I was one of many who gave Automobilista 2 the benefit of the doubt, and was pleasantly surprised by my first few hours with it. The off-brand Holden Commodore was immediately up there with one of the best sim cars I’d ever driven, and I promptly spent a giant chunk of my evening blasting around Adelaide with a handful of other sim racers who seemed quite satisfied with their impulse purchase. There were doubts among the more critical portions of the community as to whether or not the Madness Engine could support a truly hardcore sim, after the mass market Project CARS series received mixed re ..read more

So earlier this morning, Logitech proudly announced that Darrell Wallace Jr, driver of the #23 DoorDash Toyota Camry for 23XI Racing in the NASCAR Cup series, will be the “cover athlete” for all major Logitech sim racing products going forward. The details of this endorsement deal are obviously scarce at this time, but we can probably expect a couple of Logitech decals on Wallace’s firesuit, a potential neon-blue Logitech night race scheme later in the season, and for the next round of wheels, Wallace’s face and car to adorn the box. Is this exciting news? For NASCAR fans, absolutely. In fact ..read more

I’ve held the stance for several years now that if iRacing fail to change how they approach sim racing, there lies the potential for the developer to face much bigger problems beyond “Austin Ogonoski is mad at them on his blog again.” This came to fruition Tuesday night, as the eNASCAR Coca-Cola Series race at Charlotte proved to be such a disaster, that the incident is now being covered by real-world motorsports outlets such as RACER Magazine. For those who might not have the time to read the excellent piece by Ryan Kish, the rundown is fairly simple. In a recent hotfix deployed a few weeks ..read more

In pursuing the sole goal of perfecting race car dynamics in a semi-static environment, modern simulation developers often lose sight of the immersive sim elements that serve to complete the experience. While teams like Reiza Studios or iRacing will spend months behind the scenes refining and polishing a brand new car to be released into their respective piece of software with an upcoming patch or DLC launch, we very rarely talk about the various race weekend elements that these companies traditionally overlook. Restricted sets of tires over the course of an entire event, limited backup cars a ..read more

In the beginning, I was pretty supportive of the idea. Regardless of whether you believe all this lockdown nonsense was necessary or not, one reality remained unavoidable; for a period of time, every single sports network had giant empty gaps on their television schedules, and had no idea how to fill them. Living in central Alberta, we exhausted the archive of 80’s NHL playoff series within the first week, and our national sports networks quickly devolved into a monotonous pattern of Covid speculation, followed by extensive Top 10 highlight marathons. This wasn’t even remotely engaging, let al ..read more

A couple years back, there was this really obscure article written on Jalopnik explaining how the most underrated cheap truck you could buy was a 2001 Toyota Tundra. It was definitely written as a filler piece by Andrew Collins, his used truck shopping adventure that nobody really cares about at the end of the day blown up into a full-length article to appease his overlords desperate for content, but the core argument he made was pretty sound. The truck itself wasn’t exactly spectacular compared to then-new 2015 models, but the package struck a compromise between capability and economy that Co ..read more

The idea was to clean up online racing. Instead we’ve opened a bit of a pandora’s box. According to iRacing’s sporting code, the use of real names within a racing simulator is intended to “promote personal responsibility.” On paper, it’s not the worst idea. When the concept of online accountability in sim racing was first introduced in 2008 – maybe a little sooner if you were an early adopter of Race2Play – Xbox Live was by all accounts a warzone. Call of Duty lobbies were notorious for being an impromptu lesson in racial slurs. Forza Motorsport sessions resembled something more akin to Destru ..read more

It’s seemingly popped up overnight, hasn’t it? In just a few short years, our favorite little hobby in the corner of the greater gaming sphere started receiving more attention than ever thought possible. What once felt like a quiet, interconnected ring of racing enthusiasts has morphed into this very loud melting pot of real drivers, rabid millennial auto racing fans, and brands willing to cash in on what’s supposedly a booming industry – or at least one you can argue is tangibly on the rise. But as eSports championships pop up left and right, each offering higher prize payouts, higher product ..read more