Signing you in

With just a couple of weeks left to go, the final pieces for our Season 3 release are rounding into form. This is always my favorite part of our quarterly build cycle—where months and sometimes years of hard work, steady development, and pure grit have finally transformed into working code, polygons, and pixels, all making their way across our testing environments, into the hands of our testers, and toward that release day green flag. While we work our way through this final tech and scrutineering phase, we’re far enough along to give you a quick preview of what to expect when the download button goes live in early June.

Before we dive into the details, just a quick shout-out to everyone who participated in this year’s epic Nurburgring 24H, both in the real world and sim world. What a grueling yet rewarding event this is, and maintaining focus and competitive fire for such a long span is truly a feat. The real event at the Green Hell was a complete sellout and hit all-time attendance records, and here in our virtual world, that level of excitement was matched every bit of the way. The iRacing Nurburgring 24H saw participation increase by a massive 47% over last year, with over 7 million total miles driven!

We have seen similar levels of engagement throughout 2026, and it’s really special for us to experience motorsport at this level with you on this amazing shared racing platform. Next up, prepare for a change of pace with a four-hour throwdown in Touring cars with the 4 Hours of Thruxton.

With that said, let’s get down to business – it’s time for that promised Season 3 preview. This build is great and should have a little bit of something for everyone. To kick things off, let’s start with new content.

The BMW M2 CS Racing debuted in iRacing a couple of years ago and quickly became one of the most popular cars on the service. The car hits that absolute sweet spot of sports car racing, offering just enough power and sophisticated ABS/traction control to make it approachable for racers ready for a step up from the MX-5 or GR86. But because of its proper front-engine, rear-wheel-drive construction, top-tier drivers can still slide it around and extract serious performance. We are happy to share that we will be following up this F87 generation of the car with the all-new G87 generation: the BMW M2 Racing.

As for placement, the new BMW M2 Racing will replace the previous-generation car in our official M2 series, with the older car living on for use with AI, Hosted, and when opportunities present themselves.

Next up, we’re happy to share that our already-announced partnership with EuroNASCAR is ready to hit the grid in our sim: the Euro NASCAR RC01 is here. This powerful yet surprisingly light and agile V8 stock car is purpose-built for road racing and engineered to excel across a variety of compelling European tracks, such as Brands Hatch, Oschersleben, Paul Ricard (#soon), and Zolder.

The car is an amazing bridge for those of us who are oval fans, road racing fans, or a bit of both. If you love the roar of a V8 stock car, close door-to-door racing, and a raw, rewarding driver’s car that puts total control back into your hands, this car is for you. We hope to see you out on the track!

Just a note of potential warning – the physics model is entirely done, but the artwork is coming in hot – there’s a slight chance we’ll have to hold this one back for the future.

And now for something completely different – since back in June of 2021, we have enjoyed the one-of-a-kind racing experience that is the Formula Vee with you all. The real-world class dates all the way back to 1963 serving as the legendary launching pad for iconic champions like Niki Lauda, Emerson Fittipaldi, and Keke Rosberg. This nimble and capable machine quickly became an absolute favorite on the service, boasting some of the best participation and most fun racing. With Season 3, we are excited to share that Formula Vee racing is about to get a bit more dynamic with the introduction of two all-new Vee cars.

Our new Vee cars will hit the same track alongside our already-free base-content Formula Vee. We did something similar to this a couple of years back with the introduction of two new Street Stock cars, and we intend to follow that same pattern. For everyone who loves the Vee exactly as it is today, you’re all good—nothing is changing for the base car. But for folks looking for a new look and a bit of variety to shake things up, both of these new Vees will be available together as a two-for-one optional purchase.

For prototype fans, our efforts to modernize the GTP fleet are expanding. As the first car of its type to hit iRacing, the BMW M Hybrid V8 pioneered this class in our sim. For Season 3, we are upgrading this machine to the current-day spec Evo package. The BMW M Hybrid V8 Evo will be an automatic, free update for all members who already own the car. You don’t need to take any action, just run your update and it will arrive in your garage.

