5 Changes iRacing Can Make to Improve Racecraft

I like the idea of tying iRating to how safe you finish

What if iRating was completely hidden so people could not hyper-fixate on it, weaponize it in chat or easily game the system?

I love the idea of lowering the number of incidents to DQ, BUT we need to talk about changing the way off-tracks are punished. With lower DG limits, off-tracks punish inconsistent drivers too harshly while they try to improve. Plus, it would be great if contacts were better weighted in terms of collision strength. 0x's are good, but between 0x and 4x could be more nuanced, even without assigning blame.

#5 - I agree they're too lenient in providing bans, but there also needs to be a forgiving period for past infractions, otherwise after a few years one would inevitably stack up enough minor offences to get a year or permaban.
#4 - Sure but I also think that off-tracks on roads shouldn't be a thing, unless if they're used for gaining time. ACC has a much better system in that regards. If you go beyond the track limits your time is deleted, but you shouldn't get black flagged just because you are clumsy and missing corners.

It might be stupid to ask this, but have you watched Days of thunder?

i got banned from LFM for calling someone a cunt who was an intentional wrecker... I am fine on iRacing.. just lfm is the problem for me.

One thing I would like to see that sort of tallys with your first suggestion would be SR / licence punishments, I don't necessarily want to see people banned for just being bad / over aggressive. But if someone gets multiple reports for non intentional wrecking in say c licence races in a season they are put back to a D licence. Which would hopefully encourage them to be more safe when they get back to c races. Would include demotion to rookie in this as well.

13x as DQ is fine in ovals. I never understood how you can ramp up so many Xs in these races anyway. But for road that doesnt really work with the offtracks.

I like your ideas. I'm a road racer, but the same issues occur there. In particular the use of AI to determine 100% fault incidents is something I have advocated for the last 12 months or so. AI has come a long way in the last 12 months and is still accelerating. Utilising AI to determine fault should be straightforward to do. iRacing must have a ton of data to commence training the system. Maybe they already are. All the hours devoted to reviewing protests would be better spent on AI training. Incidently, when I have raised this in the forums I have been shouted down. Mainly because people want to focus on the edge cases. What if this happens? What if that happens? Completely forgetting about the 95% of cases where it's a "no brainer". I would much rather get a 4x as an innocent bystander and the perpetrator get away with it occasionally than get a 4x all the time. I look forward to the day when unsafe rejoins, not holding the brakes and intentional wrecking is not the norm.

Iracing stewarding can take off the kid gloves and start actually suspending people.

I think your rules are way to harsh it's a virtual racing game of course not everyone gonna be a good racer

I'd like to see irating per car. You.can be good in a car, but be afraid to try something new at the cost of ir.

I like it!

Some great ideas in here! iRacing certainly need to do something, because racecraft is in the dumpster right now

I ran my first Ferrari fixed series race yesterday and assumed it was just a fluke at how many people wrecked and just went WAY over the limit, then I ran another, and another - holy sweet mother of Jesus - I know my iRating is low right now but I can’t believe how many people just had absolutely 0 practice and understanding with the car

Lowering the incident limits seems like a necessary. Yes - some innocents will be caught in the crossfire, but it’s nothing that a halfway decent driver can’t fix, and it will filter out the, for lack of a better word, garbage.

Nice Haircut

I think that they really need to find a way to figure out who is at fault for a wreck because I got demoted because I couldn’t find a way to avoid wrecks. Would sit in the back of the pack then can’t get away from an incident and get 4x or 8x.

Top split is so full of egos, its awful

I don't particularly care for all the unneeded, colorful "chatter". I have the Mute Driver at my disposal to shut those guys up.

It's the times I'm driving a super clean race, get gathered up in an incident that I wasn't apart of to begin with, wind up to damaged to be competitive.

Finish way at the back of the pack and LOSE -50 to -80 iRating.
That's what ruins my iRacing Experience.

