most).

You can get discounts by buying 3 or more tracks and/or cars at once, or if you compete in 8 rounds of one championship in a season (of course you will need.to have many tracks to.do this, iRacing makes money this way)

Enjoy

 

[Frank Steinbach]

Hi Federico, trying to answer some of your questions here.

1. Your "career" in iRacing basically is getting the license for the series you would like to compete in.
Say you want to run the popular GT3 cars for example. First you have to get at least a B license to race in official race sessions with those cars in either the Blancpain or IMSA series.
Then you can start participating in one of the series and depending on all of your results before you will be in a division where you constantly compete with other drivers in that division throughout the season for that series. A season runs 12 weeks with a different track every week.
The "ultimate" career goal in iRacing would probably trying to get a pro license so you can participate in all the series the service offers. Including the pro series where the drivers compete for real money. But unless you´re alien material that goal is just theory.

2. You have to work up your way through the license system to run those cars in official races.
Rookie -> D license -> C license -> B license -> A license
You can practise with those cars just by yourself in a test session if you own the car/track without restriction or in official practise sessions with other drivers if you have the appropriate license.
Another possibilty woul be joining hosted unofficial races with the content you own or trying to get on the test server during the times when the service is down due to maintenance work.

3. Starting with iRacing and only having a rookie license you can participate in all rookie races without buying anything other than your basic subscription.
As soon as you get out of rookie license you need to start buying the car and the tracks for the higher license series you want to race in.

4. For new members there are promo codes throughout the year where you can get a few months membership plus an extra car sometimes at a discount.
One I remember is this one: PR-GRIPTV18 which gives you 3 months membership + a Ford Mustang for 10$.
There are other discounts I´m sure but the only other I remember is the one where you get 20% on future content purchase after you own 40 pieces of paid content in the service. That is quite a sum of money to get that discount though.
Best deals to get into iRacing or renew your membership is around Black Friday every year. So keep that in mind.

 

[Giovaneveterano]

Thank you very much to take your time to explain me the situation.
It seems like I have to buy certain tracks just to earn the licence, even if I'm not interested in, and then I suppose cars.
The good thing is that I can hotlap with any content I paid for.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

well, you get quite a lot of stuff with your first subscription: 16 cars and 15 tracks. Once you get out of Rookie (and the guys above have shown you how to do it) you can actually still race with only that material for a whole season (12 weeks) in the iRacing Production Car Challenge to advance from the d-licence to the c-licence, but this is where the first investment stops.
at the next level you will have to usually buy 3-5 tracks and one car for a series. you save a little money buy buying 3-5 (10% discount) or more than six items (15% discount) in one go. most series run some of the free tracks, so that's how you often do not have to buy the minimum eight tracks for your participation credit, let alone the 12 tracks for a full season (only the eight best weeks count anyway).
Advancing form D-licence to A-licence is SOLELY based on your security rating. If your car leaves the track, hits anything or is hit by fellow players, this safety rating is negatively impacted. The higher your class the more virtual miles you have to do without incident to progress. This can be frustrating as one naturally gets caught up in other players' mistakes which then sets your progression back a bit. So, you can be the slowest chap in the world, if you keep on the gray stuff and do not hit anyone and do not impede anyone's progress, advancing is easy. However, going slow on purpose will spoil your race results, which in turn will lead to you being gridded with the slow guys (like me, lol) and for fast guys this is close to being unbearable. Everyone must strike some sort of compromise.
After all this, let me tell you I paid sth. like 500 euros my first year (4 seasons) and about 40 euros my 5th year. it's really really expensive at first because the game is just so good, you cannot help buying stuff, then, after saturation has been reached, you can actually get by on very little (and curse yourself for stuff you bought but hardly ever used ...). Still, me, I do 95% of my sim-racing in iRacing there are 3,000+ players online every night and that is very very hard to beat. worth every cent
P.S. we have just started week 10 of a 12+1 week season, so joining in two and a half weeks will give you a couple of days to get out of rookie and also give you access to the fresh schedule in order to figure out what to buy for the first season.
P.P.Ps: you can advance while the season is still running, guys have progressed from rookie to A-level in a week, but it is of course pretty expensive that way.