We’ll circle back to a few more car-related topics in a bit, but right now, let’s shift gears entirely and talk tracks…

As for the mechanics of this release, the new from-scratch version of Laguna Seca will ship as its own new track variation, and will be automatically granted to all iRacers who purchased the track going back to when it was converted to paid-content late last year. Further details will be provided in a follow-up in the forums.

Qualcomm Circuit’s unique location features surfaces that transition from high-grip runway concrete to bumpy, lower-grip asphalt streets and perimeter roads, resulting in sudden handling shifts that will challenge experienced drivers, yet with enough breathing room to get some racing done. The scenery is one-of-a-kind, sending you screaming past massive airplane hangars, aircraft, and even an aircraft carrier docked in the background.

We have a handful of additional track updates coming—let’s run through what’s in store:

That covers our car and track content additions and upgrades. To cap things off, let’s touch on a few physics-system updates also in the works.

Let’s shift gears, as we have a ton more in store for the sim. New features, substantial improvements, and one project that has been a bit of a thorn in our side for years and we are THRILLED to finally share with you all. In fact, let’s start with that…

Adding Dirt Racing to iRacing was an incredibly challenging, extensive, and ultimately groundbreaking project for us. It was also incredibly rewarding, and advanced our sim forward generationally in terms of our dynamics and systems modeling. Equally challenging, rewarding, and important to us was the addition of AI racing opponents a few years later. Since the debut of these systems, we’ve made significant and expansive improvements to each on an ongoing basis, but one thing we had yet to achieve is bring the two together.

Now that covers the content side of Dirt AI, but you know what’d make this product addition even better? AI Heat Racing would. And AI Heat Racing you shall have, which will be debuting in Single Race and expanding in support in future updates.

Balance of Performance (BoP) is an incredibly challenging aspect of racing, both in the real world and in simulation. We spend a massive amount of time and energy continuously working to provide an accurate, fair, and representative racing experience across our multi-car grids. Just before the Nürburgring 24, we deployed a patch that included a powerful new underlying capability to better tune BoP. This system allows cars to stay much closer to their pure physical states, ensuring a driving experience that aligns tightly with each machine’s core physics model.

This has been a significant upgrade to the consistency and predictability of racing. While initial updates were made utilizing these tools for our GT3 and GTP fields, we have further refined these capabilities for Season 3 with targeted adjustments to aerodynamics, mass, power, and even tuned and improved some electronic systems like Traction Control and ABS.

Aero modeling is a seemingly eternal pursuit for us here at iRacing, and we invest substantially in this field, in the science, and in our modeling. With Season 3, multiple short track cars will have more impact with side drafting. As always, work continues…

The new Sim UI has been a game-changing addition since its release in Season 4 of last year. The underlying technology and framework are incredibly powerful and flexible, giving us a potent platform for continuous improvement. In fact, every single season release since its debut has introduced significant upgrades and new functionality. Season 3 continues that trend, delivering a collection of features we’ve long wanted to bring to iRacing but were previously blocked by legacy tech.

In real-world racing, drivers have access to a level of trackside tools and support that hasn’t yet been fully reflected in the sim. For instance, your crew can constantly keep you informed about situational, real-time events around the track—like what your opponents are doing, where they are racing, where the pace car is, and which areas require extra caution.

While we have many projects in the works to close this information gap, we are ready to share a massive step forward in the Season 3 build: a live, dynamically powered set of track maps. In all there are three distinct styles, each presenting data in a unique, meaningful way, and drawing direct inspiration from real-world racing tools available on the pit wall. In fact, the design team on this project has hands-on experience using similar tools in top-tier real-world motorsport, and we even have an engineer at iRacing who pioneered the use of dynamic track maps in racing decades ago.

All three modes feature a variety of ways to visualize data and to make critical things clear such as multi-class information. Later phases of the project will add additional information and context related to racing events and opponent status.

With these three modes, iRacers now have a built-in, plug-and-play solution for a feature that previously required third-party software. Crucially, because this solution is directly integrated into the sim engine, it is incredibly performant.

All that said, we know that on-screen track maps aren’t for everyone. Just like almost everything else in our new UI, these features are completely modular. If they don’t fit your cockpit setup, you have all the tools you need to toggle them off and configure your screen exactly to your preference.

