Dear Community,

For almost 17 years, RaceDepartment grew to become the number 1 sim racing community on the web, an achievement we should all be very proud of. This ongoing growth also faces us with a lot of challenges. To sustain the growth and technically facilitate the website towards the future we are happy to announce the merger between RaceDepartment and OverTake that will help us overcome our challenges while providing the best possible experience for every sim racer in our new home.

When I released the first version of the forum back in 2006 I provided a solution for just myself and a good friend whom I raced with online. We both agreed we had a lot of knowledge to share between ourselves and we absolutely needed a small place on the internet to accommodate this desire to share. We actively started posting the first few topics on our boards and our community grew from two members to four, from four to eight, eight eventually became sixteen and here we are almost seventeen years later with more than three million registered users on the forums of which more than a million joined in the last year.

The ongoing growth comes with a lot of challenges, and as we always welcome your constructive feedback we have listened closely and identified a few areas where you asked us to improve in 2023: website and download speeds, overall user experience, esports, social media, video, and written content. On top of that, I have a long list of improvements I would like to add myself to help me run this website on a daily basis: a larger team and more resources are just a few of them. Of course, we like to add all improvements on top of the many features this forum already offers.

Similar to RaceDepartment, OverTake aims to provide everything a sim racer wants: frequent news about everything going on in the sim racing scene, lots of professional videos like the Nitro Night series, tons of content, and much more. But most importantly, OverTake shares our values and goals. We both want to provide a place where virtual racing fans come together as one, so it was only natural for us to become one big place for our communities to engage with.

During the last years, I have been approached by a lot of companies and individuals who all claimed to provide the best possible solution for the future of our big platform but none of them gave me the right feeling, until now. With OverTake.gg we have found a like-minded brand that shares our values and also acknowledges our role in the sim racing community for the last sixteen years. By integrating our features into OverTake's platform we can give both communities the best of both worlds while continuing to work closely for the next (at least) sixteen years to come.
RaceDepartment will gain more visibility and awareness, including high-quality content creators, and OverTake gains a vibrant and amazing community that has been around for ages. Together we strive to remain the same open welcoming platform for every petrolhead that likes virtual racing.

Although OverTake and RaceDepartment can soon create more content under one roof, share more knowledge, and deliver more entertainment, while being a lot faster, we can’t do it without our loyal community. I’ve already talked about the improvement you can look forward to with the merger, but maybe there is more you wish for. Therefore I have opened a dedicated forum where you can ask all your questions about the upcoming merger, and another place for your suggestions, so we can later on evaluate your input to check if and how we can implement your ideas. Please note that the merger will take some time and changes won’t happen right away.

Best Regards
Bram Hengeveld