2012 iRacing.com Daytona 500 – yours truly in the pink #38.

Even though I personally dislike iRacing’s tire model and shitpost on other sites to the extreme about how iRacing is a total load of crap, no other racing game currently available offers the immense structure and competition that iRacing does when it comes to online racing.

While not a primary focus of iRacing.com, the game offers several World Tour events each year – full distance races (compared to iRacing’s standard 35% – 50% race distances) centering around several prestigious real-world marquee auto racing events. These events, such as the Talladega 500, Indy 500, or brand new for this year, the 24 Hours of Daytona (traditionally shortened to 2.4 hours before driver swaps) offer a festival-like atmosphere and organization not seen in the scheduled twelve-week seasons that make up the primary focus of iRacing.com

That is, when they go off.

Yesterday, iRacing’s servers crashed just as the Saturday sessions for their Daytona 500 were about to begin. The crash was so devastating that iRacing not only cancelled all current and future sessions for their Daytona 500, but also invalidated the results of sessions already completed – making the entire weekend’s events totally pointless.

“Some people make it sound like iRacing always has problems” says one iRacing member.

Well, it’s because iRacing does always have problems.

2011 Daytona 500

2013 2.4 Hours of Daytona

2013 Daytona 500

2014 Indianapolis 500

And now this weekend’s Daytona 500

For what iRacing charges, from the yearly subscription being almost $99, to every piece of content costing (on average) $12.95, it’s not uncommon for people to drop $400 – $600 on the sim, and when you’re dropping that much on a single video, the developers should very well have their shit together.

Especially when you can fire up their previous release at any given time and run a full length Daytona 500 online with a friend and 41 other AI cars without the enormous hit to your wallet or server outages that they swear they’ve fixed this time.

Inexcusable.