Sim racing

Sim racing (short for simulated racing) is the practice of driving and competing in racing simulation software that aims to recreate real-world motor racing in a virtual environment, usually with a steering wheel, pedals and a seat or cockpit rig. Researchers at the University of Limerick describe it as "one of the oldest esports", and its profile rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when virtual races stood in for cancelled motorsport events.

Because the driver sits still in a cockpit, racing simulators suit a seated virtual reality setup, and several of them supported head-mounted displays such as the Oculus Rift development kits before consumer headsets went on sale. IRacing says it was the first racing sim to support VR, in 2013, and many major PC racing simulators have since added headset support. On console, Gran Turismo 7 became playable on PlayStation VR2 in February 2023, in every mode except two-player split screen.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited papers (full text of Joyce 2024, Lefebvre 2024, Joyce 2025, Murphy 2025, Zekioglu 2026; abstracts of Weidner 2017 and Higuera de Frutos 2021) and the cited Road to VR, UploadVR, PlayStation.Blog, GTPlanet, Nielsen and iRacing pages. About review dates.

Definition

There is no single agreed definition. Lefebvre, Malinen and Karhulahti, in a 2024 history of the field, adopt geographer Daniel Paiva's definition of sim racing as "racing simulation which focuses on the recreation of motor racing in a virtual environment in order to correspond as closely as possible to the experiences an individual feels when driving a racing car". Under that definition the key element is the simulation of existing competitive motorsport, so games such as Mario Kart are usually not counted. The same authors note that others use the term more broadly: one definition covers any organized online video racing competition, and another includes all racing games.

The software ranges from "simcade" titles, the label Lefebvre and colleagues give the original Gran Turismo, to highly realistic simulators such as iRacing, rFactor 2, RaceRoom Racing Experience and Assetto Corsa.

History

Early racing simulations

Lefebvre and colleagues trace the genre's roots to home-computer titles that moved beyond action racing games such as Pole Position (Namco, 1982): Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (Papyrus Design Group, 1989) and Formula One Grand Prix (MicroProse, 1991). Arcade cabinets such as Winning Run (Namco, 1988) and Hard Drivin' (Atari, 1989) offered similar experiences outside the home. Sim racing succeeded on consoles only in the late 1990s, with Gran Turismo (1997) on the original PlayStation among the first successful games.

Competition and esports

The Grand Prix Legends world championship of 1998 is described by Lefebvre and colleagues as "perhaps the first major sim racing event". In the 2000s arcade-style racing titles appeared at general esports events such as the World Cyber Games, while interviewees in the study described the PC titles Live for Speed (2002) and rFactor (2005) as among the first serious simulators; the ESL ran offline Live for Speed competitions in Germany from 2003 to 2006. The Nissan PlayStation GT Academy, which ran from 2008 to 2016, gave sim racers a route into real motorsport.

The authors describe 2015 to 2019 as a period of institutionalization in European sim racing. They cite the launch of Project CARS (2015); competitions supported by motorsport bodies such as the FIA, including the World Rally Championship esports program (2016), the F1 Esports Series (2017) and the GT Sport World Tour; and the Visa Vegas eRace of 2017, in which sim racers competed alongside real drivers for a US$1 million prize. Over the same period highly realistic simulators such as iRacing, rFactor 2 (2013), RaceRoom Racing Experience (2013) and Assetto Corsa reached a wider audience.

COVID-19 pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic halted motorsport in 2020, sim racing replaced many real championships. Examples include the "Not the Australian Grand Prix" for Formula 1, the IndyCar iRacing Challenge and the 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual. According to Nielsen, the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series race held at a virtual Homestead-Miami Speedway on 22 March 2020 and shown on Fox Sports 1, drew an average of 903,000 viewers, which Nielsen called the most-watched linear esports broadcast to that date. Joyce and colleagues, citing earlier work by Tudor, give a figure of about 7.5 million viewers across the eight events of Formula 1's virtual Grand Prix series that year.

