iRacing officials couldn’t have asked for a much better show than the one they got to kick off their television journey on March 22.
At the end of an entertaining 150-mile simulation, Denny Hamlin edged Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a slam-banging photo finish to win the first eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series race at virtual Homestead-Miami (Fla.) Speedway.
The supernova of social media reactions — with the #ProInvitationalSeries hashtag ranking No. 1 in trending topics on Twitter and generating more than a million engagements — proved two things.
First, iRacing had a winning recipe. Second, it was one that was set to be replicated in short order.
“We knew we had done well,” Myers admitted, “but I don’t even think we were completely ready for how quickly things grew after that first race at Homestead.”
The Homestead broadcast pulled a viewership of 903,000 people, making it the most-watched esports broadcast in history. It opened the floodgates.
Almost like wildfire, other series began jumping on the iRacing bandwagon. IndyCar, IMSA, the World of Outlaws and more started working with Myers and company to organize their own Pro Invitationals, while FOX Sports ordered a pickup of any and all remaining eNASCAR invitational events.
In an even bigger move, the eNASCAR events were given a simulcast on the FOX broadcast network and also distributed to NASCAR’s international broadcast partners.
“It’s just been remarkable,” Myers said. “I don’t think I realized it until now (April 6), but I haven’t had a day off since the Sunday before the Atlanta race weekend. We’ve been working every day, 16 to 20 hours a day every day since then, just to get everything where it needs to be and to make all this happen.”
Within 30 days, esports racing events ran the spectrum — from grassroots short-track races and all the way up to IndyCar and NASCAR events featuring the stars fans are used to seeing on a weekly basis.
In addition to IndyCar iRacing events on Saturdays and NASCAR races on Sundays, there’s even a primetime block on Wednesday nights that FS1 has dedicated to iRacing content, which has largely featured the World of Outlaws sprint cars and late models.
When factoring in iRacing’s existing world championship series — the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series, the World of Outlaws iRacing Sprint Car World Championship and the Porsche TAG Heuer eSports Supercup — iRacing events were streamed online or nationally televised nearly every day of the week.
Though it is — in a word — different, iRacing has been well received by fans around the world.
That’s something in which Myers and Adamson take pride.
“I didn’t expect the outpouring of support from the people that never knew what iRacing was and had no interest in video games, who never imagined in a million years that they’d be watching a video game on TV,” Myers said. “This has been such a great relief to them to be able to, for two hours or whatever it is, just be able to sit at home … forget about the coronavirus, forget about the fact that they’ve lost their jobs and just be able to sit with their families and enjoy two hours of entertainment with the sports that they love, watching the stars that they adore.”
Myers and Adamson know that, at some point, the pandemic will lift and business at race tracks around the world will resume.
But even when that happens, Adamson was quick to point out that iRacing’s business — the business of simulated racing and esports competition — will be forever changed thanks to the stage they’ve been given.
“That’s been the big thing about all this, is the validation of sim racing,” he said. “It was always in the back of people’s mind that they knew it existed, especially people in motorsports, but specifically with us, I think it’s been very well proven now that this is a valid form of motorsports and it’s not just a game. I know a lot of people consider it that way, but it has its purpose and place in this world now.
“I think that’s what the best achievement has been about all this,” Adamson noted. “How many times can you say that we have now sort of risen above other motorsports teams and games to our own destination that has a lot of validation and a lot of respect? You don’t want it to be because of a pandemic or anything like that, but at the same time that was the door that opened for us to be able to do what we’re doing right now.
“People have said that we were made for this moment, and in a way, I can see that as we use what we’ve always been doing in order to fill this gap for the fans.”