The Daytona 500 is one of the more challenging races on the NASCAR circuit. The speedway is long and narrow, forcing drivers to be more aggressive. And the weather in central Florida doesn’t always cooperate. During the 2024 event, a deluge of rain had forced a Monday conclusion. After 41 lead changes and with only eight laps to go, a crash involving half the field prompted a red flag and a 15-minute delay. At the end, another collision between leader Ross Chastain and Austin Cindric opened the door for William Byron to zip by and take the checkered flag.
Byron’s win wasn’t a huge surprise—he’d notched 10 prior wins on the NASCAR circuit—but his backstory is unusual. He’s part of a new emerging generation of drivers who have learned much of the craft of high-speed racing online through iRacing, the premier esport for virtual, or “sim,” racing, where anyone can channel their inner Joey Logano and race in the glitziest virtual races in the world. Now 27, Byron became a NASCAR fan at the age of 6 when his father took him to a race in Virginia. A few years later, Byron heard an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. gushing about sim racing and “that’s what got me interested,” he says. “I felt like I could learn something.”
iRacing at 12
Equipped with the necessary steering wheel, pedal, and a working PC, Byron began sim racing at age 12. He learned how to navigate tight turns, calculate angles, temper speed—all without the worry of real-life crashing. “It’s realistic enough to get started and see if you’re good at it,” he says. “It’s really similar to pickup basketball. A chance for people to compete in a way they probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to any other way.” After a year and a half, Byron began to enter local go-kart races. Eighteen months after that, he was racing legend cars, launching his career.
Chelmsford, Massachusetts–based iRacing, cofounded by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry and motorsports simulator (and sometime racecar driver) Dave Kaemmer in 2008, is the biggest name in sim racing, with 150 employees and consistent double-digit annual growth. This past November, iRacing began collaborating with Microsoft to integrate AI technologies into its simulators.
In partnership with the Tiffany of racing brands, NASCAR—a deal that dates to the year of iRacing’s debut—iRacing is changing the face of the sport: how up-and-coming drivers like Byron learn to drive, how cars are designed, how courses themselves are built, modified, and selected.
Simulating excellence
Simulators have altered the landscape of athletics, especially in more finely skilled competitions such as baseball and golf. But virtual racing may be having the biggest impact. iRacing’s brand partnerships, not only with NASCAR but also some of the sport’s most storied racetracks and automakers, have allowed the company to re-create a real-world race experience down to the hubcaps. NASCAR and iRacing are also using the technology to figure out where (and even if) it’s feasible to build new tracks, or how to best modify existing ones, an arrangement that has led directly to races on the short track inside the L.A. Coliseum and the streets of downtown Chicago.
“I think the iRacing partnership was a little bit ahead of its time,” says Tim Clark, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief brand officer. “If you go back to the beginning, we probably didn’t really know what to make of it. Was it a game? Entertainment? A training tool? And the answer is it was a little bit of all those things. It’s so unique, because you could influence a NASCAR fan of tomorrow, you could influence a NASCAR driver of tomorrow. I make this joke all the time. the Dallas Cowboys aren’t looking for their next quarterback on Madden, but you can scout the next driver of a NASCAR national series on iRacing.”
NASCAR 25
“It’s like the experience of driving that race car in competition at any racetrack in the world, and gets you as close to reality without having to leave your home,” adds iRacing executive director Dale Earnhardt Jr., a 2021 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee. “The tracks are scanned to perfection. Every bump, crack, crevice in a unique character about that racetrack is included.” Bonus: if you crash, no one ends up in a hospital.
iRacing currently boasts more than 1.2 million unique accounts and more than 300,000 active members. Now comes its next chapter: the launch this fall of NASCAR 25, an attempt to Madden-ize iRacing’s offerings and take sim racing from niche obsession to mass market behemoth. It’s the company’s very first console title. Up until now, iRacers had to pony up for a steering wheel and pedal set (which can run as high as $600), in addition to having to race solely on a PC.
Entering the console space—a landscape dominated by competitors like EA, Sony Interactive, and Nintendo—iRacing is betting that NASCAR 25 can deliver the verisimilitude of its online races via a console on a big screen TV, at a more consumer-friendly price point. While an annual membership in iRacing costs around $100, with additional fees if you want access to fancier cars and tracks, NASCAR 25 will allow drivers to start their engines on their trusty Xbox or PlayStation at a to-be-determined price point that should be similar to existing sports games. (Madden NFL 25 retails for $69.99.)
“We want to make a NASCAR stock car drive like a real NASCAR stock car,” says Steve Myers, the executive vice president of iRacing. “There’s a reason only 40 guys in the world get to do it—because it’s hard.”
From PC to console
iRacing’s biggest asset has been the realism of its racing experience. Diehard fans now wonder if the console version can match the original. “Making the jump from the PC ecosystem to consoles is a big step, opening the door for more players to experience iRacing’s level or realism,” says Alberto Segovia, an amateur driver and prolific blogger on sim racing. “What intrigues me the most is how they’ll manage to balance that authenticity with the accessibility of a console game. But if anyone can pull it off, it’s iRacing.”
For NASCAR, Clark says, the game represents an effort to “create fans on their terms. I think in years past, we may have taken a more selfish view of fandom, that you have to watch on TV or you have to buy a ticket and come to a racetrack. But if you’re fandom is getting on iRacing and participating in some of these races that way, I’m totally fine with that.”
A league of its own?
Therein lies other potential marketing gold to be mined, in the form of a televised TGL Golf–type virtual racing league (NASCAR dipped a toe in during the COVID lockdowns), or even a celebrity-laden, Cannonball Run–style special, with stars sliding into virtual race cars, ready to rev up. A lot will depend on just how much mass appeal NASCAR 25 can muster.
“I want every fan of motorsport to be able to experience the anxiety of trying to qualify for race, the nerves and the butterflies of sitting on a starting grid before the engines fire, being in that nose-to-nose battle on the final lap, having to make that exact right decision in the right moment to win the race,” Earnhardt says. “That’s what they get to experience in iRacing. There’s no candy-coating, there’s no handholding. That’s the draw.”
Byron, who still sim races offseason to “get the rust knocked off,” is excited for the launch, and he’ll be right there at the starting line. He still sim races under his own name. Does he win all the time?
He laughs. “Usually.”
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