Manual › Chapter 04

The desktop companion

The application to keep running on your race PC: telemetry, live coach, widgets, overlay, setups and liveries.

What it is for#

The companion is a Windows application that stays running on the computer where iRacing runs. It does the job the browser cannot: talking to the simulator.

Out of it come:

• the live telemetry that feeds the pit wall and the monitor;
• the recorded laps with racing line, sectors and fuel, which become your records and your race paces;
• the live coach, which talks to you after every clean lap;
• the widgets and the overlay on top of the simulator;
• the broadcast gallery;
• the automatic installation of team setups and liveries;
• the alert to your team if you drop offline while on track.

It is not mandatory, but without it the app is left with its organisational half.

Installation is covered in Getting started. Here is what you find inside.

Signing in#

On first launch there is a single button: Sign in. A window opens on the site's sign-in page, you sign in there — with your email or with Discord — and the companion takes the session by itself.

Once only: after that the companion stays signed in.

The window#

At the top: status#

A single line telling you where you are: Waiting for iRacing while the simulator is closed, then the running session with a green dot. Next to it appear the flags the simulator is showing.

Below, four numbers updating in real time: Fuel, Incidents, Position, Lap.

The two banners#

When needed, two banners appear above everything:

• New version available, with the button to download it.
• ⏰ Your next stint, from 60 minutes before check-in time, with the ✔ Confirm check-in button. It is the second place a stint can be confirmed from, the other being the app.

Session#

Track, car, session type and speed. It is there so you can tell at a glance that the companion is watching the right session.

Team#

• Live race — the race crew it is hooked to, if there is one.
• Last upload — when the last packet of data went out. If that number stops growing, the connection has a problem, and a red line says so.
• Telemetry laps — how many complete laps have been recorded in this session.

This is also where the Share session button lives, with the team picker.

Sharing a session#

Outside official races you can let your teammates watch the session you are running: practice, a test, a qualifying run. They find it in the app's Home, under Live sessions, and open it in the same monitor used for races.

State, standings, weather, best lap and the recent laps and stops are shared. No permanent history is kept.

Settings include Always share the session with the team: sharing starts by itself when iRacing opens and stops when it closes.

Overlay widgets#

These are the app's panels taken out of the browser: transparent, always-on-top windows the mouse passes straight through. You keep them on top of the simulator or on top of the race video.

They are the same page as the Monitor: they update from the same data, and each keeps the position you put it in.

Broadcast gallery#

The Open the gallery button opens the desk for whoever streams. iRacing must be open, even just as a spectator. The whole Broadcast gallery chapter is about it.

EndurancePRO on the PC#

Opens the app in a window of its own, without the browser bar. Handy on a second screen during a race.

Live coach#

Opens the coach panel. See Performance: telemetry and coach.

Telemetry on disk#

This card governs the .ibt files iRacing writes into Documents\iRacing\telemetry.

Record sessions to disk is the switch. Those files are where the real racing lines come from: iRacing only publishes actual positions there, while it zeroes them in live telemetry. Without them the lap map stays an approximate reconstruction.

Below you find how much space the folder takes, how many sessions are in it and how old the oldest one is.

Freeing space#

iRacing never cleans that folder, and it grows by gigabytes. You clean it from here:

• Free space deletes sessions older than the number of months you choose.
• Advanced… opens a window listing sessions one by one, filterable by car, track and type, so you decide case by case. A race from six months ago can be worth more than yesterday's practice.

Team files#

Files from the team#

Setups and liveries shared by the team install themselves into iRacing's folders. The livery is renamed with your customer ID, so the simulator recognises it.

Team folder#

The other direction: what you put into that folder reaches all your teammates. The companion publishes it and the others install it themselves.

The same file name means a new version: it overwrites the installed one.

Settings#

The in-race overlay#

A transparent, always-on-top window that does not steal focus from the simulator: the mouse passes through it and iRacing never notices it is there.

It shows what other overlays cannot know, because they do not know your race plan: minutes to the end of your stint or to check-in time, the next driver, fuel range in laps and the team incident budget.

The position stays where you put it.

Le Mans Ultimate#

The companion detects Le Mans Ultimate and tells you whether the plugin that publishes its data (rFactor2SharedMemoryMapPlugin64.dll) is active. Without that plugin no data comes out at all, and without this line nobody would know why.

With the game open it reads the current session: type (practice, qualifying, race), track, number of cars, the full standings and — if you are on track — your own car with position, class and fuel. You see it on the same settings line.

Tray and updates#

Closing the window leaves the companion running in the notification area next to the clock: from there you reopen it, toggle the overlay and actually quit.

Updates download themselves. The button next to the version number forces a check.

When something is not working#

The full list is in Troubleshooting.