Racing has changed a lot with the times. Today, sim racing is a big part of all forms of motorsports around the globe. Several drivers practice their craft in the virtual sphere before going out on track and getting it done in real life. Some drivers even start their career in motorsports thanks to sim racing.
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Gone are the days when these were just looked at as video games and one product that deserves a lot of the credit is iRacing. Recently, Xfinity Series driver Parker Kligerman explained its benefits on the Awful Announcing podcast.
Back when it was not a big deal if you’d have gone to a motorsports athlete and said that you were a sim racer, they might not have taken you seriously. After all, it is a video game at the end of the day. With the advancement of technology, iRacing has been able to almost perfectly simulate the conditions of a race regardless of the discipline. What shot it into popularity was the pandemic in which even the best drivers in the world raced on it on a competitive level. There has been no turning back since.
“Tracks are incredible. The physics of the race cars ebb and flow, racing is such a dynamic thing, especially race cars that are constantly changing. We can barely keep up in real life with what our cars are doing so iRacing has a massive task ahead of them to make it exactly realistic but I would say 98% of the time it is a very realistic representation of what we ge through.” he said.
It’s not just NASCAR that iRacing simulates perfectly. Other disciplines like Formula One and Maza MX-5 Cup are also accurately represented on the platform. IndyCar has also been recently added to the platform and the IndyCar ButtKicker iRacing Pro Series is set to debut in September this month.
Hendrick Motorsports has an iRacing driver turned NASCAR star
Virtual racing has given birth to some of the best talent in American motorsports today. It’s still somewhat unreal to think that a sim racer can make it in real life but that’s exactly what has happened. The biggest example of this is the 2024 Daytona 500 winner William Byron. He has been one of the most consistent race car drivers in the Cup Series of late but his motorsports career began in his room in front of the simulator.
“I was inspired by that and then I just started driving on there. Creating my own paint schemes, you know, working with all the tools on there and really just kind of came became a project for me to learn,” he had said earlier, speaking about how a Dale Earnhardt Jr. comment made him take up iRacing.
Today, Byron himself is an inspiration for thousands of racers on the platform who have dreams of making it big in the NASCAR Cup Series. It just proves how far the digital world affects the real world in the present.
