iRacing 2.0 has arrived

With 2011 Season 3 of the world's premier online racing sim series comes its latest major iteration; iRacing 2.0. The biggest feature of the new release is the new tire model, or "NTM", delivering remarkably authentic performance. The NTM is now installed on a number of cars including the Ford GT and Skip Barber F2000. It's expected we'll see the NTM rolled out across all cars during the course of this season.

V8 Supercar driver Shane Van Gisbergen has been working closely with the iRacing team to bring the NTM to the Ford Falcon V8 Supercar. He had this to say in a recent blog update:

"Up until now, race simulations have based their tires on a sort of reverse engineering process, where they take the performance numbers of real tires and try to mimic them as closely as possible. Instead, the iRacing people have made a massive effort to understand the fundamental physics of tire performance in order to create virtual tires that inherently behave like real tires rather than as the result of artificially tinkering with their performance to make them match-up with a set of arbitrary numbers."

2.0 also sees two new cars and two new tracks. The iconic Ford GT and the incredible HPD ARX01 make their arrival, alongside Iowa Speedway and Japan's Suzuka Circuit.

iRacing 2.0 [iRacing.com]