iRacing | The 2020 Chevrolet Corvette C8R Is Coming To iRacing

[Paul Jeffrey]

Yes, iRacing have yet another new high profile car release in the works - as the new Chevrolet Corvette C8R is confirmed to be heading to the sim later this month.

American muscle with a hint of European inspired design, the latest in a long line of Corvette machinery has rolled off the production line and onto the race tracks of the world - with plenty of divided opinions from the Chevrolet faithful, and now the new car is set to be recreated in virtual form, thanks to the development team over at iRacing.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1301173039460167680

Scheduled to be added to the simulation as paid DLC during the month of December, the new car marks a very welcome addition of yet more closed top GT machinery within the title, joining the likes of Ferrari, Porsche and Audi in what is a growing roster of endurance specification cars.

At this early stage no exact time frame of when the car will be released has been revealed, however I think it fair to say we probably won't have to wait until the very dying days of September to enjoy all the new content goodies coming as part of the new season update for iRacing.com.


iRacing is a PC exclusive racing simulation, available now.

Want to join in with the discussion about this popular online racing title? Worry not, head over to the iRacing Sub Forum here at RaceDepartment and get yourself involved in the action today!

 

[Isaac Chavira]

It honestly looks 100 times better than *normal* version of it.

Wait until the Z06 comes out. It's got it's center exhaust back too.

 

[BP]

Looking forward to this and the new LMP2 as the C7R was always one of my favorite GT cars in other sims.

iRacing is really not as bad as some people make it out to be...I used to think similarly, but it’s actually quite decent once you know how to adjust each car’s brake pressure and FFB level. Without adjusting the brake pressure, people lock up much faster than other sims that give you this option in the UI, but lockups are recoverable most times once adjusted.

Beyond that, the FFB is one of the best IMO in terms of communicating what’s about to happen with the car...if you have a good enough wheel, calibrate it right (every car requires a different FFB gain) and stop fixating on “oh it’s only 60Hz, bigger is better” logic, it’s actually quite enjoyable. The damage model is also one of the best, and I’m comparing to all the titles I own (basically everything except Live for speed, PC3 and Beam.NG).

Yes the pricing model sucks, will never argue against that point, but it does everything else better than most. 10 years ahead? not a chance, it holds its own.

Still a 2008 engine simulator. I am waiting for iRacing 2.0.

Still trolling the iRacing articles I see...when iRacing 2.0 is announced, I’ll message you personally. Until then, the rest of us are having fun racing against similar paced people several times daily, so stop being so predictable on EVERY iRacing thread, it’s getting old

 

[Louis Wedding]

And yet still 10 years ahead of the competition

In which department?

Physics/Tyre Physics? No.
Graphics? Lol, no.
UI? No
Netcode? Lol

 

[robnitro]

You ignore the words of champion drivers who literally say that iRacing's tire model is ****, and instead parrot the marketing claptrap of people who are selling renting you something.

EXACTLY! iRacing is just like the iPhone, a lot of hype and "speshulness" because if you're paying that much, it better be good or you're a fool lol
I'm reminded of Sega32x which put out crap games vs the still 16 bit Super Nintendo.
Nowadays we have the console wars, another joke when the games are gimped to run on them. But flash beats substance in this mostly capitalist world.

 

[RichardHessels]

In which department?

Physics/Tyre Physics? No.
Graphics? Lol, no.
UI? No
Netcode? Lol

Online racing and good competition systems - yes!
Their netcode is quite good, but trying to synchronise a online session with somebody from a small town in the back of Europe sitting at a low bandwith connection over Wifi to someone sitting next to the Internet Exchange in Amsterdam with a high bandwith optical connection, packages can get lost for half a second sometimes before they arrive at the server.
In the meanwhile that server need to predict where the car is at that moment - at 200 miles an hour.
Together with a bunch of other parameters.
And feed all of that back to the clients (with the same sub optimal connections).

 

[BP]

OK I'm gonna help a bunch of you out right now. The 2 big issues people have with iRacing's driving is the FFB isn't responsive and the brakes lock up uncontrollably. Here's how you fix both those things; if you have an active iRacing subscription, go try this and report back. Other than the articles and videos linked, this is my opinion based on my findings.

