What is Sim Sense? An early look at the iRacing coaching app

The problem it’s built for

Most iRacing drivers who want to get quicker are already doing the obvious stuff. They watch onboard videos, download a fast setup, and maybe load a quicker driver’s lap into a telemetry viewer. Then they sit there staring at two overlaid speed traces, knowing they’re slower through Turn 5 and having no idea why.

That gap between knowing where you lose time and knowing why is where most people stall. The data is all there. iRacing records throttle, brake, steering, speed and gear dozens of times a second, and anyone can pull it up. What’s missing is the interpretation. A speed trace that dips lower than the reference lap through a corner could mean you braked too early, braked too hard, released the brake too suddenly, turned in too early, missed the apex, or got back to throttle late. Those are six different problems with six different fixes, and a single line on a graph doesn’t tell you which one you’ve got.

I’ve watched plenty of drivers (myself included, for longer than I’d like to admit) respond to that uncertainty by simply trying harder. Brake later, carry more speed, push. Sometimes it works for a lap. More often it adds incidents and makes the lap times noisier without making them faster, because the real problem was somewhere else entirely.

We built Sim Sense to close that gap. The tagline on the site says it plainly: “Know why you’re slow. And how to get faster.” The rest of this post walks through what it actually does, what’s free, and where it stands right now, because it’s still early and we’d rather you knew exactly what you’re signing up for.

How it works

A small desktop companion runs alongside iRacing and records your laps while you drive. You don’t have to export files, name sessions or remember to hit a button before you go out. You drive, and the laps are captured.

Each lap is then compared against a reference lap in the same car at the same track. That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of coaching advice is generic: “be smooth”, “use all the track”, “brake in a straight line”. Useful as far as it goes, but the right brake point for Turn 2 at Laguna Seca in a Global Mazda MX-5 is nowhere near the right one in a GT3 car, and the amount of trail brake a Skip Barber wants is very different from what an ABS-equipped GT4 car will tolerate. Measuring you against a quick lap in the same machinery means your scores reflect the gap to someone properly fast in the same situation you’re in. A theoretical ideal is no use if nobody actually drives that way.

From there, Sim Sense breaks every corner down and scores it. You get a read on which specific part of your technique is responsible, in which corner, so you’re not left decoding a speed deficit yourself. If you’ve read our guide on how to read iRacing telemetry, you’ll recognise the logic: it’s the same comparison a good coach would make by eye, done for every corner of every lap.

The 26 skills

The scoring covers 26 driving skills, grouped into six areas:

  • Braking: threshold braking, trail braking, brake point accuracy, lock-up prevention, brake release smoothness
  • Steering: input smoothness, turn-in, mid-corner corrections, counter-steer response
  • Acceleration: throttle smoothness, traction management, exit speed
  • Gear changes: downshift timing, gear choice, upshift timing
  • Racing line: apex accuracy, track width usage, line consistency, minimum corner speed
  • Consistency: lap to lap, brake points, speed, line, sectors and incident rate

The reason for splitting it this finely is that driving problems rarely show up where you’d expect. A driver who thinks they have a corner entry problem often has a brake release problem. Someone convinced their exits are poor might be losing the exit before they ever touch the throttle, because the apex was a car width early and they had to wait for the car to straighten. Scoring each skill separately lets you see the actual cause.

Scoring is per corner, which is important for a practical reason. Very few drivers are uniformly weak at something. You might trail brake nicely into the long, fast-ish entries and then chop the brake off abruptly into every hairpin. Your average trail braking score across a lap would hide that completely. Broken down by corner, the pattern is obvious, and so is where to spend your practice time.

The consistency group deserves a mention on its own, because it’s the one most people underrate. Lap-to-lap variation in brake points and line is often worth more than raw pace, especially in races, and it’s the thing that separates a driver who sets one good qualifying lap from one who finishes races near the front. We’ve written more about that in our consistency guide.

