When iRacing acquired Monster Games in 2022, a development team with a long NASCAR game lineage, and then the rights to make NASCAR video games in 2023, it was an ideal matchup.
Operating under the then newly dubbed iRacing Studios umbrella, it then had to create a new platform for future, yearly, stock car titles in short order. It would also use the Unreal Engine graphics tech for the first time, too.
No mean feat, but with the release of NASCAR 25 last October, the treadmill was up and running. There’s no rest for the wicked when it comes to annual releases; just ask the teams behind the MotoGP or Formula 1 games, although the latter has just been afforded a year off from releasing. Mind you, it made 16 in a row before the well-earned sabbatical.
So with NASCAR 26 just around the corner, this year’s version adds dynamic track surfaces, AI improvements, career mode revisions, lighting upgrades, tyre model changes (especially under braking) and a litany of smaller tweaks. From the RAM truck to the Coronado Street Course venue and a ‘Peak Performance’ training and challenge area.
Yet, there’s always room for improvement, and further, more fundamental, features the community has been requesting.
Director of Production and Senior Producer at iRacing Studios, Matt Lewis, recently took part in a Q&A session and covered not just some of this year’s latest additions, but what the team would like to work on and add to future releases as it “builds this thing into an epic franchise over the long haul.”
Why can’t you race every series on every track in NASCAR 26?
Much like its predecessor, you cannot take a Cup car and race it on every venue, such as the St. Petersburg track – a newly added venue that, in the real world, only the Truck Series visited.
“I think we have 32 tracks, times the four series, times all the difficulty levels, running AI lines, all that stuff,” explains Lewis, with regards to the in-game restrictions.
“It just becomes a ton of resources and a ton of hours put in.
“We will get there. As long as I am on this title, it will come eventually. It just takes a couple of [release] cycles to get to that point.”
“Meaningful” ‘Silly Season’ conversations for the future
In the single-player career mode of NASCAR 25, and now confirmed to be the case in NASCAR 26 too, drivers so not swap teams at the end of each season.
This is a feature in the EA-published F1 games, and has been since 2019, and the Milestone-created MotoGP games since 2024. Even past NASCAR games, such as the EA Sports titles in the ‘00s, featured driver retirements and rookie drivers filling seats.
However, according to Lewis, the development team “will get there” and there have been conversations with NASCAR and the real-world teams to try and resolve this in future instalments:
“Let me just talk about silly season here for a second.
“In NASCAR, there are a ton of entities involved. You’ve got drivers, you got sponsors, you’ve got teams, you have OEMs, and you have, in some cases, lifetime contracts with either sponsors or OEMs.
“Some of the OEMs have their own driver development programs where they’ve taken a kid from literally 10 or 12 years old in a go kart and funded him his entire life.
“These things weren’t as prominent 25-30 years ago, back when we were doing the EA Games. They still existed in some level back then, but it wasn’t a walled garden as much as it is today.
“That’s not to say we’re not going to get there again. This is another personal one for me where I think silly season and [the] rumour mill, [such as] ‘Ex driver is retiring, and there’s a shot to take over his ride’… It’s all about the emotion and the immersion of Career Mode.
“We want to get there. We will get there. We’ve had some meaningful conversations this season, actually, with the NASCAR teams and NASCAR themselves, and everybody’s on board.”
More detailed, and terminal, damage
“So there’s no terminal damage. It’s honestly just a prioritisation thing,” explains Lewis.
In this year’s new game, which releases in September, your AI rivals will occasionally DNF, and the player can DNF via the pause menu, a feature that allows you to skip rounds (if you so choose) in the career.
But, in order to have retirement-inducing damage from a wreck, inherent game characteristics will need significant change. Will it happen one day? Maybe, but there are some fundamental characteristics to NASCAR racing that could prevent it.
“We’re constantly doing things behind the scenes, we’re constantly making it better,” according to Lewis.
“It’s just really hard to take that actual step and say, ‘Hey, we’re really going to focus on it’ until we get further down the road and we can put more resources against it.
“Like I said, when there aren’t other super high priorities going on.”
NASCAR 26 Kyle Larson pre-order paint scheme
There are other factors, specific to NASCAR racing, that need to be considered.
“Is really good-looking damage going to affect graphics?
“At the end of the day, it just is. There are 40 cars in the field.
A lot of these other racing games that focus on damage have 12 cars in the field. 20, maybe. We have 40.
“If you start getting into a situation where all 40 cars are individually damaged to different levels and everything’s 100% unique, it just gets so labour intensive.
“These consoles, they are what they are, right? It’s not like a gaming PC where you can just tweak the settings up or down depending on the graphics card that you have and things like that, like it has to just work on the consoles.”
Caution replays
Not a significant feature for most contemporary racing games, a quick action replay of what caused a caution is something near and dear for NASCAR gamers. After all, it was a beloved feature in past instalments, adding a sense of immersion, replicating a race weekend’s broadcast.
In a recent trailer for the latest release, an “involved caution screen” feature was mentioned. This amounts to a halfway house addition. “A TV broadcast style overlay that shows who was involved,” says Lewis.
And the caution replays?
“We know we need to get it. It will come. It’s just again, brutally difficult,” he explains.
“You have to save all sorts of extra states during the race. I won’t say it’s free, but it’s kind of tied to mid-race saves.
“You have to do a very similar amount of technical things to have mid-race saves as you would with a caution replay. So typically, in history, when you get one, you get the other at the same time kind of deal.”
Split-screen multiplayer
NASCAR 26 does not have local split-screen multiplayer, and it sounds as if this one isn’t necessarily a near-term feature for the now confirmed NASCAR 27, either (Lewis confirmed in the same Q&A that “we’ve already pieced off some people to start working on 27”).
It’s a feature that’s not been completely written off, however.
“I would never say never, but it is another one of those things where to do it right and to do it in the way that iRacing Studios would want to do it requires a massive undertaking of optimisation in the graphics engine to get it back.
“This is less a NASCAR problem and more where the [racing game] market has shifted in general problem.
“I’m a dad. I love sitting on the couch playing with my kids back in the day as well. But it comes down to graphics and where we are in terms of rendering.
“When you have a racing game with 40 cars on the track, you already have a difficult time rendering and making things look good. Then when you do it twice on the same screen, plus you do it a third and a fourth time for both rear view mirrors, a fifth and a sixth time for the smaller mirrors that are on the side panels of the cars, it gets really expensive computationally to render.
“And then you only have two choices at that point. You can make it look worse, you can turn things off, or you can kind of just turn the quality down overall on the game.”
Ultimately, a frank and open Q&A session highlighted the challenges of releasing a game every 12 months. It can be a grind. But, says Lewis, there’s a grand plan:
“We’ve got to come up with the right design and start working on it over time so that we can ultimately get there.
“The big thing I always tell people is I think it’s kind of a mixed bag in some people’s favourites of whether it was like [NASCAR] 05 or [NASCAR] 06 or whatever. But all those Career Mode ones, it’s the fifth or sixth iteration of that NASCAR game when they finally got the pinnacle of what the Career Mode was supposed to be. We’re on that track, we’re going to get there.”