How to Get Out of Rookie Class in iRacing Fast (Beginner’s Guide)

I've been sim racing for about 2 years now, primarily on iRacing. I'm now in A Class with just under 2k iRating, but in my early days it took me a worryingly long time to get myself out of Rookie class. I wasn't sure how it worked, what I was doing, or what my path to D Class would be. With the knowledge I have now, I'm going to tell you how to get out of Rookies on iRacing as quickly as possible and still learn the fundamentals in the process.

The Sporting Code is your Bible to iRacing. To race on iRacing you agree you have read it, but please actually do. Not only will it teach you the rules and regulations to abide by, but it will explain how all the ratings systems work. However, I'm going to summarise those here anyway and help you to understand how and why to gain each rating.

Understand How Safety Rating and iRating Work

Safety Rating

Your Safety Rating (SR) on iRacing is a public indicator of your cleanliness as a racing driver and determines your licence class. It is defined as a number between 0.00-4.99. As a Rookie iRacer, you start with 2.50 SR.

Every time you have an incident whilst on track, you'll be awarded 1 or more incident points. It's worth noting that although you will receive incident points in all sessions, they only have an impact on your Safety Rating in ranked sessions, meaning practice, qualifying and race sessions for ranked events. Open practice sessions and unranked races do not count towards your Safety Rating or iRating, however, the Sporting Code still applies (i.e. don't think you can just wreck people for fun in unranked races without being banned)!

Most races will have an incident limit for disqualification. In Rookie races, this is usually 17x (x is a way to denote the amount of incident points received). This means if you are awarded 17x in a single session, you will be disqualified. Longer races often have limits for penalties as well, meaning you may receive a drive through penalty at 17x and then only be disqualified if you reach 25x. The longer the race, typically, the higher the threshold.

Incident points are assigned a multiplier known as corners per incident. This takes the number of corners in a circuit, multiplied by the number of laps completed, and uses it as a multiplier against the number of incident points awarded in that session. Keep in mind that the type of session will also have its own multiplier and your current licence class will have an effect on your multipliers. If you want to go in-depth into how your Safety Rating is calculated, have a read of the Sporting Code.

All these factors and multipliers are used to calculate the change to your Safety Rating during a session. At the end of a race, if you receive only 1 or 2 incident points as a Rookie driver in a 12 minute race, you will most likely gain some Safety Rating.

iRating

iRating (iR) is a measure of a driver's skill behind the wheel, more akin to a typical rating you would see in other video games such as Call of Duty. As a Rookie, you begin with 1350 iR.

Your iRating's main purpose is to be a matchmaking tool. When you enter a session, iRacing will try to place you in a race with other users who have an iRating similar to yours. The average of everyone's iRating in the session forms the Strength of Field (SoF).

Your iRating will increase or decrease at the end of a ranked race based on your finishing position, with your current iRating compared to the SoF used as a multiplier. For example, if you have an iRating of 1350 and finish a race with a SoF of 1500 in 5th position, you'll likely gain iRating. If you finish in the same position in the same race but you have an iRating of 4000, you'll more than likely lose iR, as you are easily expected to win.

Race to Finish, Not to Win

Now that you know how Safety Rating and iRating are calculated and how they differ from each other, you need to know how they work to change your licence class and get you out of Rookies. It's also important to know that they are completely separate. You may gain iRating in a race whilst losing Safety Rating, or vice versa, and Safety Rating is the only one that can help you escape the Rookie torture.

Here's how Licence Classes work:

• If you hold a Rookie class licence, your licence will be instantly promoted to D Class once your Safety Rating reaches 3.0 or higher.
• Promotions to C, B and A Class will happen at the end of the season if your Safety Rating is above 3.0.
• Promotions to C, B and A Class happen instantly if your Safety Rating reaches 4.0 or higher.
• Demotions from A, B and C Class occur at the end of the season if your Safety Rating is below 2.0.
• Demotions from A, B and C Class occur instantly if your Safety Rating falls below 1.0.
• You cannot be demoted to Rookie class.

