iRacing Equipment Suggestions

I’m watching with interest, although I wouldn’t mind motion.

Matt

 

Motion urgh— you guys try VR? I went and tried one that wasn’t set up right( they warned me) with motion and I was violently ill the next 12 hrs.
Good thing I didn’t buy $100 Tix to a fundraiser the same evening.

I will be asking for no motion from now on.

 

I have a pretty good set up that is basic but works great:
Fanatec wheel club sport withe pedals and gear box - use a trak racer solid rig with a race seat and using vibe virtual reality head set I’d say it’s about $2k-3k all in computer is about another $2k


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Using fanatec and a beamer.

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In my opinion you do not need seat motion as the cost to benefit ratio is not worth it (for us mortals).

It breaks down into your seat set up, your display set up and your computer. To get any type of positive part task training to take to the car you will absolutely need a dedicated seat with hard mounted wheel and pedals, this is really non negotiable, Openwheeler and Next Level Racing are a good place to start.

For your displays you will most likely end up with a triple display so if you dip your toes in buy things that can be expanded, Trak Racer and Next Level Racing are both good display stands. For displays this you have to figure out and pick your own as it’s very subjective. Some guys like smaller displays (27”) real close some like 55” plus displays further back. For what it is worth I stettled on 3 x 43” displays.

For the computer, plan on spending at least $1500, you can actually run iRacing with a single display on almost any computer but you won’t do it for long. Think Intel i7 or up, Geoforce RTX 2080 or close, plenty of RAM and a solid state drive.

Hopefully this helps, all in $2,500 gets you a basic single display system $4,000 to $5,000 gets you a nice triple display set up. If you want motion and the top of the line everything $40,000 to $60,000 gets you In the ballpark.

YMMV.

 

2K will be tight to get PC, monitor AND rig.

Self build decent PC with i5, GTX 2070, 16gb ram and a 512gb SSD will be around 1200 thereabouts. I'd try and get a 21:9 monitor (no point looking for even wider angle as that'll kill your budget). Sadly this leaves only enough money in budget for a basic wheel and a playseat or so.

IIRC Fanatec do finance so perhaps stretch your budget a bit and go for their stuff. Their V3 pedals are quite good. Sure, can't compare them to Heusinkvelds for example but totally different price point. You'll get decent brake feel with the V3, which is most important in sim racing. The V2.5 wheelbase is good enough to start with and add a rim. If you do mostly formula racing take their Formula rim otherwise any of their GT rims that take your fancy. Direct drive wheelbases offer even more accurate feedback and add to realism but again, out of budget. The good thing with Fanatec is all their stuff is in their own ''network'' so if you upgrade you won't have to sell other bits to make the next thing work.

At the cheaper end you'll have stuff like the Logitech wheels which really feel like a kids toy compared to even fanatec. Logitech used to be the only one in their game, their current G29 is basically stillnthe same internals as what they started with in the early 2000s, and still contain ALL of the faults they had then. I've had all the logitec stuff and they all started braking after a year or so, the stuff that wasn't broken yet I always kept ''just in case'' and all of it died over time. A shame. You just end up spending the same money as you would on fanatec. A waste of time and best avoided.

Regarding sims, if you plan to online race iRacing offers the best. Yes it's expensive but they continue upgrading everything and no need to worry about them bringing out iRacing 2 at some point and you having to buy everything all over again (as you have to with practically every other game). Other than that there's a reason why every single race driver uses iRacing...it's good and very realistic.

Assetto corsa I enjoy a lot as well, and Rfactor 2. Both have good community support in regards to mods (often free) and some (cheap) pay mods. Assetto Corsa has an (aftermarket) ''iracing'' style ranking system through ''SRS'' where the online racing features fewer crashing idiots.

Unorganized ''public'' lobbies in practically all games/sims (excluding iRacing once your rnking is high enough), expect to get very frustrated if you're unlucky and find a server full of utter idiots that want to win the race in the first corner. But when you're in a good lobby....it's such a thrill!

I recommend iRacing purely for that so long your focus is on online racing. These days, somehow, sims still can't replicate how good Grand Prix 4 was with AI, which replicated really well other drivers to race against....almost as if they where human! It was a joy.

I hate Project cars (all of them) with a passion...looks pretty, AI can be ok, but cars feel floaty. AI with their formula cars are simply awful as the AI seemsto use their cars as if it was a nascar race....Online lobbies are quite empty most of the time also, but a really cool feature i that you can add the AI in an online race so the field isn't as empty. That's about the only positive I can say for it, sadly. Also, their developers are a bunch of arrogant pricks who promise the world but deliver zero.

if you want simulation, forget console racing. Even the ported sims from PC to console are ''dumbed down'' as the consoles aren't strong enough to replicate the physics accurately. May as well stick with a controller then and race from the comfort of your sofa.