STEP 1: How to calibrate iRacing's FFB

iRacing's FFB setup is not as straightforward as other sims (you have to change the gain for each car) but I promise you this makes a world of difference in feeling what the car is doing. iRacing doesn't apply compensation for differences in forces at the steering rack as some sims do, where an MX5 has lower forces at the wheel due to power steering vs. a Formula 3 car with higher forces due to no power steering and overall design differences. You have to tune this on a per car basis and the guide linked below explains how.

Follow the guide and do not deviate in any way. If you drive on a Logitech wheel or something of similar power, turn your wheel's FFB strength to 100% (or 107%? I think that's what it was from what I remember on my G27), otherwise, if you own a much stronger wheel like DD or belt driven whels, just set the strength to what you can handle AFTER you've changed these settings.
https://virtualracingschool.com/academy/hardware/vrs-directforce-pro-wheel-base-settings/

Here's one of the most important parts of the guide here, but read the whole thing.

My assumption is most people who try iRacing (for a month or two) don't get this part right and then rag everywhere about how bad the FFB is...I used to feel it wasn't responsive too until I did this and it was a game-changer...literally my Road iRating went from around 1700 (which is near the average iRacing driver's rating) to over 3K in no time (high enough to always be in the top splits). It wasn't even this VRS guide that clued me in on this, it was taking the Driver61 Sim racing course this summer where one of the coaches told me on Day 1; the guide above only confirmed it and why it works (highly recommend that Driver61 course btw).

STEP 2: Fixing the brakes/Minimising lockups

Like the FFB, iRacing doesn't "bake in" settings for calibrating the brake pressure so that it transfers from car to car a lot better like most other sims (not saying this is bad or good, btw)...so whereas an MX5 you can mash the brakes hard and rarely get lockups, other cars like openwheelers have more responsive brakes and lockup under less pressure. My guess is they model the brakes after the cars using pedal travel and leave it to the user to have the appropriate hardware to mimic said brake pedal's behaviour...i.e. Have your physical brake pedal be softer with lots of travel if driving an MX5 and have the pedals be very stiff with minimal travel when driving a Formula 3.

Obviously most of us don't have several sets of sim racing pedals, or have the time to adjust the resistance in our pedals each time we switch cars. What makes it worse is when you have pedals with load cells and progressive resistance...because the cars lockup in the faster cars with less pressure, it's harder to learn with muscle memory if the car locks up at say 40% brakes but you don't feel strong resistance on your pedals until 60% brakes.

To fix this, you have to trick iRacing into thinking 100% of your physical brake travel is not 100% in the game by modifying your control config file. It's a totally legal move to do since there's no way to calibrate brake pressure in the sim itself. I'm not gonna explain it here, just watch this video and he'll do the heavy lifting for me. One key thing to remember is when you're calibrating your brake pedal, take note of the Raw input value for 100% brakes. His method is sound, but you have to figure it out based on what numbers your pedal puts out. Read the comments below the video as many people have posted solutions for various pedals.

So just remember this formula for calculating the desired percentage when you jump into a new car:
(100% brake pedal RAW value) divided by (percentage you want converted to decimal)

So if your brakes show 4095 when you press it at 100%, but you want 100% to be 75% in-game:

4095 divided by 0.75 = 5460

If you want 60%:

4095 divided by 0.60 = 6825


THAT'S IT!
The rest is up to you...as all of this means nothing if you don't have the driving skills to catch a slide or threshold brake effectively

 

[BP]

Online racing and good competition systems - yes!
Their netcode is quite good, but trying to synchronise a online session with somebody from a small town in the back of Europe sitting at a low bandwith connection over Wifi to someone sitting next to the Internet Exchange in Amsterdam with a high bandwith optical connection, packages can get lost for half a second sometimes before they arrive at the server.
In the meanwhile that server need to predict where the car is at that moment - at 200 miles an hour.
Together with a bunch of other parameters.
And feed all of that back to the clients (with the same sub optimal connections).

