“Practice makes perfect.” That’s what you tell yourself when you’re throwing spirals through an old tire, with dreams of the NFL, or shooting pucks against the garage door and imagining hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup.
How do you get to be perfect, though, if what you need to practice is bending a 3,300-pound stock car to your will? After all, there’s no easy (or legal) way to climb into a NASCAR Cup Series car and race your friends around the neighborhood.
Well, there wasn’t. With the advent of simulator racing, though, that’s changing — and fast.
As anyone who has played with the latest PlayStation or Xbox can attest, video games are more realistic, more lifelike and more immersive than ever. So advanced is today’s gaming hardware that famous titles like Forza and Gran Turismo can accurately replicate the experience of racing real cars on real racetracks.
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If those console franchises open the doors of sim racing to the everyday gamer, PC-only offerings such as iRacing and rFactor 2 go one step further.
“I discovered iRacing just by a simple Google search,” Anthony Alfredo, driver of the Our Motorsports No. 23 Xfinity Series entry, told ESPN. “I ended up getting one of those Logitech wheel-and-pedal sets to play at my desk, and as simple as that, for a couple hundred dollars, I was sim racing.”
iRacing is arguably the biggest name in the ever-expanding world of sim racing. It’s said to boast 225,000 active subscribers, including drivers from practically every major racing series in the world: NASCAR, Formula One, IndyCar and several others. McLaren driver Lando Norris has long been found loitering in iRacing lobbies, and 2021 F1 champion Max Verstappen as well as 2005 and 2006 champion Fernando Alonso have been spotted in its races, too.
Rajah Caruth is another with significant sim experience. The 20-year-old is contesting the ARCA Menards Series with Rev Racing in 2022, and he’s participating in select Camping World Truck Series events with Spire Motorsports and a limited Xfinity Series schedule with Alpha Prime Racing.
And it’s through iRacing that he got here.
“NASCAR is where I wanted to race, and I just wanted to race in real life since I was a little kid, and so the only way to do that, I…
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