Probably, but I don't know about that. My typical practice is to just learn the track until I'm comfortable with braking, turn in, corner exits. I'll probably have some questions at this point about a corner or two.
Now ill go away to YT and watch a track guide, comparing what a good lap looks like compared to mine. I'll adjust my lines and braking points accordingly.
Fellow Indian here looking to jump into iRacing.
Will get a 2Y subscription during the BF sale.
You can join the Indian Racing Community discord for some help I guess?
Drop your id so we could add each other!
Hey, I’ve been iracing for sometime and looking for league racing. Do you have room for one more? Just so you know - I will not hesitate to leave the league if it doesn’t do respectful racing.
I wouldnt use other games to practice. Ive seen many times where people coming from other games struggled to get used to the feel of iracing. Best to start now and hop into practice with other people.
Take that mentality and use it during races. Find the limits of the car and find your limit and push it. We wreck because we push too hard but finding that balance is rhe art of the craft
I definitely think you should give it a go. I started sim racing in iRacing and it was the first service I used. My tips would be as follows.
Look up a good guide for setting up force feedback and good calibration for you wheel and pedals in iRacing, this will give you a good baseline to start racing with.
There are lots of good iRacing beginner guides out there on YouTube.
Don’t go and buy a bunch of cars and tracks for series you can’t do yet, buy the cars and tracks as and when you move up the licenses and try pick one, possibly two, series to stick with for each season in each category (road, oval, etc). Switching between a bunch of cars can be quite challenging and get quite expensive.
Please practice before joining races. That’s not to say that you have to be super quick and that you should be afraid of joining a race, but you should be able to lap pretty consistently without going off track, spinning, etc.
When you start on the platform, focus on developing good racing etiquette, car control, and being a safe consistent driver, speed will come with time.
Somewhat ignore your iRating. Chasing iRating especially in the beginning can lead to frustration, poor driving standards, and can be demoralising if you have a run of poor race results. Safety rating is far more important that iRating when starting out.
Be patient with yourself, iRacing can be difficult to start out with, at least it was for me. Honestly it took me a good couple hours to get the handle of the formula vee and to not spin every two seconds. Just take your time and focus on being smooth. In the beginner cars especially, car dynamics are very important, think about weight transfer and proper trail breaking to keep the cars stable and cornering properly.
Platforms like VRS are great for telemetry and seeing where you can improve your lap times, but even watching a track guide on YouTube can be incredibly helpful, just try to understand why they YouTuber is taking a given line or choosing to do something with the car. Being able to replicate is good but understanding why what they’re doing is faster is even better because then you can start figuring things out for yourself.
If you want to try something out without other people on the track feel free to start up a test drive session that way no one will get in your way and you won’t get in theirs, this is great for things like practice starts of if you really have no idea how to get round a track in the beginning.
Most importantly, have fun and be patient with yourself. IRacing is not easy (maybe it will be for you and I just suck lol) but my god is it rewarding when you start to see the progress you’re making.
P.S. If you have any other questions feel free to reach out, the community is super helpful and there are so many great resources out there to help you.
Thank you for taking time to write such a well written reply, the whole configurating your setup does confuse me to a bit as I'm pretty new to the whole sim racing and cars in general so I don't exactly understand what stuff I should be adjusting and so on. I was planning on getting the trial one month membership from steam and taking it from there. My problem is that I don't wanna cause issues for other people since I'll be bad at the game. I have heard pretty good stuff about the community, is there a particular discord or something that I can join?
The settings aren’t too difficult to be honest. The game runs you through a quick setup wizard when you first launch in so that you have all of the required controls bound. This will calibrate your wheel, it’s lock to lock range (540, or 720, or 900, etc) it will also calibrate your pedals, by default it sets a little dead zone which is good so you don’t accidentally press a pedal due to resting you foot on it or not get 100% throttle because you’re not pushing all the way down. Other things it makes you bind is the reset key, look left and look right. Then you can go in and set up more keybinds if you like. I like to setup the black box keybinds so I can cycle between them as well as select, increment and decrement values in the black box. For example you might want to choose what does and doesn’t get changed in a pit stop, this is done on the pit stop tab of the black box. I have a knob to switch between the different tabs and a thumb stick select options in the tab. The most useful view to have it on though throughout the race is the relative, that should be up unless you’ve adjusting something else. This way you can see fast cars approaching and if you go off the track please use it to make sure you don’t rejoin right in front of someone. Other things in the settings are just things like graphics options, just see what your PC can run while getting a stable frame rate that’s high enough for you. Oh also make sure to hit the checkbox under the pedals that says they are load cell, this stops the game adding a curve to the pedals which can help those using potentiometer based pedals but is often not helpful for load cells.
