During the Peachtree Three Benefiting the National MS Society event on Thursday night (14th July 2022), a number of odds and ends were revealed during a segment with special guest Greg Hill, iRacing Senior Vice President and Executive Producer.
Ahead of a detailed rain-system update, Hill confirmed that a brand new scan of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is on the way soon to the simulation service.
The current layout on iRacing does not reflect the Road Course variant used by both NASCAR and IndyCar, and with both series reuniting for a weekend of racing at the same venue later this month, the team is working to update the venue.
This shared event weekend first took place last season, with Will Power winning the IndyCar event and A.J. Allmendinger the NASCAR Cup Series race.
“Our team has actually been, from about two weeks ago when released Atlanta, sprinting to model the 2022 version of Indianapolis using a fresh laser scan and bring that to our customers in time for the upcoming race weekend,” said Hill.
“It’s been, frankly, a ton of work. We’ve had four different developers working on the model and we actually split the racetrack up into sections.
“Everyone went off into their own little corner, they modelled their section and we have the capability to merge it all together. That’s something we had to develop back when we did Nürburgring Nordschleife, GP and Le Mans in the same year.
“As of today, it’s all been combined together.”
Not only will it be a new laser scan with the latest layout, but physically based rendering (PBR) will be used for the texture, in theory uplifting the visual fidelity of the venue too. The existing version game before the use of PBR on iRacing.
The update follows the aforementioned configuration update to Atlanta Motor Speedway on 1st July 2022, which allowed the older 2008 version to stay on the platform.
IndyCar’s Gallagher Grand Prix takes place on 30th July, while the NASCAR’s Verizon 200 at the Brickyard on the 3st July, so we expect the latest version of the track to be available for the iRacing platform within the next two weeks.
