NASCAR 26: The 5 Features Developers Are Still Working Toward

iRacing Studios Director of Production Matt Lewis sat down with Traxion for a candid interview, and the result is one of the more honest developer conversations NASCAR gaming has seen in years. Lewis laid out five NASCAR 26 features he wants to build into future releases, and none of it sounds like corporate spin.

Also see:
▶ NASCAR 26 Career Mode and Gameplay Upgrades Detailed
▶ NASCAR 26 AI DNFs: Rivals Can Now Retire
▶ Full interview: Five Missing Features, via Traxion

The interview ran August 9 through Thomas Harrison-Lord at Traxion. Lewis also serves as Senior Producer on NASCAR 26 and has been with iRacing Studios through the transition into the NASCAR gaming license. He is not pitching what the game has. He is explaining what it does not have and why.

Racing Every NASCAR Series on Every Track

Currently, players cannot race all four NASCAR series on every venue in the game. Some series and track combinations are simply absent. Lewis says the constraint is resources, not intent.

“It just becomes a ton of resources and a ton of hours put in,” he told Traxion. “We will get there. It just takes a couple of release cycles.”

The annual release model for NASCAR titles means each version ships with whatever the team could finish before its deadline. Because cross-series track access requires track variants, ruleset configurations, and AI calibration for each combination, the workload adds up quickly across a full NASCAR schedule.

A Real Silly Season in NASCAR 26 Career Mode

If you have played career mode, you have probably noticed that rival drivers stay locked to the same teams season after season. Nobody moves. NASCAR is built on off-season drama, and the game currently skips all of it.

Lewis says meaningful silly season mechanics are coming. “We want to get there. We will get there,” he told Traxion. He also shared that the team has had conversations with NASCAR, the teams, and sponsors, and that everyone is on board with the direction.

However, the complexity is real. “There are a ton of entities involved,” Lewis explained. “You have got drivers, you have got sponsors, you have got teams, you have OEMs, and in some cases lifetime contracts.” Getting all of that to animate dynamically between career seasons is a different engineering problem from building individual race gameplay.

Terminal Damage That Can End Your Race

Crashes in NASCAR 26 do not retire your car. You can hit the wall hard, absorb contact from multiple cars, and keep going with no real consequences beyond pace loss. Real NASCAR does not work that way.

Lewis acknowledged the gap directly. “It is honestly just a prioritization thing,” he said. “It is really hard to take that actual step until we get further down the road and can put more resources against it.”

The technical challenge compounds with field size. “If you start getting into a situation where all 40 cars are individually damaged to different levels, it just gets so labor intensive,” Lewis explained. For now, terminal damage is aspirational. In the meantime, AI DNFs from rival drivers already add some consequences to race results.

Caution Replays

When a caution comes out in NASCAR 26, you see a screen telling you what happened. You do not get to watch it. A full replay showing the incident that triggered the yellow flag is not yet in the game.

Lewis says an “involved caution screen” is coming soon, but full caution replays remain further out. “We know we need to get it. It will come,” he told Traxion. “It is just, again, brutally difficult.”

This one sounds simple from the outside but turns out complicated in practice. Capturing the right moment, identifying the triggering car, and stitching together a watchable clip during an active race requires more infrastructure than most players would expect.

Split-Screen Multiplayer

Split-screen is the feature Lewis spent the most time explaining, and for good reason. Rendering a 40-car NASCAR race is already demanding on any platform. Doing it twice on the same screen is a different challenge entirely.

“When you have a racing game with 40 cars on the track, you already have a difficult time rendering,” Lewis said. “When you do it twice on the same screen, it gets really expensive computationally.”

He was realistic but not dismissive. “We have got to come up with the right design and start working on it over time so that we can ultimately get there,” he said.

What These NASCAR 26 Features Mean Going Forward

Worth stating clearly: none of this is confirmed for a specific release. Lewis was not announcing a patch schedule or a DLC roadmap. Instead, he was sharing what the development team wants to build and explaining honestly why those things are not in the game yet.

That distinction matters. If you are buying NASCAR 26 expecting any of these five things at launch, they are not there. But Lewis’s willingness to talk openly about the gaps, rather than pretend they do not exist, is the most encouraging part of this interview. The franchise is paying attention to what fans want.