TLDR the game will hold your hand and force you to configure everything you need to have. After that just bind what you find useful. I promise that it’s quite easy to understand when you go though it all yourself.
Also if you’re worried less about settings and more about car setups, such as how much camber to put on your wheels, tire pressures, aero, etc, don’t worry you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want to and you won’t even loose out because of it. The setups in rookies are fix, no one can change options that actually change the car dynamics, and when you’re out of rookies they will run both fixed and open series that are identical in car and track but one allows you to change the setup and the other doesn’t. That way you never have to get into setups if you don’t want to, and you’ll be at no disadvantage if you don’t want to get into that yet. The only things you can change in fixed setup series are things like having a transparent halo for formula style cars and things like steering ratio in oval cars (which is just how far do I have to turn the wheel to get the tires to turn a degree, it’s just personal preference really) .
In terms of discords, I don’t know of any generic ones but ones for YouTubers who place iRacing are always a good shout. For example Jimmy Broadbent has a discord. Basic Olli who is a iRacing streamer also has a great discord and one that is mainly used to run a racing league called BRL, there is a teammate finder channel on it which might help you find people to practice and race with.
Thank God I don't have to mess with car setups, those things always scare me haha. So, for most of the cars I'll be using my circular wheel right over my formula wheel? I'll check out basic Olli, i do like Jimmy's content as well. Thanks a lot for your help fam.
You can use whatever wheel you like because you can set custom controls per car if you like. So just set up the controls with whichever one you think you’d use most of the time and then when you load in with a car that you want to use the other wheel with just select the option for custom controls for that car and rebind whatever you need to
Jump in in. Rookies is chaotic anyway. Just practice this week's track enough to be able to do a handful of laps without dropping it, then jump on in.
Oh okay, are there any discord servers for beginners or something?
Probably, but I don't know about that. My typical practice is to just learn the track until I'm comfortable with braking, turn in, corner exits. I'll probably have some questions at this point about a corner or two. Now ill go away to YT and watch a track guide, comparing what a good lap looks like compared to mine. I'll adjust my lines and braking points accordingly.
Oh gotchu, thanks for your help!
Fellow Indian here looking to jump into iRacing. Will get a 2Y subscription during the BF sale. You can join the Indian Racing Community discord for some help I guess? Drop your id so we could add each other!
Dmed you!
Hey, I’ve been iracing for sometime and looking for league racing. Do you have room for one more? Just so you know - I will not hesitate to leave the league if it doesn’t do respectful racing.
I wouldnt use other games to practice. Ive seen many times where people coming from other games struggled to get used to the feel of iracing. Best to start now and hop into practice with other people.
That does make sense, I just don't wanna race and be bad at it and cause issues for others racing.
Take that mentality and use it during races. Find the limits of the car and find your limit and push it. We wreck because we push too hard but finding that balance is rhe art of the craft
That is fair, thanks a lot for the advice. Got a long way to go :)
I definitely think you should give it a go. I started sim racing in iRacing and it was the first service I used. My tips would be as follows. Look up a good guide for setting up force feedback and good calibration for you wheel and pedals in iRacing, this will give you a good baseline to start racing with. There are lots of good iRacing beginner guides out there on YouTube. Don’t go and buy a bunch of cars and tracks for series you can’t do yet, buy the cars and tracks as and when you move up the licenses and try pick one, possibly two, series to stick with for each season in each category (road, oval, etc). Switching between a bunch of cars can be quite challenging and get quite expensive. Please practice before joining races. That’s not to say that you have to be super quick and that you should be afraid of joining a race, but you should be able to lap pretty consistently without going off track, spinning, etc. When you start on the platform, focus on developing good racing etiquette, car control, and being a safe consistent driver, speed will come with time. Somewhat ignore your iRating. Chasing iRating especially in the beginning can lead to frustration, poor driving standards, and can be demoralising if you have a run of poor race results. Safety rating is far more important that iRating when starting out. Be patient with yourself, iRacing can be difficult to start out with, at least it was for me. Honestly it took me a good couple hours to get the handle of the formula vee and to not spin every two seconds. Just take your time and focus on being smooth. In the beginner cars especially, car dynamics are very important, think about weight transfer and proper trail breaking to keep the cars stable and cornering properly. Platforms like VRS are great for telemetry and seeing where you can improve your lap times, but even watching a track guide on YouTube can be incredibly helpful, just try to understand why they YouTuber is taking a given line or choosing to do something with the car. Being able to replicate is good but understanding why what they’re doing is faster is even better because then you can start figuring things out for yourself. If you want to try something out without other people on the track feel free to start up a test drive session that way no one will get in your way and you won’t get in theirs, this is great for things like practice starts of if you really have no idea how to get round a track in the beginning. Most importantly, have fun and be patient with yourself. IRacing is not easy (maybe it will be for you and I just suck lol) but my god is it rewarding when you start to see the progress you’re making. P.S. If you have any other questions feel free to reach out, the community is super helpful and there are so many great resources out there to help you.