I'm primarily a road racer but when I race ovals, I race super speedways and it is definitely a lot harder to gain SR on supers. I do agree with the different rules for short vs supers but there just needs to be totally different rules for road as well, mainly the off track/ slow down penalties. But that is a whole other issue :)

My other worry is that if you go too far the participation might drop off.

I have a serious question / Idea but no connections or know how to make anything with it. I will put it hear with hopes to change the world.... Or at least Iracing. I seriously believe machine learning /AI could help with so many things in iRacing. Imagine a spotter that has analyzed the data of every driver from every session and computed when a car is there, what they will likely do from that position, or where crashes will end up.

I think that there should be a vote to kick system. You can nominate a dirty driver or troll for a specific reason and if 3/4 votes to kick them then they are DQ'd. If there are issues with targeting or wrongful kicks let there be an appeal process. But the best policing should be with the people in the lobby, as the race is happening.

A system where if your safety rating decreases then you start getting slower cars. In any real life racing if you crashed a bunch of cars your team would struggle to keep up... So make like a 50hp range and if you have a lower safety rating you get a lower hp car based on that ratio.

I think your suggestions of the major and minor offenses is good. I think their should be some sort of way that people can redeem themselves after clean racing for X amount of races, they would then get 1 minor offense taken off their record. Kinda like how formula 1 does with their license penalties.

I think these ideas are interesting, but you completely disregard road racing. These things could have a huge impact for those of us who run road primarily and some seem negative to that genre.

Have you seen the way they race in real life? Denny Hamlin can wall a guy, get a win and no penalty. You want players on a video game to be held to a higher standard than the real thing? Personally I like a little rough racing, it would be boring without. I also think retaliation should be allowed. If someone dumps you, you should have every right to o pay them back

WOW I thought the DQ limit was way lower than 25 in a short NASCAR truck race. I have been having pretty clean races lately

Harsh penalty system might work for high level racing, but there has to be leniency for low license levels simply because people have to be able to learn somewhere. Inexperience leads to a lot of offenses (of the unintentional kind) and if you ban people at that stage, they'll never get better.

Instead if irating splits it should be safety rating splits

An issue I encounter is the mixing of different kinds of categories: coming from a NASCAR series and racing against Open Wheel series folks - and vice versa. They’re two completely styles of racing. There’s no rubbing or bump drafting in open wheel, at all. They need to have separate license “categories “ for specific series.

These are really good suggestions. I wish we could determine who is at fault in a wreck but thats so hard to program i imagine.

I think with the incident limit should also be based off your saftey rating, higher saftey rating allows for a higher limit. I know some people would abuse it by going clean for a few races gain SR then intentionally wreck people once given the leeway but to combat this I would propose a weekly change to the limit rather than race on race so you have to be clean for an entire week rather than a few races and also allows any grudges of being wrecked before to wear off.

#4. I want car contact to be more x's, like, we're familiar with the 17x limit (which works fairly fine for road, maybe should be lower for oval) but egregious car contact needs to be more costly, and discouraged :/.

I’ve wondered before if there should be repair times. Like if you get wrecked out of a race it takes 4-6 hours to fix that car. Keeping that unsafe driver out of the race. Yes it would hurt legit crash victims but that’s just racing.

Also, I find it almost comical that I can be driving down the straightaway and get rear ended and lose safety rating. What about being rear ended or doored at no fault of my own makes ME just as unsafe as the perpetrator? Hard to fix but something needs to be done about not at fault 4x’s

I think not only Iracing should do changes but also other games. If your trying to just have a good race and some idiot F it up, it's not fun at all.
Onesly they should be more stricter about these things.

I see guys on Facebook pages taking suspensions and gloating about them. Which proves that iRacing does need to be more harsher.

Cars are have to much aero. Racing is too tight and on throttle time is high. Increase the hp and lower the suction or drafting. Bring back braking in corners

Iracing needs to be transparent with their protest and results. I also believe this create more actionable protest vs false. They They should explain why the action was taken.

