iRacing Just Created Its Own Formula Car With Dallara

For as long as iRacing has existed, it has been adamant that it will never create its own cars for use in the sim. It makes sense for most of its car roster, and as more manufacturers are willingly letting the iRacing dev team scan their machinery, the game comes closer to representing grids seen in real life.

Formula One, on the other hand, is the most glaring exception, but an understandable one, given that the most recent cars still hold secrets worth keeping from opponents. For its part, iRacing has been saddled with a 2015 McLaren and a 2009 Williams car. Both are woefully outdated models that don't reflect real-world performance and aren't as intuitive to set up and drive as close to reality as possible as comparatively modern machinery in LMP1.

That all changes today, however.

Together with technical partner and licensor Dallara (whose F3, LMP2 and Indycar machines are part of the game, and also helps build Team Haas' F1 cars), iRacing is introducing the iR-01, set to run this December en route to a full debut in 2021. And straight away, it looks like nothing else in the game. Wide, low, streamlined, and somehow not coming with a halo attached, the iR-01 has a singular goal: fill an F1-sized gap to the open-wheel roster. Oh, and it's got a 900hp V10.

Now, like I said, having a fantasy car on this game is unprecedented given the devotion of its devs to realism, but executive producer Steve Myers says that the project has been a long time coming, with development started in May of this year. The challenges of the now-constrained logistics mean that the team has "faced struggled with collecting data" on both cars and circuits directly from the source. So rather than just leave the back half of the year a little less lustrous content-wise, Myers called Andrea Toso, chief of vehicle dynamics at Dallara, to help conjure up a new race car for the game that is meant to represent its topmost echelon.

The end result of this seven-month development is the iR-01, a car that blends classic CART and '90s F1 silhouettes with modern racing sensibilities for an overall package that iRacing hopes will be "the ultimate open-wheel racecar" for its avid player base.

And it doesn't stop with the car: players can run this machine in its own series, including up to a World Championship starring this car in late 2021. That's an awful lot of commitment to a decidedly fantastical design, even if Dallara technically has well over three decades of F1 knowledge and data to pull from. But the trailer did show Dallara's process in building a chassis, including five cylinders of some sort, which could indicate that a real-life unit may be unveiled.

The reactions to the reveal show a growing schism to the new car. On Reddit, Twitter and YouTube comments, opinions are split between those fawning over its design and V10 sound and those who think iRacing took a step too far into "arcade-y" speculative fiction that they say breaks the perception of what iRacing is trying to be. I'm a little agnostic, personally -- I can see the merit in both arguments, but would rather think of the new car as a "taste test" of sorts, possibly in preparation for a true F1 car come 2022 (where the design becomes markedly different enough to the current 2017-2021 cars that there's little to worry about leaks). The wing pylons could be done away with in place of blended endplates, but otherwise, it does look properly sinister.

They're also building Coca-Cola Superspeedway, a staple in the classic NASCAR Racing 2003 games, while they confirmed a finished Long Beach Street Circuit yesterday, ready to be raced in this December along with the iR-01.