NEW TO SIM RACING? - My 10 Tips for iRacing Beginners

[Music] hey guys will here so there's been a massive surge in new signups in iRacing over the last couple of weeks as real-life motorsport sort of transitions across to the simulator world obviously it's attracting a lot of attention and a lot of new faces are coming in so if you're brand new to the sim racing scene welcome we're very glad to have you and if you are new to I racing in particular then you should find this video very useful so we're going to be covering my top 10 tips for people who are brand new to eye racing to not only help save you a bit of money but also help you maximize your enjoyment and hopefully minimize your frustration as well so we'll jump straight in now these aren't in any particular order in terms of importance I've sort of tried to just organize them so that they sort of lead and make sense into each other as we go through so let's just jump straight in here my first suggestion is start off with the base content while you're familiarizing yourself don't go all in it immediately and buy all the cars and tracks that you think you might want to use that can get extremely expensive very quickly obviously cars and tracks are quite expensive to purchase in iRacing and it's not like other sins it's not arranged like other sims up and it shouldn't really be used in the same way as other sims are either so most sims what happens is you know you buy it you buy the game you're presented with a whole bunch of tracks and cars and you kind of chop and change and you experience different things and you know different people will sort of gravitate towards different types of cars and different types of tracks we'd in the simulator itself but you have access to everything obviously besides DLC but AI Racing's a little bit different it's sort of organized around seasons and different classes of cars and there's actually plenty of base content there to sort of get you familiar with the game and sort of decide whether it's something that you want to invest in further as you go along without needing to sort of fork out and spend a fortune right from the onset so I definitely recommend you know familiarize yourself with the title first sort of figure out what you want to do and what you're actually planning on getting out of it before you go and just fork out on a whole bunch of content so that's tip number one now that leads pretty cleanly in to tip number two which is my suggestion is try to focus on one car and one series to begin with as well I find for me at least it's a lot more rewarding to become really fast and really can one particular car within a particular season rather than sort of chopping and changing all over the place all the time driving lots of different cars I find I tend to get really frustrated when I'm driving lots of different cars all the time and sort of having to reset my muscle memory between them and yeah I just find I enjoy the game a lot more when I'm focusing on one season and getting really good at that and you would see if you went back and watched some of my previous race videos back when I was doing the mx-5 and a Skip Barber seasons in particular I was really getting competitive in those and really enjoying them and more recently I've sort of been chopping and changing and trying different things a lot more and I've actually been finding eye racing a lot more frustrating since I started doing that so on that point I racing kind of works a little bit differently to a lot of other Sims in how the online participation is arranged so you have 12 week seasons with a different track each week and you can partake in as many races as you want during that week and the way it works is pretty simple if you do four or less races in one week at a particular track then it'll take the results from your best race out of the four if you do five to eight races and it'll take the average of your best two and so forth so if you do nine to twelve it'll take your best three and so forth so that's really good because it keeps a pretty even playing field between those who only have time to do one race a week as opposed to people that are just able to go over and over and over again until they win a race so that works really well now it's also split up into different splits based on the strength of field so every driver has an AI rating and a safety rating and your AI rating is what determines the strength of field so say you signed up for a race that had a hundred cars participating and each field had a maximum limit of 25 cars so that would mean that you would have four splits so each one of those splits would end up with people that had roughly around the same rating as you have besides you can imagine that keep so much more even playing field within each individual split and makes for much more competitive racing so when you start getting up into the top splits that's when you get in the really high quality of driving you find there's less accidents less craziness off the start and then to turn one and that's where I find eye racing is most rewarding so yeah I find that I have a lot more fun when I focus on one particular car maybe two or three if you've got a lot more time but don't just want to be changing and chopping all over the place all the time make sure you're focusing on one get good at it and you'll find that you have a lot more fun and spend a lot less money as well and that also comes into play how much money you'll find yourself spending on tracks as well obviously if you're participating in one season you only need to buy the tracks for that season and not every single track that's available so you'll save yourself a lot of money there as well so point number three take the time to get your force feedback and your field of view dialed in correctly this is going to make a massive amount of difference to your overall performance it's definitely worth taking the time to get this right and there's a bunch of different guides that are available I've done a couple as well as a few others that I'll link in the description below for you as well so point number four I strongly suggest that you guys use the offline practice mode while you're familiarizing yourself with a particular car or track you don't want to be jumping into online practice sessions and ruining it for other people now you might be thinking well you know safety rating and I rating aren't affected by practice