Running a Sim Racing League

This week we hold the final race in our Winter League Drive Simulations . The team called The Regime, ushered in a new one with a comprehensive victory, after missing out on first place by a single point last season. This seasons victory was more emphatic, with a 100+ points gap to second place.

We’ve found that the league is greatly appreciated by our customers and also provides us a way to turn a quiet week night into one of our busiest evenings.

Here I’ll outline how we structure our league nights, the work that is involved to set them up and run them, before looking at the impact that they have on our business.

Structure

Our DriveSims location in Concord, CA, has 6 simulators, so we structure our league nights around six teams?—?one team per simulator. Each team has three drivers, for a total of 18 people in the league.

Each league night consists of a car and track combination, which we run three times in an evening. These three heats allow each of the three racers in a team to compete. Points are allocated to drivers based on finishing position in their own heat, and all drivers points are added together at the end of the night to form the team points.

We try and vary the content or theme of each league to provide some variety. The first one, for example, was with GT3 class cars and each team could choose their own car but would need to stick with it through the whole league. Our second one started off in race spec Miata’s and progressed through GT4, GT3 to open wheel cars. The latest league visited six countries with a strong motorsport heritage, pairing cars and tracks from that country. We raced Mercedes Benz at Hockenheim, McLarens at Brands Hatch and Indy cars around Indianapolis.

In the search for variety, we also included a mini endurance race in our last league. This saw us doing a 2.4 hrs of Le Mans in LMP cars. Driver swaps and tire strategy became more important here and added a new element to the evening.

Good quality, good rules, good racing

When choosing the theme for the league, we’ve found that it is important to look at the quality of the car & track models. Assetto Corsa is the simulation software that we use, which is great due to its modding community and the wide range of cars and tracks that are available. Its down side, is the modding community and the wide range of quality in the mods that they produce. It is definitely worth testing each car and track before making it available to customers for commercial use. Finding a bad one that wont load is quite rare, though also look at the ability to configure the car set-up. League racers want to set up their cars to their preferences, so being able to change gear ratios, brake balance and tire types are capabilities built into the better car mods.

With good quality car and track models, we then complete a test drive for each. Does the track provide a sufficient challenge for the car? Is it suitable? You likely don’t want to race the Indianapolis 500 in a Fiat 500.

Just as important to making the league fun are the rules and driver etiquette expected on the night. Close competition makes for a good race, but get too close and hit another car and you can ruin someones race and create some tension in the room. We’ve got a great crowd who comes to the DriveSims league night and don’t have any bad sportsman ship, which we’re grateful for. However, they’re a competitive bunch and all spend the entire evening looking for the smallest edge against each other. We’ve added to our league rules each season, as we learn and respond to racing incidents.

Now, between the track limits being monitored by Real Penalty and the ability it gives us to issue penalties manually and with the rules defined in our league rules we are able to officiate any issue. We attempt to make a call during the race where possible and make a note of incident time & the cars involved if we need to review replays at the end of the race. Ensure that automated capture of replays is enabled on each sim & your race control PC.

Each league, we get some returning customers and some new ones. Our first week is always orientation night, where we open up the sims for free-play and take about 20 mins to talk through the league structure, rules and expectations. This allows everyone to come into the first race night the week after, with familiarity of how to use the simulators, race start procedures and to meet their team mates.

Setup

Beyond spending time thinking through the variety and theme that each league will contain, there are a few tasks required to operate the league.

We collect league fees to cover the simulator time used by each driver. Eventbrite gives us a way to make those tickets available, and as we sell under 25 tickets, there is no fee levied by Eventbrite to use their service, which is appreciated.

The mechanics of operating the league, by which I mean the recording of team names, drivers per team, collection of lap times and results, posting those results to a leaderboard and allocating points for the league is all handled by our software platform, DriveOS.

We built DriveOS to run our sim racing venue. It greatly simplifies the records and operations of running a league. Our last league took about 20 mins to set up and needs about the same time in maintenance each week. Easily achievable during the league night and maintains our objective of operating our venue with one member of staff.

This diagram shows the different concepts and data that we need to establish to run a league.

A points based leaderboard is the first thing to create. We’re also able to create a time based board that we use for hot lap challenges. This gives us a name for the series, such as ‘DriveSims Winter League’, and a leaderboard that automatically posts to our website.