Exactly! Some people expect miracles when they really need to try rational thinking and self analysis.

I have raced close to guys in Australia when I'm located in the Caribbean, literally on the other side of the planet, only AFTER I upgraded my internet from a 8Mbit (on a REALLY good day) wireless connection to a 100Mbit Fiber optic Wired connection. Massive improvement in the quality of racing. Light can only travel so fast and it's never in a straight line from your house to your ISP to iRacing's server to other guy's ISP and then to other guy's house. In the Australian example above that's anywhere from 200ms to 300ms round trip, yet it works if both users have solid, fast, low latency connections. If you do a Speedtest and it takes too long to ping your ISP (mine takes 1-3ms on avg), then you're part of the problem.

If you see people jumping around on the server, it's either your connection or that driver's connection or both...iRacing's servers are some of the best I've raced on. Anyways let me stop before I'm accused of Fanboyism (even though I own and play most of the other sims mentioned on RD quite often).

 

[Dan ONeill]

I can attest to the effectiveness of the brake pressure mod. It really makes the world of difference and feels more natural (in the M8 GTE)!

 

[Nick Gregory]

everyone knows iceRacing is not realistic but still counts

iRacing has been off the v4 tire model for some time now BTW.

 

[LukFry]

And yet still 10 years ahead of the competition

yeah, but that literally everything. in terms of simulation they're more or less far behind modern simulations like ACC or RF2

 

[TeknoBug]

This came out of nowhere, Pratt & Miller has given iRacing a hard time in the past not allowing to release a C7R variant. This'll be a fun season with Hockenheimring, LMP2 and now this. I'M BUYING THEM ALL!

Hopefully they're going ahead with finishing up Long Beach, they somewhat hinted about it a month ago.

 

[DonZmeuheu]

This came out of nowhere, Pratt & Miller has given iRacing a hard time in the past not allowing to release a C7R variant. This'll be a fun season with Hockenheimring, LMP2 and now this. I'M BUYING THEM ALL!

Hopefully they're going ahead with finishing up Long Beach, they somewhat hinted about it a month ago.

Really??? They finally release Long Beach???

 

[mozzie]

Really??? They finally release Long Beach???

Yes, apparently they are working on finishing Long Beach due to COVID-19 not allowing them to travel and scan tracks.

 

[avenger82]

only AFTER I upgraded my internet from a 8Mbit (on a REALLY good day) wireless connection

8Mb/s (that's 1MiB/s) is still plenty for any racing sim netcode. It's about latency, not bandwidth. I'm always on WiFi and don't experience lags in any sim, even on iRacing when connected to US servers from Europe(pings are a little higher, but not a problem even with close fights). Only remember two times within last few years I had to reboot my router because I was lagging.

 

[2112]

Looking forward to this and the new LMP2 as the C7R was always one of my favorite GT cars in other sims.

iRacing is really not as bad as some people make it out to be...I used to think similarly, but it’s actually quite decent once you know how to adjust each car’s brake pressure and FFB level. Without adjusting the brake pressure, people lock up much faster than other sims that give you this option in the UI, but lockups are recoverable most times once adjusted.

Beyond that, the FFB is one of the best IMO in terms of communicating what’s about to happen with the car...if you have a good enough wheel, calibrate it right (every car requires a different FFB gain) and stop fixating on “oh it’s only 60Hz, bigger is better” logic, it’s actually quite enjoyable. The damage model is also one of the best, and I’m comparing to all the titles I own (basically everything except Live for speed, PC3 and Beam.NG).

Yes the pricing model sucks, will never argue against that point, but it does everything else better than most. 10 years ahead? not a chance, it holds its own.



Still trolling the iRacing articles I see...when iRacing 2.0 is announced, I’ll message you personally. Until then, the rest of us are having fun racing against similar paced people several times daily, so stop being so predictable on EVERY iRacing thread, it’s getting old

Agreed. I am not a rabid iRacing fanboi, as a matter of fact I would rather use rF2 for the league that I am in. When I first got iRacing I hated it because of the tire model. My plan was to never go back. Then my league, which I have been part of for years, decided to go to iRacing in hopes of attracting more participants. Begrudgingly I re-upped.