sessions so it doesn't really matter but if you've got a full practice session there can be a lot of cars driving around and because with iRacing the way it is now with tire warming and all that sort of thing what happens is you know somebody might be doing hot lap after hot lap after hot lap trying to set their muscle memory and really sort of trying to dial things in might be sort of analyzing their telemetry data or something like that and if you end up ruining a lap for them that can be you know ten fifteen minutes for them to go reset and then you know get their tires warmed up again and it can be really really frustrating and it doesn't really benefit you in any way either there's no benefit to practicing you know online versus offline when you're first getting familiar with the current track it's only when you're sort of wanting to compare your times with other people that really becomes beneficial so yes spend the time get familiar offline before you jump online and particularly while you're learning the ins and outs of the game as well how different various settings work and stuff like that there's really no benefit to doing that online so stay offline in the beginning get familiar and then start participating online once you kind of have your head around everything now one of the questions that comes up most often is how can you get out of rookie classes really quickly and efficiently so my tip here is again familiarize yourself with the car and track before you start participating online that way you're not going to be crashing off and making mistakes or at least it'll be limited and your safety rating and I rating won't be impacted by your own mistakes so much but you know inevitably there are going to be accidents you are gonna get hit by other people and it can be extremely frustrating so my suggestion for getting out of rookie class as fast as possible he's either start from the pitlane you can do this by either not clicking on the start race button at the end of the qualifying session or jumping onto the grid and then exiting back out into pits and if you do that that means that all the other cars don't have to wait the full two minutes for you to timeout so that can be a good way of doing it as well so start from the pit lane and just basically try to stay out of trouble it doesn't matter if you're not winning races just stay completely out of everybody's way that'll give your safety rating a massive boost now will cost you a little bit in terms of I rating because obviously you're not going to be sort of pushing things at the front of the field and earning those points but yet to begin with to get out of rookie classes just focus on your safety rating try to get as many points as you possibly can per race in terms of your safety rating and you'll find it probably taking you about four to six hours to get out of rookie class that's how long it took me now you can also get out of rookie class by participating in time trials as well I can be a little bit more boring though so it's really up to you guys but yeah I would definitely suggest don't try to race other cars while you're in rookie class just sort of drive around the track get familiar try to get as few incident points as you possibly can and you'll be out of the rookie classes in no time so part of this as well is understanding how the mandatory participation races or the mpi races sort of count towards your license points as well so you'll see on some races that you participate in on the on the landing screen you've got a little red bar that says MPI that means that it doesn't count towards your mandatory participation for the license class that you're in so it means by participating that in that race you can boost your safety rating in your AI rating but it's not going to boost you into the next license class now if you click on your account settings you can actually see a little window that tells you exactly what you need to participate in and you'll find that when you're on a race that is counting towards your empire it'll be green and that's how you know that the race that you're participating isn't going to count towards your MP R and help you boost in to the next class so generally speaking license advancements take place at the end of each season or if you have a safety rating of over four for the particular license class that you're in so if you're over four it'll jump up immediately as long as you've met that MPI if you're under four then it jumps up at the end of the season so on to tip number six treat every single online session as if it were real life so you know in real life obviously if you have card damage whether it's your fault or not it is going to cost you money and it Klee the same in iRacing so if you end up with card damaged in a qualifying session or you drive off the track or something like that it is gonna cost you in terms your eye rating and safety rating and that can be really frustrating not only for you but for other drivers as well if you're hitting other people and causing accidents it just creates chaos for everybody that creates a bad time and it's really not what I racing is all about now that also goes for after the race as well what a lot of people don't realize is that incident points still accumulate after you've passed the finish line so what I generally recommend is drive around the track and park up in the pits that way the the risk of somebody hitting you or doing something stupid after the races and minimize from my understanding the incident points are still counted right up until the last car crosses the finish line so just keep that in mind as well so point number seven this is more around etiquette rather than something that's specific to eye racing itself but that said because of the way I racing is structured around I rating and safety rating it can be particularly frustrating in iRacing when people don't do this so in the unfortunate event that you do have a spin or an accident with another car and you find yourself stranded in the middle of a circuit please for the love of God just stay still while there's other cars coming past you when there's other cars coming past you they can see where you are and as long as you're not moving they've got a good chance of being able to get past you without having an accident if you decide to try and drive across the track to get out of people's way the chances are you're going to make things a lot worse