Obviously having some of the people who made the great NASCAR PC racing sims working on iRacing is a plus. Is there a sense of nostalgia for the team to go back to work on a NASCAR PC racing sim game?

Well, it's pretty different this time, since it is an on-line, subscription service rather than a boxed game, and the NASCAR affiliation is more of a sanctioning partnership-we'll be running real NASCAR series-as opposed to licensing the use of drivers and teams. So there's a different feel to this partnership. But that said, it's a great feeling to be working with NASCAR again, and I know the development team is excited about it.

What has the team learned in the years in between the last NASCAR Racing game and their new iRacing engine in terms of improving the realism and graphics of the game?

We've completely rewritten the graphics engine, come up with a better way to do the netcode (improved multiplayer), and the physics engine is much improved. The laser scanning of the track surfaces creates a much more realistic feel and response of the cars to bumps and banking and elevation changes. It turns out that people who design roadways and racetracks in the real world do a much better job at creating driveable surfaces than graphics engineers and artists. I personally have learned a lot more about the viscoelastic nature of tire rubber compounds, especially the hysteretic behavior of compounds filled with carbon black and/or silica fillers. Which really improves the realism, seriously!
How will racers sign up for the NASCAR iRacing series? Will they have to go online and do qualifying races like the real NASCAR racers do before they are allowed to enter the field for a race?

We assume that everyone who joins iRacing is a novice racer, at least in the virtual world. And while any member can drive any car in the iRacing garage, including the cars for NASCAR's top three divisions – NASCAR Sprint Cup, NASCAR Nationwide Series and NASCAR Camping World Series – on any track in our inventory, you can only compete in officially-sanctioned multi-car events if you hold the appropriate license. All of our members begin on the oval-racing side of the service as rookies in a Legends Car and move up through the Late Model, etc., gaining licenses to race in faster and more demanding cars as they demonstrate their ability to drive safely with others. It's just like the real world in that sense – you can practice or test in any car on any track, but you have earn your way into racing at higher levels by demonstrating that you've developed the necessary skill set. We think that a lot of people who like racing games will find that iRacing is a natural progression from what they've been doing already and that they'll really enjoy it.

How long will the NASCAR iRacing series last in 2010 in terms of number of races and weeks of racing?

Currently all iRacing seasons are 13 weeks in length, and we anticipate that some of the NASCAR-sanctioned series will fit into our normal four seasons annual calendar. But we're discussing with our partners at NASCAR the possibility of a "pro" series, for instance, that would run on the same schedule as the Sprint Cup Series.

Does iRacing have the rights to all of NASCAR's tracks?

We are already close to being able to duplicate the real-world NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule. We currently have built or are in the process of building all of the International Speedway Corp (ISC) and Speedway Motorsports, Inc. (SMI) tracks. Pocono, Indy and Dover are the only three independent tracks on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series circuit. We're in the process of building Pocono and we're in discussions with the other two.