Another tool we’ve long wanted to provide and are thrilled to finally deliver on: a dedicated, built-in Fuel Calculator! This tool is incredibly powerful, offering dynamic, real-time data to better inform your critical fueling and strategy decisions. It also features significant customization, allowing you to show or hide options to perfectly suit your preferences and needs.

Fuel calculator also works great in team-based scenarios. It is available both on the drive and session screen, has a toggle to change only that widget from liters to gallons, and allows players to set a fuel target as a factor in the calculation.

Switching between different input devices, steering wheels, and rims is a quality-of-life headache that many of us face. It’s a frequent chore for iRacers who swap hardware to match the specific car they are driving, especially those equipped with a full quiver of car-appropriate rims. While we are working on a host of additional quirks and improvements in the realm of per-car controls and force feedback, we are thrilled to deliver a massive step forward in this build: Control Profiles.

With Control Profiles, you will no longer need to manually rename, move, and juggle various .cfg files on your computer. Instead, we have extended our UI profile system to handle control configurations natively. At any time, you can now load, save, or delete control profiles, all through an incredibly quick and easy-to-use interface.

We have a number of additional new UI features and capabilities that also go a long way to improving quality of live and access to information. These include:

We have redesigned and rearchitected the way that pit speed is enforced in iRacing. The end result produces a more fair and predictable experience for all racers. Our goal is to have cars run as close to the maximum allowable speed as possible with stricter enforcement, removing the need to manually control speed to save time on pit road.

The car now uses a PID controller targeting the maximum allowable pit speed. Because of drivetrain physics, some high-powered cars may experience speed oscillations. This is purely visual and won’t trigger a penalty, as your average speed will remain right on target.

To ensure smooth operation, know your gear ahead of time and select it before the limiter engages. Choose a gear that keeps the engine in the middle of its RPM range, and do not shift while the limiter is active, as the system may briefly overspeed and trigger a penalty. A brief overspeed is also normal when accelerating from a dead stop, but our enforcement scheme has been adjusted to allow for this.

While I’m including this in the Season 3 section of this blog, know that it’s not a sure thing we’ll be ready… we’re so close, but not quite there yet. To cut to the chase: we’re talking about a fully implemented and comprehensive Multi-Class Start feature, featuring per-class Pace Cars. This significant new feature is part of what we call “Race Control”, which is a set of systems responsible for managing every single racing rule and procedure, and the countless scenarios and permutations of events that need to be accounted for. In short, we need to test the heck out of this before we’re ready to commit to the release.

That said, we’re pushing hard and assessing how testing goes over these final two weeks. If it seems we’re there, we’re going to debut it during a Week 13 series to further put it to the test. If we feel we’re not quite there, we’re going to hold onto it for a bit longer.

This is one of those “should-we-share-or-shouldn’t-we” situations, and I hate to set expectations incorrectly, so I hope this all makes sense and seems sensible. What’s equally exciting about this project is that it creates the technical space for us to continue with additional racing procedure improvements that have long been planned for the sim. You can probably guess what some of these might be…

To give you just a bit more detail on why this feature is a real game-changer for multi-class racing: each class will now get its own pace car. Classes are released with an appropriate delay between the groups, and each group gets its own independent green flag. This will really clean up these starts, and add a new level of real world authenticity to iRacing.

We implemented Anycast routing technology to our race servers, which automatically connects your sim client to the race server via the most optimal geographic routing path. By intelligently routing your data through the best path, many members will experience lower ping, less packet loss, and more stable connections during race sessions. Anycast routing provides enhanced protection against network disruptions like maintenance between providers, routing reconvergence, and DDoS attacks, ensuring the simulation remains online and reliable for everyone

That’ll do for our Season 3 preview. This was by no means an exhaustive list, and a lot more will be shared, as always, when the full release notes drop. But before we wrap things up completely, let’s look just a bit further down the road…

As we announced last year, we have been working hard to bring a compelling, single-player-focused Career Mode to iRacing. Significant resources have gone into this project, allowing us to build this all-new experience from the ground up with a completely clean slate. By designing outside the constraints of our existing Multiplayer system, we have created a brand-new way to enjoy iRacing. This mode offers fresh challenges, a different pace of play, and leans heavily into one of our biggest strengths—our massive content library—in ways never before possible.

