Opinion: is iRacing’s dominance under threat?

If you know anything about sim racing, you’ll be aware of iRacing. It’s the thing Max Verstappen does when he’s supposed to be getting a tight eight hours of sleep ahead of a Grand Prix. It’s also the most popular online sim racing service, with hundreds of thousands of active users.

Nothing else compares to it in terms of fair and competitive online racing, and if you want to experience the thrill of being a professional racing driver but your dad didn’t own a petrochemicals company, iRacing is the closest you’ll get.

Or at least that used to be the case. I wonder if in 2026 there’s something of a reckoning coming for iRacing. You see the problem is, while you don’t need to be a multimillionaire to play iRacing, you do have to pay for the privilege. For a start, there’s a £10 monthly subscription to access the service at all, you can’t even practice on your own unless you have a paid membership.

Then, while there’s a handful of free cars and tracks, the majority of online races require you to purchase individual cars and circuits in order to compete. Oh, and if you want to host a private testing session with your mates, you have to pay per hour for that as well. It’s like if Ebenezer Scrooge designed a sim racing platform.

This would all be slightly less of an issue if the service was rapidly evolving and improving, but development of iRacing occurs at a pace that makes tectonic plates look sprightly. iRacing is a genuinely excellent experience, but for a company that rakes in millions of dollars every year, new cars and tracks arrive at a trickle and graphically the game feels like it’s marooned in the previous decade.

The imminent problem for iRacing is that other sims are, finally, starting to emulate what the service offers but without the burden of a subscription. Take Rennsport and Project Motor Racing; it seems every new sim now launches with a schedule of daily and weekly events and a license system to ensure safe players don’t get torpedoed by lunatics at turn one.

Le Mans Ultimate is the most likely competitor, because it’s a modern, graphically impressive simulator and it too has a physics engine that probably realistically accounts for the seasonal toenail growth of the driver. There’s also RaceRoom Racing Experience, the least inspiringly named video game of all time, which boasts affordable cars and tracks, including 1990s BTCC touring cars, if you want to conjure the spirit of split-screen TOCA Touring Cars battles on the PlayStation.

And of course there’s Gran Turismo 7 which, while not the most realistic sim out there, has a huge established player base and a substantial new update.

Do I think iRacing is going anywhere? No. What I do hope, though, is that other sims providing a credible alternative will push iRacing to improve to see off the threat. Then we all win. Well, except me, I usually finish around 14th with considerable suspension damage.