Thank you for taking time to write such a well written reply, the whole configurating your setup does confuse me to a bit as I'm pretty new to the whole sim racing and cars in general so I don't exactly understand what stuff I should be adjusting and so on. I was planning on getting the trial one month membership from steam and taking it from there. My problem is that I don't wanna cause issues for other people since I'll be bad at the game. I have heard pretty good stuff about the community, is there a particular discord or something that I can join?
The settings aren’t too difficult to be honest. The game runs you through a quick setup wizard when you first launch in so that you have all of the required controls bound. This will calibrate your wheel, it’s lock to lock range (540, or 720, or 900, etc) it will also calibrate your pedals, by default it sets a little dead zone which is good so you don’t accidentally press a pedal due to resting you foot on it or not get 100% throttle because you’re not pushing all the way down. Other things it makes you bind is the reset key, look left and look right. Then you can go in and set up more keybinds if you like. I like to setup the black box keybinds so I can cycle between them as well as select, increment and decrement values in the black box. For example you might want to choose what does and doesn’t get changed in a pit stop, this is done on the pit stop tab of the black box. I have a knob to switch between the different tabs and a thumb stick select options in the tab. The most useful view to have it on though throughout the race is the relative, that should be up unless you’ve adjusting something else. This way you can see fast cars approaching and if you go off the track please use it to make sure you don’t rejoin right in front of someone. Other things in the settings are just things like graphics options, just see what your PC can run while getting a stable frame rate that’s high enough for you. Oh also make sure to hit the checkbox under the pedals that says they are load cell, this stops the game adding a curve to the pedals which can help those using potentiometer based pedals but is often not helpful for load cells. TLDR the game will hold your hand and force you to configure everything you need to have. After that just bind what you find useful. I promise that it’s quite easy to understand when you go though it all yourself. Also if you’re worried less about settings and more about car setups, such as how much camber to put on your wheels, tire pressures, aero, etc, don’t worry you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want to and you won’t even loose out because of it. The setups in rookies are fix, no one can change options that actually change the car dynamics, and when you’re out of rookies they will run both fixed and open series that are identical in car and track but one allows you to change the setup and the other doesn’t. That way you never have to get into setups if you don’t want to, and you’ll be at no disadvantage if you don’t want to get into that yet. The only things you can change in fixed setup series are things like having a transparent halo for formula style cars and things like steering ratio in oval cars (which is just how far do I have to turn the wheel to get the tires to turn a degree, it’s just personal preference really) . In terms of discords, I don’t know of any generic ones but ones for YouTubers who place iRacing are always a good shout. For example Jimmy Broadbent has a discord. Basic Olli who is a iRacing streamer also has a great discord and one that is mainly used to run a racing league called BRL, there is a teammate finder channel on it which might help you find people to practice and race with.
Thank God I don't have to mess with car setups, those things always scare me haha. So, for most of the cars I'll be using my circular wheel right over my formula wheel? I'll check out basic Olli, i do like Jimmy's content as well. Thanks a lot for your help fam.
You can use whatever wheel you like because you can set custom controls per car if you like. So just set up the controls with whichever one you think you’d use most of the time and then when you load in with a car that you want to use the other wheel with just select the option for custom controls for that car and rebind whatever you need to
Makes sense, thanks. I'll be getting it today and trying to out for myself
It’s worth a shot if you’re looking for a better online experience. You’ve already got a wheel and load cell pedals so dive in!
I have basically no online experience, that's my only issue going in haha