We all know that iRacing is the most popular racing simulator, and many people who use it also drive real cars on the same tracks as in the sim. Wouldn’t it be nice to share data and compare laps between them?
We were also looking for ways to better test new SoloStorm features, and thought that integrating with iRacing would be a huge productivity boost.
After some intense work, here’s what we wound up with
Overall, the results are very good. Lap timing is extremely close (less than 0.1s error on the Nurburgring, and we can still improve that significantly), and car position is consistent. This is kind of a big deal since iRacing does not stream GPS position in real time so as not to facilitate cheating. Therefore, we need a map of the course, the location of the start/finish, and a bunch of math to calculate where the car is on track.
This works with tracks downloaded form Podium, however in some cases (like the Nurburgring Tourist Driving configuration with bridge to gantry times), an iRacing telemetry file had to be imported to provide the necessary information. Yes, we have automated that process, and need to figure out how to share those additional tracks.
There is still a lot of work to be completed, along with work on basic Time Attack features, but this functionality should be available in the next release for anyone that wants to try it.
To make this work, you will need to configure a new Bluetooth COM port on your iRacing PC, and then download and run a program (from us) that streams iRacing telemetry to the COM port.
If this proves to be a popular feature, we will also be looking at ways to auto-detect tracks, and streamline configuration in general.