The Minimum Participation Requirement (MPR) must also be met for a licence promotion to take place. You can read more about MPR in Article 3.4.3 of the Sporting Code.

So that means in order to escape the firey pit of Rookie death and progress through the licence classes, you need to finish each race with as few incident points as possible, regardless of where you finish in the race. Conservative racing, learning the ways of race craft against your fellow Rookies in a respectful manner, will help move you up into D Class where you can progress your skills further with a wider selection of cars and series.

How Do I Race Cleanly?

Different people have different opinions on the best way to go about getting Safety Rating, so I'll go through a couple of the methods, which works most effectively, and which I think is best.

Farming SR

A lot of people believe that when you're in Rookies, participating in races should consist of starting from the pitlane and piddling around at the back avoiding the chaos ahead in order to minimise the chance of being hit with any incident points. I have to agree, this is certainly the most effective method. However, there's two very good reasons why I don't recommend this and wouldn't do it myself, even if I started again now.

Firstly, it's boring. iRacing may be a simulator, but it's also a hobby and we as sim racers spend a huge amount of money, even at the lowest level, to enjoy this hobby. So you should enjoy every chance you get to be behind the wheel and bumbling around at the back will never give you that.

Secondly, Rookie class is designed to be a place where Rookie drivers learn their trade. This means racing, wheel to wheel action, gaining pace, everything. If you're purposely not doing race starts and not involving yourself in battles, you will not learn anything and you will actually be worse off when you start trying to race competitively in D Class. Testing and racing against AI drivers are important for practice, but there's no substitute for racing against real life drivers online and the best place for training yourself in these environments is with other Rookies.

Winning

This is by far and away the worst idea in the list and unless you're already a champion in real life and confident you can out-pace the field by multiple seconds, I do not recommend it.

The problem is, the vast majority of Rookies are new to racing and iRacing may even be their first venture into sim racing. Many drivers will be overconfident but undertalented and the skills of each driver can differ, which can cause a lot of chaos on track. Outrageous divebombs, turn 1 pileups and even intentional wrecking are pretty common in Rookie class. Even if you qualify well and stay clean yourself, it's very possible that you will be caught up in something that's entirely out of your control, especially if you're racing hard in order to win above anything else.

Unfortunately, this is the method I took when I was a Rookie. I was the overconfident, undertalented dunce attempting Michael Schumacher-like overtakes with the talent of a wet sponge. I wanted to enjoy myself and I wanted to race, which I still believe is right, but I didn't do it sensibly and I picked too many fights with cars that were doomed to end in the wall. It's one of many things I would do differently if I was starting from Rookies again. If you want to know more things you should understand before you start, check out my article on 5 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Sim Racing.

If I started again now, here's what I'd do...

Race Conservatively

In my opinion, the best way to get out of Rookies is to run a compromise between racing hard and farming SR, which is racing but racing conservatively. For me, this means taking part in qualifying sessions and starting on the grid, but also knowing when to back off and picking your battles.

It's important to get a good perception of danger when in your car, because seeing and reacting to dangerous situations will be crucial to getting you out of Rookies. This might involve watching YouTube videos (you can check mine out here) and trying to predict incidents before they happen, or just doing a lot of AI races to prepare your reactions for the cars around you. If you can spot a potentially dangerous situation before any incidents actually occur, you can more effectively remove yourself from the chaos and have enough time to take evasive action if necessary.

Not only will this method help give you the Safety Rating you need to progress to D Class with a few solid races, but it will also prepare you for the wheel to wheel action in higher classes and the pressure of completing a race distance with no mistakes. In my belief, this is crucial for your development on iRacing.

It's That Simple

Now you have the fundamental understandings on what is required to get out of Rookie class and how to apply it to your own iRacing journey.

If you would like to see my video on this topic so you can see some visual examples, make sure you watch it here and comment how your iRacing journey is going so far!