this happened to me in a race just the other day I had a car that was stranded in the middle of the circuit blocking most of the track but I had a pathway that I could get past him and what happened is as soon as I was coming along he just drove straight in front of me I ended up t-boning him took me out of the race took him out of the race and we both ended up losing a whole lot of I rating and safety rating as a result just stay still until the track is clear and then you can move off and proceed back into the race so that leads us quite cleanly into point number eight which is it's not worth ruining your race over track position particularly when it comes to blue flags now the rules in iRacing are pretty clear if there's a blue flag if you're shown a blue flag it's up to the person who passing you to make that move cleanly but that doesn't mean that you have to make it difficult for them and there's so many times where you know I've been leading a race and I've come up behind some back markers which are obviously a lot slower than the guys that are leading the race and you know they end up trying to be a hero and they end up ruining both of their race and your race but it also counts for racing for track position as well if you've got somebody behind you that is obviously faster than you and is obviously gonna get past you at some point no I you know I'm not saying don't be aggressive and don't battle with them but you have to sort of consider whether it's worth holding them up when they when they're inevitably gonna get past you most likely anyway you know are they gonna take a dive on you are they going to end up causing an accident which is going to take you out of the race and affect both your I rating and your safety rating you know is that track position worth the risk of having an accident and ending up ruining yours and the other person's race so for me personally what I tend to do is if somebody behind me is obviously a lot faster than me and inevitably gonna get past me I generally make it pretty easy for them to get past or it doesn't let them pass I'd rather come second or third or fifth or sixth and then dead last from having an accident so just keep that in mind again I'm not saying that you shouldn't be battling and you shouldn't be you know driving aggressively but just you know again treat it like real life you know it's not worth having an accident over you know losing one position so just you know be sensible when it comes to that as well tip number nine install a little software package called crew chief now this is free software and it's absolutely amazing it works as a spotter and what it does is it tells you when there's another car alongside you it tells you critical information about what's going on the track now there is a spot up built into our racing but frankly crew chief is a lot better than it is it also has things like voice activation as well so you can set up your pit strategies by issuing voice commands and it's just a really awesome piece of software not only does it add to the immersion while driving but it also gives you a much better awareness of what's going around you on track as well so definitely check that out there's a link in the description below for you and finally tip number ten another software package that I would definitely recommend you installing his VRS now VRS is a subscription-based service and allows you to get tips from real-life drivers they can analyze your telemetry data but basically what it does is it records telemetry data and allows you to then analyze that both against other drivers as well as against your own lap times and I find it to be extremely value in trying to shave you know those last few seconds and tenths and hundredths off your lap times you can have a look at the data compared to different Lapps find out where your consistently you're not consistent find out where you you know perhaps breaking too early breaking too late and although it is a subscription-based service there is a lot of built in free content which is also extremely valuable so I definitely would recommend checking that out as well a really valuable resource particularly in the early stages when you're familiarizing with a particular car or a track it can really bring down the amount of time it takes you to get nice and competitive so that's it for my top 10 tips for new I races I'm sure that a lot of you guys watching this video will have some other tips as well and I'd really appreciate your contribution in the comments below as well obviously everybody's gonna have different ideas of what's important and as always with the videos on this channel I try to keep it as much of a community effort as I possibly can now if you're looking for more tips you can check out our discord community as well got over 1300 members there now and a lot of us are pretty keen eye races that have a lot of wealth of knowledge to share there as well so definitely check that out and if you are looking at signing up for iRacing for the first time I do have a link in the description below for you as well by using that link a small amount of iRacing credit comes back to me to help with buying cars and tracks I can produce more content for you guys as well so I really appreciate that but above all I just appreciate you guys watching and enjoying these videos so if you have enjoyed it make sure you leave a thumbs up make sure you subscribed and hit the notification ville too so you don't miss future videos we are working on our beginners guide to sim racing in a more general sense at the moment as well and the next video in that series is going to be looking at wheel bases and wheels more specifically so that is definitely something to stick around for but yeah guys that's it for today so thank you very much for watching and I'll see you again soon bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 213,594

Keywords: iracing, sim racing, beginners iracing guide, how to get out of rookies, iracing licence, iracing guide, how to start iracing, racing sim, driing simulator, sim racing cockpit, simracing rig, racing sim cockpit, racing sim rig, boosted media, guide, iracing success

Id: 3QA43CXc3oc

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Rex72727]

Thanks for putting in the work on this!!

[u/theekevinbacon]

Notification SQUAD

[u/mclaren34]

I hope to buy that exact same wheel later this year.

Thanks for posting a review about it.