nascar-iracing posts

Last year, the PC online racing simulation company iRacing.com announced it had secured a deal with NASCAR to launch a fully sanctioned NASCAR online racing series. On February 9 iRacing.com officially launches its first season of the NASCAR iRacing Drivers World Championship. The 39 week season will have 19 races and will have the top 50 drivers in iRacing.com's line up competing. That group includes real NASCAR driver and racing sim fan Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Even though the series has already picked its drivers for its inagual season, anyone will be able to enter one of five NASCAR amateur series. In addition the 2010 NASCAR iRacing Pro Series begins in May with the top 250 racers competing to earn a spot in next year's NASCAR iRacing Drivers World Championship.

Many racing game fans know the name Papyrus Design Group (also known as Papyrus Software). Founded in the late 1980's the game developer had a huge success on the PC with the NASCAR Racing series of racing simulations. The games, published by the now defunct Sierra, were highly accurate simulations of driving NASCAR rides on the tracks and even some real NASCAR racers (most notably Dale Earnhardt Jr.) were both fans of the game and used it to train for the real thing.

When the NASCAR game rights were sold to Electronic Arts in 2004, Sierra/Vivendi Games shut down the developer for budget reasons. However many of Papyrus' team decided to launch a new venture, an online PC racing simulation service called iRacing. The actual online service launched in August with little fanfare. However this week iRacing announced that it had brokered a deal with NASCAR to launch a full-saction online NASCAR racing series. It will be the first time the NASCAR franchise will be made available to play on the PC platform in over five years.

While the series won't begin until early 2010, Big Download wanted to get more info on iRacing's plans and got its co-founder David Kaemmer (also the co-founder of the original Papyrus) to answer our questions about this new online-only racing series.