Sim racing has also drawn interest from the International Olympic Committee, which included Gran Turismo Sport in the 2021 Olympic Virtual Series and Gran Turismo 7 in the 2023 Olympic Esports Series. Joyce, Toth and Campbell report that iRacing had an estimated 133,000 monthly players on its online service as of December 2023; iRacing's own site now claims 350,000 sim racers.

Equipment

A typical home setup has a force-feedback steering wheel, a pedal set and a seat or rig. In a 2025 study of wheel haptic feedback, Murphy, Campbell and Toth note that professional teams have long used large, expensive simulators with motion platforms to test setups and learn circuits, and that cheaper commercial hardware and software have since made immersive sim racing available to the general public. Wheels deliver two kinds of feedback: force feedback, a low-frequency signal in which resistance to turning the wheel rises with the car's lateral acceleration, and vibrotactile feedback. Measuring a Logitech G Pro direct drive wheel, the same study found that wheel motion fell mainly in the 0-5 Hz range (force feedback and the driver's own input) and the 25-30 Hz range, which grew as the vibrotactile setting was raised.

Pedals convert foot input to a signal with potentiometers, Hall-effect sensors or load cells. Joyce, Toth and Campbell describe load cell sensors as the current industry standard for brakes, while many entry-level pedal sets use potentiometers. In their test with 20 experienced sim racers, laps with a load cell brake were faster on average than laps with a Hall-effect brake set up to imitate it, though the difference fell short of conventional statistical significance (p = 0.071 for average lap time).

The view comes from one or more monitors or from a VR headset; the example rig pictured in the Lefebvre study uses three monitors. A motion platform can be added to move the seat; without one, as Joyce and colleagues point out, sim racing lacks the vestibular cues of real driving because no g-forces act on the driver, so racers depend more on visual information and on haptic feedback through the wheel and pedals.

Virtual reality

Early headset support

Several racing simulators supported the Oculus Rift development kits before the consumer headset launched. iRacing supported the Oculus Rift DK1, and Oculus used the sim to demonstrate the Rift to show visitors. Road to VR reported in October 2014 that the consensus among DK1 users was that the kit's resolution was too low to replace a monitor for everyday racing; iRacing added Oculus Rift DK2 support that month, initially without positional tracking. In a DK2 test of Assetto Corsa's RC1 build the same month, Road to VR's Paul James wrote that positional tracking was "spot on" when leaning toward the wheel and that the headset conveyed the scale of the car, but that distant parts of the track became "a jumble of dots" at the DK2's resolution and the flat mirror textures lacked correct parallax.

Road to VR reported in April 2015 that Project CARS would release from 7 May 2015 with Oculus Rift support that was a work in progress "in an advanced state of development", and in 2016 it was one of the 30 launch titles for the consumer Rift. In July 2016 Road to VR reported that a VR version of DiRT Rally would launch on the Oculus Store, with a VR update for existing Steam owners; Road to VR senior editor Paul James had called the game's earlier DK2 support during Early Access "rudimentary at best, broken at worst".

Milestones

The table lists selected racing titles and when their VR support arrived. It is not a complete list.

Title	VR milestone	Date	Headsets or platform
IRacing	First VR support (company claim); DK2 support added in the Season 4 update	2013; October 2014	Oculus Rift development kits
Assetto Corsa	DK2 support, tested by Road to VR in the RC1 build	October 2014	Oculus Rift DK2
Project CARS	Launch (scheduled from 7 May 2015) with work-in-progress Rift support	May 2015	Oculus Rift
DiRT Rally	VR version for the Oculus Store and VR update on Steam announced	July 2016	Oculus Rift
Driveclub VR	Standalone VR version; Sony's announced release date	13 October 2016	PlayStation VR
rFactor 2	Beta with DirectX 11 and VR support	1 May 2017	Oculus Rift, HTC Vive
Gran Turismo Sport	Limited "VR Tour" mode with one-on-one races	2017	PlayStation VR
Assetto Corsa Competizione	VR support scheduled for the second Early Access build	10 October 2018	PC VR
F1 22	PC version announced with VR support, for a 1 July 2022 launch	Announced April 2022	Oculus Rift, HTC Vive
Gran Turismo 7	Free update 1.29 makes all races and modes except two-player split screen playable in VR	20-21 February 2023	PlayStation VR2
Assetto Corsa EVO	Early Access launch with PC VR support; many players reported poor VR performance	January 2025	PC VR
Le Mans Ultimate	Version 1.0 with PC VR support	22 July 2025 (announced date)	SteamVR
IRacing	iRacing Connect app for Apple Vision Pro	11 May 2026	Apple Vision Pro

