Introduction

This guide will explain the ins and outs of oval racing in iRacing, explaining all of the options available to players at certain stages, including series such as Indycar and Nascar iRacing Series. iRacing has many series, especially in oval racing, and it can be a bit daunting to new players. Hopefully at the end of this guide you will have an idea on what you want to do to progress your oval racing within iRacing.

Rookie

Every single player, even the pros have to start here, so don’t be intimidated. Many players fear of making mistakes and drive overly cautious and neglect their race for safety rating, there is no need to be overly cautious, go out there and have fun and race clean. This first stage is pretty simple, race in the iRacing street stock series and raise your safety rating to 3.0 to be promoted, to raise your safety rating you need to avoid getting incident points. Once you have reached 3.0 safety rating you will be immediately promoted to the next stage, which is D class!

D Class

This class is also relatively easy, to complete this stage you have three options, the late model, the SK Modified or the K&N Pro Impala, I would recommend the Impala as this has significantly more participation, combined with a fixed set up, making it ideal for beginners to learn faster more tricky cars. To complete this license you must race a minimum of 4 times within a D class championship, and reach 3.0 safety rating to be promoted at the end of the season or 4.0 to be immediately promoted to C license mid season.

C Class

At this stage more options start to open up, allowing you to pick which type of oval racing you’d like to focus on. The main series with participation is the Indycar Series, the C Class Series and Nascar iRacing Series (NiS).

Indycar

Firstly the Indycar Series is a fixed series that takes place in the Dallara IR18, also known as the 2018 Indycar. This is the top level of open wheel oval racing, racing at speeds of up to 230mph! This series is quite tricky to do well in and will require a decent amount of practice, this is mainly due to the draft, making solo practice pretty useless. Whilst you may jump into a practice session and think it is easy flat and not difficult at all, however, with draft the track can significantly change, forcing you to alter you line and throttle placement. All this combines to make a tricky series, where quick thinking is everything, but when you get it right you will know, and it feels great!

C Open & Fixed (Trucks)

Secondly the C Class Series, this series takes place in one of the two C Class trucks available to buy in the iRacing store, there is no difference between the trucks other than visual so pick up whichever you like. There are two variants of this series, one with open setup and longer races, another that is fixed with short sprint races, which is immensely popular within the iRacing community. The short sprint like races combined with a fixed setup making it both easy for beginners super close bumper to bumper racing make this series popular and definitely worth a try if you enjoy stock car racing and don’t have loads of time.

NiS Open & Fixed

The final option at C license is NiS, similar to the C license trucks there are two variants of this series, open and fixed. Despite only being C license NiS is what many consider the peak of stock car racing in iRacing, this series runs the official Gen 6 NASCAR stock cars, and runs the same schedule as the real life counterpart. The races are much longer, 50% of the real life counterpart and for 4 races per year full length 100% races are ran, lasting up to 4 hours in some cases. This series takes time and practice, however if you’re a NASCAR fan then this is a very enjoyable series.

Beyond C Class

There is actually less than people expect beyond C license, the peak of stock car and open wheel oval racing is in C license. Beyond C class the main series are B and A Series in the Xfinity and Gen 6 cars respectively, both having an open and a fixed variant of the series, however neither of these series get much participation, as people opt for the trucks for sprint races and NiS for races in the Gen 6 NASCAR.