iRacing Development Update: May 2026 – iRacing.com

Hello iRacing,

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.

New Cars

BMW M2 Racing

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.

The new car is visually transformed, both inside and out, and just wait until you see the all-new cockpit-spanning multi-display dash setup—that one pushed our art and vehicle dynamics teams to new limits. We’re also thrilled to let you know that, much like the BMW M2 CS Racing, the BMW M2 Racing will be included for free in our base content.

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.

Euro NASCAR RC01

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.

New Formula Vees

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.

BMW M Hybrid V8 Evo

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.

Additional Vehicle Updates

• The Dallara IR18 is getting a similar modernization update, with ramp flaps and an Indy 500 body wicker added to its aero options. We are continuing to monitor real-world changes as the IndyCar season progresses.
• Now, a bit of a fun update – the Porsche 992.2 is getting the classic “X” tape added to its headlight lenses. It’s a throwback to the era when endurance racing headlights were made of real glass rather than modern shatter-resistant plastics. It serves as a nostalgic homage, and it looks sharp on the grid. Painters, this will be fully customizable in the template.
• Finally, as part of our continuous effort to upgrade our fleet with our latest simulation tools, tires, and enhancements, we have applied a comprehensive, ground-up physics refresh to the SK and Tour Modifieds. This update was long overdue, and it’s exciting to return to these foundational open-wheel short track machines. Modifieds offer tremendous racing, and we encourage you all to give them a spin.

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…

New Tracks and Track Upgrades

WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca

WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca has been completely rescanned and rebuilt from the ground up! iRacing and Laguna Seca share a deep history—in fact, this world-class road racing circuit was available the very day we opened our doors to the public, back in 2008. For gamers and sim racers alike, Laguna Seca is synonymous with digital motorsport, with millions of us turning laps over the decades. For real-world racing fans, the track is legendary for its old-school flow, iconic Corkscrew, and historic motorsport moments. While we have updated the circuit’s artwork over the years, this marks the very first physical scan update to the track surface itself, allowing us to apply our latest photogrammetry processes to capture its incredibly unique scenery and surroundings.

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 (Naval Base Coronado)

Speaking of completely new track experiences, it was about a year ago that NASCAR dropped the surprise announcement that it would be adding an all-new street venue to the 2026 schedule: a race utilizing the infrastructure at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. Since that announcement, iRacing and NASCAR have collaborated to design, prototype, test, and iterate the track layout in preparation for the real-world grid next month. In true only-possible-in-iRacing fashion, we are beating the real-world green flag by a week. You can experience the venue (officially named Qualcomm Circuit) the day the Season 3 build drops.

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.

Additional Track Updates

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

• Motorsport Arena Oschersleben & Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours: Both tracks now feature proper physical 3D curbs, and Oschersleben has received an upgraded tree pass.
• Oran Park Raceway: This historic track has received a comprehensive, ground-up visual artwork upgrade. This preserves a circuit that has sadly been lost in the real world due to land development, keeping it alive forever on our platform.
• Chicagoland Speedway: With Chicagoland returning to the real-world racing calendar, we used the opportunity to apply a thorough visual “NASCAR Refresh” pass to bring this fantastic intermediate oval up to our latest modern standards.

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.

Simulation Systems, and Physics Updates

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…

Dirt AI & AI Heat Racing

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.

This finally changes in Season 3 – Dirt AI is here! Starting with the Dirt Oval racing category, prepare to go door to door on a sliding dynamic surface in an all new way. It’s hard to express the challenges we had to overcome to get this update to you all. In fact, we’re not done improving it, as with all things in iRacing. But we’ve reached a point where the feature is just a blast, and we can’t keep holding onto it forever.

We’re starting things off with a bit of a metered release, to let us push these systems to the limit on a bigger stage. To begin, AI support will be added to the Dirt Legends Ford ‘34 Coupe and Dirt Street Stock, as well as a healthy list of tracks. If you’re familiar with AI development in iRacing, this will be familiar to you – we will be adding support for new cars and new tracks on an ongoing basis over the next seasons, to ultimately arrive at full product support. Until then, we’re excited for you to enjoy this early release.

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) & Aerodynamics

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…

Sim UI 

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.

Let’s dive into what’s in store…

Live Dynamic Track Maps

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. 

• Track Map: A traditional, top-down view of the circuit layout.  Opponents are displayed in a “marching ants” fashion, and you can see their locations around the track in a direct way.
• Radial Map: A time-normalized and concentrated look at gaps and relative spacing around the track, presented in a radial fashion.  
• Linear Map: A streamlined, horizontal progression bar tracking the entire field.  Also time-normalized, like the radial presentation.

