Having competed in last weekend’s iRacing IMSA Classic 500 Special Event, Team Traxion (John Munro and I) were left feeling slightly confused by the whole thing.
The event was originally slated to take place around Road America, giving iRacing’s historic Nissan GTP ZX-T and Audi 90 Quattro GTO a chance to stretch their virtual legs. However, the schedule was changed, and the race was switched to Laguna Seca, representing a wholly different kind of challenge.
We’d participated in the Road America 500 three years previously, and absolutely loved it. We led our Split overall by a chunky margin but binned it with the chequered flag in sight. Instant DNF. Oops.
We’ve often spoken about avenging this result in subsequent years, but due to schedule conflicts, we’ve never quite made it work.
Until this year.
Well ahead of time, we had the 11th of April circled on our calendars and were thoroughly looking forward to it. Road America is one of our favourite tracks: fast corners, long straights and forgiving run-off areas.
Ideal for multi-class racing, especially in these old beasts, which require a lot of driver input and reams of mental bandwidth to drive.
California nightmare
Now, Laguna Seca is a fantastic driver’s track, but I think it was a poor choice for the IMSA Classic 500. It’s a narrow ribbon of Californian asphalt, so it’s difficult to overtake at the best of times, but add in a slower class of car and the challenge is doubled.
Many iRacers will simply say that if you’re skilful enough, this won’t be a problem, which is obviously correct. However, Special Events tend to attract a higher percentage of casual, lapsed, or inexperienced sim racers than regular events do. They’re showpiece races and they help bring a new audience to the platform.
Accidents will always happen, but judging from official practice sessions, this race would feature enough twisted metal to feed Copart for years to come.
Luckily, our Split turned out to be less chaotic than first feared, but many prospective drivers were put off by some of the changes iRacing made to the cars in the sim’s last update, with many Audi drivers voicing their frustrations over understeer.
From Traxion’s perspective, John and I enjoyed driving the Nissan (we never tried the Audi, so we can’t comment), and after a bit of setup work, we found the car to drive rather sweetly, and although the race was undoubtedly challenging, it was a satisfying one.
But considering these classic IMSA cars only get one Special Event per year, its venue is incredibly important. Sure, Laguna Seca is a classic IMSA road course, and sure, it has a lot of fans, but in my opinion, its characteristics don’t suit a community-focused Special Event.
The ol’ switcheroo
So why switch from Road America to Laguna Seca? Well, we asked iRacing directly, and it explained that it likes to change things from time to time.
iRacing has also stated that there was no financial element to this, which was confirmed on the official event forum by its Global Director of Operations, Greg West: “I’ll be completely transparent that there was no monetary incetive [sic] to make this change. There are things behind the scenes that we cannot openly discuss… We worked with a partner to get more promotion for this event. All of this was to continue to grow a community and give it opportunities.”
iRacing can, of course, change its Special Event tracks if it wants to, with or without community backing. However, the community can also choose to participate or not, and this year saw a large drop in numbers.
Just 1,046 drivers (according to iracingstats.net) competed at Laguna Seca, a significant drop from previous editions of the Road America 500 (1,652, 1,592 and 1,463 in 2025, 2024 and 2023, respectively).
Although the historic racing community is a niche in iRacing, it’s a passionate one, and it’s clear that, if consulted, it would not have dropped Road America in favour of Laguna Seca. The extra promotional push from IMSA didn’t help on this occasion either (looking at IMSA’s socials, I didn’t see a single mention of the Classic 500 on its feeds).
Hopefully, a better solution can be found for everyone in 2027.