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You’re sitting on the grid at Road America in a classic Lotus 79. You look over at the car lined up next to you, but for some reason you can’t see the driver. No matter. The red turns green and you light ‘em up. Accelerating hard down the front straight, you dice for racing room with two or three dozen other drivers around the world before pouring into turn one.
Yep, you read that right. Those other drivers aren’t FROM around the world, they ARE around the world. This is internet racing on iRacing.com, where in any given race there could be drivers on six continents racing against you (no word on whether anyone in Antarctica races). You don’t know if the car out-braking you into turn three is driven by a fourteen year old kid sitting in his parents’ basement in Peoria, or Dale Earnhardt Jr. out for a Sunday drive.
This isn’t your father’s racing video game. This is as close to real racing as you can get without strapping a race car on your back. You can run your car while you sit at your desk with a single monitor, a decent video card, and a mouse (sorry, we just can’t see driving a racecar with a mouse) — or you can get the full-on experience with a purpose-built simulator cockpit, complete with racing seat, force-feedback steering wheel, shifter, and pedals, surrounded by three to five high resolution monitors, which not only provide a view of the track ahead of you, but handle your peripheral vision, too.
The Sim-Seats iRacing Pro Package
COPYRIGHT, 2009Ready to give iRacing a try but don’t have a clue how to assemble a decent simulator? Sim-Seats, of Richmond, VA, has you covered with their iRacing Pro Package ($4,000). It’s got everything you need, and a few extras you don’t: a pro-quality driver seat, racing wheel with tilt-steering adjustment, inverted G27 pedals, a Thrustmaster TH8 shifter, keyboard tray attachment, triple monitor stand, three 24-inch monitors and a Velocity Micro PC powering the whole rig.