Console VR

On PlayStation, Sony set Driveclub VR, a standalone PlayStation VR version of the game, for release on 13 October 2016, and UploadVR reviewed it as a PS VR launch title. Gran Turismo Sport (2017) offered only a limited VR mode. UploadVR reported in June 2017 that series producer Kazunori Yamauchi had said VR races would be one-on-one, citing VR's "really high rendering loads", and that all 177 of the game's cars but only about a third of its 19 tracks would be available in VR. Gran Turismo 7 went further. Its free PS VR2 update, released on 20 February 2023 (Pacific time), two days before the headset went on sale, made every race and game mode except two-player split screen playable in VR, and uses eye tracking for foveated rendering. In UploadVR's review, Henry Stockdale called it "one of the most potent racing sims ever to grace VR" and noted that the game runs at 60 frames per second reprojected to 120 Hz.

Current PC VR support

As of October 2026, iRacing lets drivers choose between OpenXR, OpenVR and Oculus modes, says it supports foveated rendering in all VR headsets, with dynamic foveation on headsets that have eye tracking, and lists headsets from Meta, Pimax, Valve, Bigscreen, Sony, HTC, HP and Apple. Its iRacing Connect app for Apple Vision Pro uses foveated streaming and can blend the driver's physical rig into the view, "aligning a physical steering wheel with the one in-game"; it requires visionOS 26.4 or later.

Comfort and motion sickness

Racing in VR combines fast visual motion with a body that stays still. Zekioglu and colleagues describe this visual-vestibular conflict as arising when the optical flow from a head-tracked headset does not match the input of the vestibular system, a mismatch they link to motion sickness, nausea and dizziness (see Simulator sickness). In a 2016 Road to VR article, Kent Bye wrote that Project CARS's cockpit view "helps to reduce vection", yet the game was still rated "intense" for comfort, and he reported mild nausea from the horizon tilting on banked corners, sudden stops in crashes, and driving up or down hills. Frame rate also matters: iRacing's 2014 release notes stated that "sustaining a high and steady frame rate is definitely very important with the Rift".

Laboratory work on driving simulators has measured the comfort cost of headsets. In a 2017 IEEE VR study by Weidner, Hoesch, Poeschl and Broll, 94 participants performed a lane change task in one driving simulator with a 2D screen, a stereoscopic 3D screen or a VR headset. The headset gave similar physiological responses and lane change performance to the screens, but caused significantly more simulator sickness than the stereoscopic 3D condition.

Research

Academic study of sim racing performance is recent. Joyce, Toth and Campbell describe the field as "in its infancy, with few studies published to date". Researchers at the University of Limerick's Esports Science Research Lab and Lero centre have published several studies:

• An eye-tracking study of 88 sim racers in Assetto Corsa Competizione found that lower-skilled racers had significantly longer total fixation durations when normalized to lap time, and that higher-skilled racers gave significantly less overt attention to the track relative to other display areas such as the heads-up display.
• The pedal and wheel studies described above examined brake sensors and the frequencies of steering wheel feedback.

These studies used monitors rather than headsets: the eye-tracking study ran on 55-inch 120 Hz monitors, the brake study on a 32-inch monitor and the wheel study on a 2560 x 1440 monitor.

Sim racing software has also been tested as a cheap research tool. Higuera de Frutos and Castro built a 3D model of a real highway section in rFactor 2 and Assetto Corsa and concluded in 2021 that both could serve as the basis of a low-cost driving simulator for road geometric design research.

See also

• Racing
• Motion simulator
• Flight simulation
• Simulator sickness
• Haptics
• Seated