iRacing NASCAR Game: Why This Franchise Is Here to Stay

The iRacing NASCAR game franchise is being built for the long term. Lead developer Matt Lewis made that explicit in a Discord AMA this week, and his explanation reframes a lot of the criticism the series gets from people comparing it to games made 20 years ago.

Also see:
▶ NASCAR 26 AMA: Everything Matt Lewis Told Us
▶ iRacing Studios on YouTube

The most common version of that criticism goes like this: why doesn’t the new game have something that a game from 2004 had? Lewis answered that directly. Nothing in NASCAR 26 comes from the Heat era games. Not the engine, not the physics, not the career logic, not any of the systems players remember from that era. iRacing does not own that code. It was built by a different publisher for a different owner, and it’s gone. Everything in the current franchise was rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine. Because of that, a feature that existed 20 years ago can’t be ported over. It has to be built again, the right way, for a new engine and a new platform.

That’s not an excuse. It’s context. It also cuts both ways: rebuilding from scratch means the foundation is better than anything the old games ran on. iRacing’s tracks are laser-scanned. The physics core is the same system the PC sim uses. The vehicle dynamics come from engineers who have worked in actual NASCAR race shops. You couldn’t get any of that by inheriting old code.

The franchise commitment is real in a way it hasn’t historically been for NASCAR games. Lewis said it directly: for most of its existence, the NASCAR gaming license moved from publisher to publisher, with each one doing a few games and leaving. NASCAR’s relationship with game developers has been unstable for a long time. What iRacing is doing is different. NASCAR, the race teams, and iRacing are all aligned on building something that lasts. Work on NASCAR 27 has already started while N26 is still weeks from launch.

Driver involvement adds to that picture. Kyle Larson, Ty Majeski, Anthony Alfredo, Brad Keselowski, Carson Hocevar, and Shane van Gisbergen have all been part of the development process in some form during the N26 cycle. Lewis mentioned a specific effort to get Larson a build to play with his kids and get direct feedback. He also shared a story from N25 development where a group of Rev Racing drivers, including Lavar Scott, saw themselves in a video game for the first time. They remembered the old games from when they were kids. Then they were in one. Lewis described it as a full-circle moment.

The comparison Lewis keeps coming back to is the EA NASCAR franchise from the early 2000s. That series reached its career mode peak around year five or six of the franchise. iRacing is at year two. The physics foundation is already at a level no console NASCAR game has reached before. Everything else is a matter of iteration, time, and the development cycles to build it right.