Manual › Chapter 05

Performance: telemetry and coach

Records, recorded sessions, lap comparison, the lap coach, corner-by-corner guide and setup comparison.

What is in here#

The Performance tab gathers everything that says how fast you are, and where you can see it. It has five sections:

Almost everything in here comes from the companion: without it the tab stays empty. The desktop companion explains how to get it running.

Records#

The board of best laps, per car + track combination. Three boards: outright, seasonal, team. Dry and wet are separate, because comparing them would mean nothing.

Only a clean lap counts: zero incidents, no pit, no off-track. Even one driven alone, in a practice session.

Bringing yesterday's laps to the board#

Laps driven before you installed the companion are not lost: iRacing wrote them to disk and the companion can read them.

1. Open the companion and go to Recorded sessions.
2. Select the sessions you want — filter by car or track if there are many.
3. Press ↑ Share the times.

They appear on the board straight away. Times and conditions are sent, never setups or racing lines, and re-importing the same session does not create duplicates.

Sessions#

Sessions are gathered by car + track combination: within a combination times compare with each other, across combinations they do not.

Open a session and you get the list of laps with time, litres and notes. Tap a lap to add it to the comparison — up to four at once. The first one picked is the reference, the others are measured against it.

What you want to look at#

A session reads from three points of view, which are three tabs.

Analysis#

Where you were on track and what you were doing there, together.

• The map draws the real racing line taken from the simulator. Colour says what the feet were doing: acceleration, braking, trail braking (brake still applied while the car turns) and coasting. The percentages are shares of the lap time.
• The lens magnifies the stretch of track around the point you are looking at, at the scale where a racing line can actually be read. One click pins the point: you can move the mouse and the reading stays, another click unpins it.
• The grey ribbon is the tarmac actually used by the team's laps on that track. Those are not the real kerbs, but it is the right reference for seeing who holds the apex and who runs wide.
• The channels below: time delta, speed, throttle and brake, steering, gear, engine revs. With a single lap each panel has its own colour; with several laps compared, each line takes the colour of its lap.

The lesson#

The lap coach: why you lost time, and the thing to try next time out.

Where the time goes breaks the lap into corners and, for each corner, into three phases: braking, mid-corner, traction. Red where you lose, green where you gain. You can sort by time lost — starting with the corner that costs most — or by lap order.

Then the coach names the cause. The possible causes are always the same, and each has something to try:

Data#

Setup, full table, drivers and the practice programme.

• Setup — every lap carries its own. Comparing two setups shows what changes on track: median lap time, top speed, understeer in slow and fast corners, oversteer on entry and under power, braking instability. Session measurements (temperatures, hot pressures, fuel) are excluded: they are not choices.
• Setup analysis — for each corner, the minimum speed, degrees of steering per lateral g and the counter-steer on entry and exit, with the symptoms that follow and suggestions for adjustment.

• Driver board — knowing who is fast is not enough to decide who to put in the car for six hours. Three measures live here: yield (how much faster or slower someone is than the time their iRating would predict), consistency (the standard deviation of laps around their pace) and cleanliness (incident points per hour of driving). Race and practice are never mixed, and only dry laps count.

Compare#

It answers one question: where am I slower.

Pick a track and a car. Your laps are on the left, references on the right — from the team or from everyone. The first is the reference, the second the comparison.

Never driven there?#

Even with no lap of your own, the app writes the corner-by-corner lap guide. A good lap already says everything: where it brakes, how hard, how far it trails, the minimum speed it reaches, where the throttle comes back. It becomes a card per corner, in the terms a driver thinks in: braking point, brake, entry, trail, apex, throttle, exit.

Tapping a row narrows the map and the channels onto that corner.

Racing line: entry, apex, exit#

When you compare two laps, a table says how much wider (+) or tighter (−) one runs than the other, in metres, towards the outside of the corner — on entry, at the apex and on exit. Below a certain threshold it is not a difference: it is how much you repeat yourself.

My sessions#

What the companion has recorded: laps, laps with a racing line, combinations, sessions.

The nightly pruning#

Every night the best 20 laps per combination are kept, plus every lap from the last two weeks. Of the rest, the statistics survive — and those are what feed the race plan.

A star on a lap or a session shelters it from pruning.

Sessions on your PC#

The list of telemetry files iRacing has written on your computer, announced by the companion. From here you choose which ones to bring to the board: the companion reads their times and sends them.

You can filter by session type and minimum number of laps, and sort by date, speed, laps or size.

Paces#

Your race pace is your reference time for a car + track combination. It is the number that sets the length of your stints: stint length = laps per tank × the driver's pace.

There are two ways to fill it in, and the second is the one you want.

1. By hand#

Type the time. Entries typed by hand are never overwritten by automatic imports.

2. From your own sessions#

📡 Paces from your sessions → Compute from my laps: it takes the median of the valid laps recorded by the companion. At least 3 valid laps on a combination are required.

Along with the pace come the fuel usage and the laps per tank, measured on those same laps, which the race plan uses as starting values.

Next to each pace is a button that opens the session it came from: you can always trace back the reason for a number.

The driver coach#

The lap coach looks at one lap. The driver coach looks at a period: it takes your recent clean laps on a combination, reads them all against the same reference, and says what keeps happening.

• Session by session: best lap, median and spread, with the trend.
• What keeps coming back, and how it is going: the habits appearing in more than a third of the laps. If one was flagged in the past, it tells you what it was then and what it is now.
• To train this week: the thing worth working on first.

The live coach, in the companion#

The same engine, without waiting for the end of the session. As soon as the companion closes a clean lap it compares it and, in a second, says in one line where the time went and what to try next lap — against the team's best lap on that combination, or against your own, as you prefer.

Out loud, if you want: you cannot read while driving.