In the year and a half that passed between my first subscription and my re-upping I found that while iRacing has a lot of work to do it had improved to the point that when making the exact adjustments you mention it worked for me. I still do not like the fact that at a certain point you cannot recover a spin when you should be able to but it is much better than before when it seemed like the tires were glass and if you did a fairly quick warm-up lap your tires were shot.

What makes iRacing attractive is the ability to find a race at any time, and the variety of cars and tracks one can find a race with/at.

There are other sims I like driving more, such as R3E, rFactor2, ACC, AMS, etc...but they all have their limitations, the most glaring for the majority being the difficulty in finding a good on-line race and often when a race is set up by a player it is at the major, fast tracks, like Spa or Monza. While I love Spa (Monza not so much...) there are many tracks out there that are underrepresented in player-made servers.

 

[DonZmeuheu]

Yes, apparently they are working on finishing Long Beach due to COVID-19 not allowing them to travel and scan tracks.

Great news....hopefully they finish New Jersey too

 

[Kurupt CDN]

STEP 1: How to calibrate iRacing's FFB

iRacing's FFB setup is not as straightforward as other sims (you have to change the gain for each car) but I promise you this makes a world of difference in feeling what the car is doing. iRacing doesn't apply compensation for differences in forces at the steering rack as some sims do, where an MX5 has lower forces at the wheel due to power steering vs. a Formula 3 car with higher forces due to no power steering and overall design differences. You have to tune this on a per car basis and the guide linked below explains how.

Follow the guide and do not deviate in any way. If you drive on a Logitech wheel or something of similar power, turn your wheel's FFB strength to 100% (or 107%? I think that's what it was from what I remember on my G27), otherwise, if you own a much stronger wheel like DD or belt driven whels, just set the strength to what you can handle AFTER you've changed these settings.
https://virtualracingschool.com/academy/hardware/vrs-directforce-pro-wheel-base-settings/

Here's one of the most important parts of the guide here, but read the whole thing.

My assumption is most people who try iRacing (for a month or two) don't get this part right and then rag everywhere about how bad the FFB is...I used to feel it wasn't responsive too until I did this and it was a game-changer...literally my Road iRating went from around 1700 (which is near the average iRacing driver's rating) to over 3K in no time (high enough to always be in the top splits). It wasn't even this VRS guide that clued me in on this, it was taking the Driver61 Sim racing course this summer where one of the coaches told me on Day 1; the guide above only confirmed it and why it works (highly recommend that Driver61 course btw)

Question regarding this....
I use a TM TX which only produces 4nm, how I've setup the ffb was setting the NM in-game setting to 4nm and used the auto tune ffb option while running practice laps than selecting the use custom controls option at the bottom.
I am assuming your guide is just for DD wheel users as no none DD wheels came handle those Nm for each car?

 

[TeknoBug]

Question regarding this....
I use a TM TX which only produces 4nm, how I've setup the ffb was setting the NM in-game setting to 4nm and used the auto tune ffb option while running practice laps than selecting the use custom controls option at the bottom.
I am assuming your guide is just for DD wheel users as no none DD wheels came handle those Nm for each car?

Get wheelcheck and run level 2 and 3 linear min force tests. With my CSL Elite I turned on linear, set wheel force to 6.0 (since the CSL does 6nm) and after wheelcheck tests I found that my min force is 4.0 so I set 4.0 on all cars then figure out a favorable strength on each car.

 

[Kurupt CDN]

Get wheelcheck and run level 2 and 3 linear min force tests. With my CSL Elite I turned on linear, set wheel force to 6.0 (since the CSL does 6nm) and after wheelcheck tests I found that my min force is 4.0 so I set 4.0 on all cars then figure out a favorable strength on each car.

Ya I forgot to mention I've done that, min force on my wheel is 2 which I've set on all cars.
My understanding is that min force is your dead zone at center and not the NM your wheel can produce...but could be wrong?

 

[bgil66]

well the "new" RSR only had a exhaust position change to fit a different diffuser and seems like they are putting it back already

I love it, ahhh that sound