What to fix first

You won’t get a wall of graphs. Your weaknesses are ranked, and every one links to a lesson and a drill. When Sim Sense tells you your brake release is abrupt into slow corners, the next step is an actual exercise you can go and do, and you don’t have to go digging through YouTube or forum threads hoping someone has described your exact problem.

To make that concrete, picture a fairly typical MX-5 driver at Laguna Seca, running a couple of seconds off the pace. Their own guess is that they’re losing time down the Corkscrew, because that’s the corner everyone talks about. The per-corner breakdown tells a different story: the biggest deficit is in the slow left-handers, Turn 2 and Turn 11, where their brake trace drops straight to zero at turn-in. The car loses front grip at the exact moment they ask it to rotate, it pushes wide, and they wait for it before getting back on the throttle. That shows up as a weak brake release smoothness score in those two corners and a knock-on hit to exit speed. The linked lesson is on trail braking, and the drill is a one-corner exercise at a heavy braking zone.

That’s a much better use of a practice session than another 40 laps of “just push harder”. It also stops you chasing the wrong thing. Ranking matters because most of us have a dozen small flaws, and trying to work on all of them at once is how you end up improving none. Pick the top one or two, drill them, drive again, see if the score moves.

If that example sounds familiar, our trail braking guide covers the technique in detail, and it’s a good read before your first session.

Your iRacing history in one place

Link your iRacing account and Sim Sense pulls in your race history. You get iRating and safety rating over time, your win rate, and results broken down by car and track.

Most of us have a rough feeling about which combinations suit us, and in my experience that feeling is often wrong. You remember the one great race at Okayama and forget the four where you lost rating there. Seeing results split by car and track shows you where you’re genuinely strong and which combinations keep eating your iRating week after week. That’s worth knowing when you’re deciding which weeks of a season to race hard and which to sit out or treat as practice.

The history view also gives you a longer-term picture that’s easy to lose. iRating moves around a lot race to race, and a bad weekend can make it feel like you’ve gone backwards. Looking at the trend over a few months, alongside the technique scores improving in practice, is a healthier way to judge progress. If rating is the thing you care about most, our piece on how to improve your iRating goes into what actually moves it.

Courses, drills and what’s free

Alongside the analysis there’s a structured course library that runs from the fundamentals up to advanced technique. Weaknesses in the analysis link straight into lessons and drills, so the path from “here’s your weakness” to “here’s how to fix it” is short. You can also work through a level from the start if you’d rather build things in order. The first three lessons of every level are free.

The free tier also includes the telemetry analysis and the racer analytics, meaning your iRacing stats and history dashboard. That’s the core of the product: the per-corner skill scoring against a reference lap, the ranked weaknesses, and the iRacing history view. We made that call deliberately, because the analysis is the part that shows you what Sim Sense can do with your own driving.

Where it stands today

Sim Sense is in early access. You can join the waitlist on the Sim Sense website, and we’re letting people in in batches so we can keep an eye on how things behave with real drivers and real laps.

For now it supports iRacing only. That’s a deliberate focus. iRacing’s telemetry is detailed and consistent, and the people racing it tend to care a lot about improving, which is exactly who we’re building for.

New features get previewed in the Sim Sense Discord, and that’s also where members vote on what we build next. Early access means things will change, and some of those changes will come directly from what people ask for there. If something is confusing or doesn’t match what you feel from the cockpit, that’s the place to say so.

Is it for you?

If you’ve hit a plateau, keep dropping the same tenths in the same corners, and “brake later” isn’t cutting it any more, it’s worth getting on the list. The same goes if you’re newer to iRacing and want to build good habits early, before the bad ones set in. A lot of the drivers who get stuck at a particular rating have simply been practising the wrong thing for a long time.

You’ll get the most out of it by driving a proper practice stint (15 to 20 clean laps at a track you know) before reading too much into the scores, then picking the top weakness and working on only that for a session or two. Scores from a single lap in cold tyres don’t tell you much, and neither does a session where you were trying five new things at once.

While you’re waiting for access, our checklist on why you might be slow in iRacing is a good way to start thinking about your driving in the same terms.