Optimizing your preparation for iRacing official races.

Consistently racing official races on a simulator without seeing any considerable improvement to your rating/license is very frustrating. Even by putting more hours into more races, crashes, bad qualifying, and a poor race pace cause your rating to stay stagnant.

The solution

The solution is to practice a specific car and track combo ahead of time to avoid having negative factors impacting your race. 

If you practice a combo for 3 weeks instead of racing 3 different tracks on those 3 weeks, you have 3 weeks worth more practice for this combo without putting in more hours per week.

You cannot meet your optimal pace the moment you get in a car: give yourself targets. For example, if you are doing 1:28.9 and your target is 1:27.5, you have 2 objectives:

1. Repeating 1:28.9 comfortably,
2. Getting lap times lower than 1:28.9 towards 1:27.5. 

The important thing to accept to avoid stagnating: both objectives take time, and you need patience. If let’s say you spend 3 weeks practicing a combo, although you will not race before 3 weeks time, you will be 3 times as prepared.

Here's an example

I have spent about a month preparing for a Road Atlanta week in September 2022 with the Mercedes GT3, here are the results:

Figure 1: Road Atlanta results with 4 weeks of practice.

However, in June 2022, I ran Long Beach in GT3 without much practice, and here are the results:

Figure 2: Long Beach results with 2 days of practice.

I do not believe I have gained a secret natural pace in a month. The reason why I was able to pull those results is because I allowed myself to learn without rushing to good results. I paid more attention to details, and I stressed less or got less frustrated during the races because I was more confident about my pace. I was the same driver during those 4 months. I simply practiced in advance for the Road Atlanta week.

Practice with the right conditions

Moreover, iRacing will simulate for you the conditions of that week if you go into the Series Schedule and press Test Drive for the week you plan to race:

For more information, you can check out our iRacing Ultimate Guide.

Figure 3: Test Drive Feature in iRacing.

Practice plan

Practicing ahead of time allows you to dissect your practice. For example, the first week of a good practice schedule would have race pace by doing full tank runs, and only looking for consistency.

Then, the second week would have a refining of sectors you feel are your worst on track. You would do about 3-5 hot tire laps runs and analyze your lines on replay. We recommend using YouTube onboards of the same car or the same class to observe fast lines around a track and compare them to your lines.

Finally, week 3 would be solely focused on qualifying. On that week, you are only doing one lap run. Since you already have 2 weeks' worth of laps, it will be much easier to fine-tune your driving and push for 1 lap pace because of the muscle memory you already have installed, instead of lacking 2 weeks' worth of laps and being stressed that you need your 1:27.5 in 3 days while you are doing 1:28.9. 

Written by Racim Fezoui | Co-Founder & Coach