I KNOW CONSISTENT IS SPELLED WITH AN E, I MESSED UP 😢

iRacing's approach to netcode with the prediction feels realistic until a car disappears or bounces 40 feet in the air on a straight from zero contact.

I appreciate how this video wasn’t just “this thing bad” like so many complaints on the internet are, rather you look more in depth as to what creates the issue.

On the safety car topic.

There is software called iRace Control that can be programmed to throw a safety car whenever a certain incident threshold within a certain amount of time is reached. The league I race in utilizes it and its fantastic and adds that butterzone of authentic feel you want.

About the damage model, many brands require in their licensing agreement that the cars never show enough cosmetic damage to have the crash be determined that it could be fatal (ferrari is big on this) thus being one of the reasons many sims lack a very realistic damage model.

they even simulated the price of racing, so realistic

I think that implementing a system where body panels are just replaced instead of repaired would improve retention in both endurance and in regular races. You can lose the entire front or back in real life, and a maybe 10 second addition to your pitstop is a new bumper. In iRacing it's like 4 minutes of repairs PLUS the aero penalty if you don't fully replace it.
In general the pitstops is a place that can have a lot of improvement done to it. Can't change tires and fuel up at the same time. Ability to swap out body panels or parts like you can tires. Being able to prioritize what part of the car gets fixed first. Adding tire allocations for endurance races so it's not just always a brand new set of tires and then also not being able to replace tires while you are fueling.

the random safety car concept is amazing, especially for 24-hour races

There was a recent comment by staff in the forum that Season 3 will include some improvements to the way traffic is routed between the players and the servers which should decrease latency (ping) and jitter (how much ping fluctuates), which may help improve netcode collisions, among other network issues.

the way he explains this makes online racing seem like a complete miracle

On safety cars:
I remember an event years ago (I remember it was shortly after the Lambo GT3 was added) that I participated in that was testing an automatic safety car script. It actually felt like something that was missing in iRacing events. It would only deploy when there was a big enough incident/crash. It operated based on incidents per second, and when the incidents per second went above the configured threshold, it would deploy the safety car, using the admin chat command. And it was my understanding that the threshold could be modified on the fly, so something like this could be applied to official iRacing events, and have the system automatically increase/decrease the threshold. Like if the system is deploying a lot of safety cars, the threshold increases so they get deployed less, and vice versa. Over time, if no safety car is deployed, maybe the threshold slowly decreases to increase the likelihood an incident would deploy a safety car.

I was at Suzuka for that crash (not at the spot, but at that race (f1 2026 Suzuka, porcshe cup) that was terrifying, there was no English commentary over the track radio so I couldn’t hear if the driver was ok or even if the crowd were for a little while, so spooky)

Thanks for the video

Nailed it. Great video!

1:26 The invisible force spins this car

you didn’t mention one of the most important things for realism. Iracing, even after the new tyre models clearly lacks a progressive grip drop off curve as it still goes away too quickly while surpassing ideal slip angle. Tyres surface temperature sensitivity in general is still a giant thing in iracing as you can’t (unless you wanna be slow) get into the ABS into the straight line braking cause of instant tyre overheating and micro-lockups! Modern ABS systems in GT cars are modelled to help gentleman drivers during the braking, irl you have to lean into the abs

youve been making some great content lately man, keep it up

6:20 curve drop off it's a neat feature funny enough pending your sentiments on PMR but if you watch how the track changes over time curb drop becomes a issue in PMR   it can destabilize your car tho I've haven't  tried to test how severe it gets but visual and to a small extent  it exists  I just wanted to mention tho  nothing more  I've been liking your videos imma hit the subscribe button

The high fidelity of car movement is not really an excuse for the poor netcode performance. They could improve their predictive algorithm, like include cars braking capability and steering input to avoid the overshooting situations and adjust prediction buffer more align to the driver ping.
The removal of dirt and grass seem like something they could implement. But it is going to become a resource hog for a 24h race when all those off-track damages starting to pile up.

10/10 content for breakfast