From there you can set up three concepts that comprise the league:

1. Teams: We ask for team names to be assigned on orientation night and most teams give theirs the next week during our first race. Response rate improved after I threatened to allocate names that were based on awful puns, if they didn’t choose their own pretty quickly. :)
2. Ranked Races: is where we set which races will comprise the league. For us there are eighteen ranked races; six different race combinations of car and track, with three heats per night.
3. Race Dispersion: is a table showing how many points are awarded to racers based on their finishing position. We copy the F1 points table.

With all of this in place, users are added into teams. Everyone at DriveSims can create their own racer name, which is used for both making reservations and logging into the simulators and automated logging of their lap times.

All of these elements mentioned above are set up before orientation night. Leaving just one, Race Results, to be completed on the night. Entering this is as simple as looking at the auto-generated results file, applying any time based penalties that were incurred during the race, and adding this into DriveOS.

A step-by-step guide to setting up a sim racing league in DriveOS is available here . DriveOS is available for $50 per month, per sim and offers reservations, credit card processing, leaderboards, subscriptions, gift cards and is designed specifically to run operations for sim racing venues.

With all of this done, we’re able to update league tables within minutes of a race finishing. This allows our guests to see the fruits of their labors before they leave the store in the evening, and spurs conversation about how to close the gap to the team in front.

League Night

We started DriveSims because we enjoy sim racing. As with any business, there is a lot of work and preparation that goes into creating fun experiences for your customers. I’m grateful that with the steps we go through above to get the league set up, we’re mostly free on league night to be able to enjoy the racing and time with our customers.

We set up each race weekend on the servers with a long practice session, a 10 min qualifying and a 10 min race. The long practice session means that when league starts at 7pm, customers are able to get straight on their simulator and start practicing. We’re then able to advance to the first qualifying race, often about 15 mins later, once everyone has arrived and we’re ready for the first heat. Once quali is done, the race will auto start afterwards. Upon race completion, the server rolls over to the long practice session automatically — giving each team time to change their drivers, and giving us time to complete any incident reviews and log race results.

Logging race results is the only admin that we need to do on the night. This is simply done by loading the Assetto Corsa results JSON file and we upload it to SimResults to make it readable. From there we copy the results into the Race Results screen of DriveOS , having factored in any time penalties issued.

Business impact

League nights are a natural choice for our business as they’re both fun and competitive. Our customers value both. Beside the enjoyment that we get from running them, they’re also a great way to bring people into the store on a quieter night. As a location based entertainment business, the weekends are busy and weekdays not so much. Our league nights run either on a Tuesday or Wednesday night.

There are a few ways that running a league benefits us.

1. First and foremost, we get to offer a fun, competitive and social event for our members. This is why we opened DriveSims, to create a place where auto enthusiasts can meet and compete. With many returning customers, and good feedback, we believe that we are offering a unique and fun experience.
2. League Fees. We charge $175 per driver, so bring in $3,150 in league fees each season. With 6 races and an orientation night, customers are paying $25 per night which is the same as we charge for a 30 min simulator session. We’ve aimed to make this good value and are happy with the pricing level, as it turns a quiet Wednesday into a busy one.
3. We provide prizes for the top 3 finishing teams. Not that our customers need any more incentive to race hard! The prize pool is around $500 in cash, with most of it going to the winning team. We also give gift vouchers for use on DriveSims.com . This season, we partnered with Le Pit Club , a local car club who sponsored our league and provided the prize money. Thank you.
4. Practice makes perfect. League members typically book 4.5 sessions to practice on the simulators. Adding about $100 per person, for about $1,800 in total.

Future Competitions

We’ll continue to run a league each season while there is customer demand for them. Creating new themes and challenges each seasons should keep this fresh for our returning customers. I’m thinking of a ‘create your own adventure’ style series, where each team gets to decide one weeks car & track combination.

New this season was a Time Attack Championship that opened up the competition to single racers. We’d heard that many people wanted to compete in the league, but were unable to make the weekly time commitment. The Time Attack Championship uses the same six car and track combinations, and runs a hot lap challenge for each. Over the 6 week duration of the league, customers can set their best lap times on each of these tracks. We’ll issue points to the top 10 drivers per leaderboard at the end of the championship, and issue points. The driver with the most points across all leaderboards will win $750 in prize money, again thanks to our sponsor, Le Pit Club .

The Time Attack Championship is also designed to find the fasted racers at DriveSims. I love the idea of competitive races between sim racing venues, and we’ll be taking our 6 fastest drivers from this league to represent DriveSims in future inter-venue competitions.

Thanks

I have enjoyed writing this and hope that it finds its way into the hands of anyone wanting to open a new sim racing venue.

I’d love to hear feedback on this article and also any ideas for future articles. I can be reached at [email protected] and thanks for reading.