Career Mode will offer a variety of grounded, real-world paths for racers to work their way from grassroots competition to the pinnacle of motorsport in their respective categories. In addition to more regionally-appropriate ladders, racers can also look forward to sim-racing-style globe-trotting experiences.

We will do a deep dive on this mode in our next update, but before we move on, we want to emphasize just how excited we are to bring this to the community. While it will be an incredible experience on Day 1, it has been engineered to be highly extendable, allowing us to seamlessly introduce additional career systems, greater depth, and new racing experiences well into the future.

To support this evolution, we recently welcomed two seasoned industry veterans to the Spark art team. One specializes in cutting-edge lighting, while the other is focused on pushing the boundaries of art quality and pipeline tools. Together with our existing team of top talent, they will help us create the most lifelike and realistic cars and tracks possible.

Look out for a Spark-focused blog update in the near future, where we will dive deep into the technical details and share a first look at what we’ve been building.

We are working harder than ever on future improvements to our core physics engine, its architecture, and all associated systems, such as steering fidelity and force feedback, multithreaded physics architecture, and physics rate. Critically we are working on our multi-year R&D project that is the next great evolution of the iRacing core tire model. Our physics team is larger than ever before and loaded with talent and energy to improve.

We have discussed these improvements with you all for some time now, and appreciate the patience you’ve had with these advancements. That said, we are thrilled to share that the first key component of our physics-modernization roadmap is currently undergoing extensive testing.

This work will pave the way in the future to increase the physics tick rate, as well as how often we read inputs and output force feedback. It is a substantial building block for our transformation to build upon.

We continue diving deeper into the complex, shifting variables of track dynamic behavior with our continued Oval Refresh work. Our latest research focuses on the interplay between track surface temperature, rubber lay-down and the creation and distribution of marbles. Specifically analyzing how particle size directly impacts on-track mechanical grip and performance.

Additionally, we’ve been investigating the environments around the vehicles themselves and how aerodynamic lift force generated by passing cars actively helps clean up the racing line. This line of thought is similar to how we have helped dry a damp track with our rain modeling. By capturing these effects, it will improve the ability to clean marbles out of would-be viable driving lanes more effectively.

To further bridge the gap between virtual and real-world motorsport, we’re working on Series-Specific Sporting Regulations.

Many vehicles in the iRacing garage pull double (or triple) duty, competing across multiple real-world racing series. Because every sanctioning body has its own unique rulebook, we are implementing a system that allows a single car to adapt its sporting regulations depending on the series it is running.

Transformative audio advancement continues to be a core focus, both in project priority and team size. We were recently fortunate enough to welcome two industry-veteran sound developers to reinforce our fantastic team. One joins us as the former lead sound designer at a highly respected, West-Coast-based racing game studio, while the other is a seasoned audio technologist who previously headed audio engineering at a prominent studio in Denmark.

On the development front, our work on Reverb took a temporary detour, as noted in our last update. We redeployed team members to focus on performance—a critical area we felt needed to be prioritized before introducing a more demanding audio system.

With those performance optimizations in place, Reverb development is officially back on track. Our focus is now split across four distinct systems:

We are incredibly excited to hear these new systems bring the simulator to life, alongside the many other audio initiatives we currently have in development and the planning pipeline.

Before we close this out, let’s go through our usual rapid-fire list of notable irons we have in the fire, in no particular order of priority…

Alright folks, that’ll be a wrap – it’s time to get back to that final fit-and-finish work and polish I mentioned earlier to get this S3 build out the door and available to you all. It’s so rewarding for us here at iRacing to be building and improving this amazing simulation and racing platform every day. We’re always pushing to do better, to simulate the real world more accurately, and to bring you improvements that get your experiences in the sim that much closer to what it’s like in the real world.

Season 3 makes big strides in that regard, and just wait for some of our longer-term projects like Spark, tire model version advancements, transformative audio enhancements, and more to arrive. We have an exciting stretch ahead of us, and one that will transform sim racing for years to come.

As always, thanks again for choosing to do your sim racing here with us at iRacing. We appreciate you all, and look forward to seeing you on the track in Season 3.