iRacing designs having real effect in NASCAR

It has been a line that has blurred further in recent years, but the world of virtual racing continues to help shape the future of the real-life sport.

NASCAR has announced that it intends to renovate Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California based on simulations done on sim-racing platform iRacing.

Currently it’s one of the fastest tracks on the NASCAR schedule, but will undergo extensive changes to turn it from a two-mile speedway into a half-mile short track. The series submitted the plans to San Bernardino County early in the month.

The new track will incorporate the shape of other tracks including Martinsville’s ‘paperclip’ layout.NASCAR track data files were converted to a format readable by the iRacing sim and from there small tweaks continued to be made virtually to end up with 18-degree corners and a roughly 19sec lap time.

The series is aiming for a 2023 race date at the altered track.