Good day,
I just want to sincerely apologize to all members, especially those who compete in series that involve the NASCAR Cup cars.
Drivers in the Chevy Camaro ZL1 car were at a slight disadvantage to the Toyota and Ford cars in that series, since May 5th, 2021 especially at tracks in which aero matters more. All the NASCAR Cup cars have identical physics, or at least they did up until May 5th.
What happened on May 5th, is we accidentally checked in a developmental aero file into a patch intended to be a member patch for the Chevy Cup Car only. There are hundreds of files that we merge (and don’t merge) when we do a software update. We are extremely diligent and have a very solid process when we are selecting files for member updates. In fact, I can’t ever remember this happening. It is also why we move from test environment to test environment and finally to members, testing and doing QA along the way obviously. For major updates we branch off from all other development for weeks before a build as another protection. For small patches the timing works differently obviously, it is why those updates are very small/focused and conservative, aimed mainly at fixing bugs. This error was not caught in QA and on the member site for almost a month. But we screwed up and are reviewing our file merge process and policies. We can take the process a step further and we will as another safeguard.
About an hour before the Coke Race Tuesday night, drivers notified us that there was a problem. Scrambling to verify the problem and communicate, with the feedback we had and 15 years of experience of making these occasional decisions, we made the call to run the race. Understanding we could always void the results after the fact. We decided to let the results stand but added a drop week.
We were transparent with the drivers, teams and posted on the private forums yesterday morning and had a call yesterday morning with NASCAR to discuss the issue, we apologized to them as well.
I just wanted to apologize to those involved in that series and to all the members who have competed with those cars since May 5th. It was just a simple mistake; we have no excuses. It is now fixed on members.
The integrity of the competition is super important to us as is continuing to improve the quality of the sim. If anything, we are adding even more resources aimed at those objectives. We hope you will notice the results in the months and years to come.
Again our apologies and thank you for being members. We know you have many choices. We will be working as hard as ever to continue to improve iRacing.
Tony Gardner
President