Love the AI 100% determination. I think sensing WHERE the contact is on a car (much like a police officer arriving and determining fault after a wreck on public roads) would be a huge improvement. Taking a 1x on rear bumper, 2x on rear 3rd, and 4x everywhere else for example, would limit the punishment on the driver in front who can't control the brake lock, overdrive, or intentional dump from behind. Mix that in with your proposed SR multiplier and that intentional dump/dive bomb starts to go away in iRating fixators who don't have anything to gain from plowing through the driver in front.

If you car gets totalled, have that car sidelined until it's repaired. For oval series this means if your Chevy gets totalled. It goes on a disabled clock. You can race you Ford or Toyota and so forth. This would help with realism since that is the number 1 difference from real life. In real life you race to protect your car for more then that one race

Simracers are obsessed with clean racing, while it’s a regular thing in real racing to have lots of incidents.

A lot of what you said may work okay on the oval/dirt oval side, but for road you cannot do that. Lower incident limits, harsher punishments etc would disproportionately punish less skilled drivers, as opposed to top slit, where a lower incident limit might not matter too much.
Adding to that, DQing rookies or "bad drivers" as a whole 1/5th into the race won't help them learn to race, understand how tyrewear affects the car late into a stint, how to stay in a rhythm and drive on the limit, but within theirs.
Another issue I see is, with what I mostly do, which is multiclass, incidents just happen, it's very rare to get through 25 cars of traffic a few times over an hour with nothing happening at all, unless you're in top split with the most skilled of folks. I've very often been in a split with relatively high iR top class drivers but a bottom of the barrel GT field, that makes it much harder for everybody, and the opposite being true, too.
Another thing I've come across too often to count is lapped cars of the class I'm in fighting to stay ahead despite a big pace differential and a few laps behind, and then crashing or spinning right in my face, giving me a 4x and an offtrack or sth like that without me having a chance to miss that. Sometimes even wrecking the top 3 cars in the process. I cannot think of a good way to rectify that situation without inevitably punishing clean and safe drivers. Maybe, at least for road, you could introduce different incident limits depending on SR and tier. For example, a d1.40 will be out of the race after 9x, whereas the cleaner A and B drivers have an extra 9x to play with to balance out the potential for dirty or crashy drivers involving them in their own idiocy, but also adding the risk to rack up more incidents and a bigger SR loss if they can't keep it together.
either way, in the end idiots will always exist and be idiots, no matter how many you suspend or ban, and as racing is, pileups and crashes where no one is fully at fault but the situation ruins half the field's races will also exist. That's just how racing is.
It's easy to want to have everybody who wrecks you get banned, but not only is it unfair to a majority of them IMO. And having an AI determine fault and revoke incident points will never work and just cause much more issues and arguments. Frankly, I think it's very good the way it is at the moment, and unless you want to introduce different systems for each category, I can't see much improvement being made.
Other than harsher penalties for those very obviously and intentionally wrecking others.
Sorry for that WOT but maybe there's something of worth in there

i think race splits should be rated on safety rating instead of irating in my opinion it would be better races and cleaner long run races...

I’ve recently managed to lower my average incidents for 2023 from over 5.9 to below 3.9.

NIS Fixed sucks. People don’t know how to not wreck and if you aren’t running top 10 in the last 40 laps, you might as well park it to save yourself the pain later.

That’s exactly what needs to be done is to have a system that assigns blame for more some or most incidents. Even if they develop a system that gets it right 8/10 times or something, that’s still so much better than always having an innocent person get hit with a 4x they don’t deserve.

I’m a fan of the idea IRacing makes everything free and making people for there car repairs

Iracing needs to hire dj

I'm giving up on iRacing. C Class Ovals is absolutely classless since nobody wants to race clean, & the incident system and stewards are a joke. I'm already acknowledging that I will never get out of C Class due to reckless, bonehead, dirty drivers in bottom split. The stewards just don't care when you protest. They'll always say "tHiS WaS NoT DoNe WiTh MaLiCe". I'm so done.