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.  

We are well aware that running external overlays or cranking up the number of received cars to maximum can sometimes create tricky performance bottlenecks for players. To solve this natively, our engineering team developed an entirely new type of network packet. This packet compresses and transmits positioning data for every single car in the session in a highly optimized, lightweight way.

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.

Fuel Calculator

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.

Control Profiles

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.

Additional UI Features

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:

• Wet/Dry tire indication:  Currently, while we do show the tire compound an opponent is using in the UI, we don’t show whether they are  using wet or dry tires in our UI.  This has been addressed and the information is now available.  
• Drag to resize.  Freely change the size of UI widgets by grabbing and dragging its corner.  This is super easy to do, intuitive, and adds a nice additional level of customization.  Initially, this will be available with the track maps and chat.  Later, we plan to expand support to elements such as the mirror and other widgets.
• Incident tracker:  This new optional widget helps you keep track of your incidents and the limit for that type of racing.

Race Control & Pit Road Changes

Pit Speed Enforcement

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.

Our best recommendation is to get into your gear early, hold full throttle steadily on pit road, and let the system do its job.

Multi-Class Starts & Per-Class Pace Cars

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 are rolling out the use of Anycast

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

In summary, Anycast provides 

• Smarter and faster routing
• Reduced latency
• Improved stability

Long-Term Development

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…

Career Mode

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.

New Graphics Engine – Spark

Our new graphics engine—codenamed Spark—continues to advance at an impressive pace. In fact, the initial architecture of the Phase 1 feature set is nearing completion. While we still have a road ahead of us, the advancements to both simulator performance and visual realism are transformational. We are currently planning the rollout phase to ensure iRacers have ample opportunity to experience the new engine before we execute a global cutover in a future release.

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.

Physics Projects & Multi-Threading Roadmap

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.  

• The existing physics update has been sliced and optimized, allowing for quicker processing across more CPU threads, spreading the work out and finishing the work more quickly.
• Alongside that, the end of the physics tick has been made to be safe to run multi-threaded, so if you have many other AI or remotes, there is an overall improvement of performance of the physics.
• While you might not see a measurable improvement with a single car, the exciting news is that with a full field, CPU usage drops by half or more across a wide range of hardware! 

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.

Oval Refresh – Continued

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.

Series-specific Sporting Regulations

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.

• Real-World Authenticity: For example, pit stop procedures—like whether your crew can change tires and add fuel simultaneously, or if they must handle one before the other—will now dynamically adjust to match the specific series rules.
• Car Systems: Some series allow systems such as TC or ABS, whereas others don’t. This feature will allow us to specify this difference.
• Next Steps: We are working through the details now, including extensive testing.

Audio Evolution

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:

• Track Reverb (debuting in Season 4)
• Reverb Zones (planned for Season 4)
• Cabin Reverb
• Impulse Responses

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.

Misc Updates

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…

• As I shared earlier in this update, we were excited to return to the SK and Tour Modifieds.  We have a similar oval-focused car update project in the works for next time that will potentially surprise, and certainly delight a few of our most hard core racing fans.
• It’s not often that we update our driver.  Next season we’ll have a long-overdue upgrade to the driver’s gear.  More info soon…
• It’s been a number of years since we visited the streets of Le Mans, France.  We’re excited to announce that we are making a return, with the addition of Circuit Bugatti, which is now in pre production.  We actually planned to build the circuit many, many years ago, but were thwarted during our scan visit by the presence of hundreds of cars, haulers, and trucks using the circuit as parking for the 24h race.  For those unfamiliar, Circuit Bugatti overlaps with (and in fact shares about ⅓ of its total length) with the race-track-portion of the 24h course.
• In addition to the recent scan of Laguna Seca, our teams have recently completed full rescans of Mid-Ohio, Road America, and Milwaukee.  Production is already underway.
• We’re scanning Circuit Paul Ricard next month, and our texture artists already have 20,000 gallons of high-friction digital paint on order and ready to go.
• Winchester development is moving forward nicely, with a fully drivable track surface.  Expect a release late in the year.
• Thanks to our localization team’s hard work, Simplified Chinese support will be added to the launcher UI in the S3 build.
• We will be expanding our dirt road configuration offering, with the addition of a new dirt road configuration of Charlotte. This configuration does not have a joker.
• The virtual mirror is now freely resizable by dragging the corner. Next level stuff!

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.

See you at the finish line,
-Greg