CONCORD, N.C. – Logan Seavey is accustomed to dominating races. However, he’s not necessarily accustomed to doing so while sitting barefoot in a lawn chair.
With the racing world on hiatus, the 22-year-old dirt racer has traded the luxury of a full containment seat and fireproof racing attire for the comfort of a dual cup holder, cloth lawn chair and casual clothing that allows him to race against the best drivers in the world on iRacing at his residence in Indiana.
In that time period, so far, he’s won two World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car iRacing Invitationals — in four attempts — one World of Outlaws Morton Buildings Late Model iRacing Invitational and NASCAR’s Saturday Night Thunder event.
He’s been able to do so without the aid of a high-dollar simulator system, too.
“I just have a steering wheel and pedal set up in my room and a monitor,” Seavey said. “Nothing crazy. No real big race simulator setup. I like to have use of a normal computer also, so it makes more sense for me to have it normally.”
While he wouldn’t say no to a more expensive sim rig at some point, Seavey is comfortable with the setup he has now. He was initially using a nine-year-old Logitech G27 steering wheel and pedal setup, but recently upgraded to the Fanatec CSL Elite wheel and pedals.
One setup that hasn’t changed for Seavey is the sprint car setup he’s been using since 2017.
“I raced a lot a long time ago (on iRacing),” Seavey said. “Since 2017 I haven’t raced many races on iRacing. But when I got back on a couple of weeks ago for this World of Outlaws iRacing, I loaded the same exact setup I used in 2017. It was just fast.
“I didn’t really work on setups or anything like that,” he added. “I was just able to get a few practice laps before the first race.”
Growing up in Sutter, Calif. Seavey raced outlaw karts and got into sim racing through his friends he raced with in reality. He ran dirt races on rFactor and pavement races on iRacing – this was before dirt tracks were available on the premier simulation service.
Seavey was a regular in the sim racing world for about nine years before moving to Indiana to further his racing career.
Since his move, he’s won the 2017 POWRi National Midget championship, the 2018 USAC National Midget championship, won an ARCA race in 2018, earned a top-10 finish in his first NASCAR Truck Series start for Kyle Busch Motorsports at Eldora Speedway in 2018 and earned his first USAC National Sprint Car win last year.
Despite all of that success, Seavey said he feels like he’s been getting more recognition for his iRacing wins than he has for some of his actual wins.
“There’s been a couple races (on iRacing) that I’ve won that I get more social interaction and recognition than I’d get for winning a real race sometimes,” Seavey said. “I would say the sense of accomplishments isn’t as big. But the social interaction is definitely a lot bigger. But yeah, it’s definitely really, really big.
“I’ve won, or even just participated in a few big (online) races in my career that were way bigger than anything I’ve done so far,” he added. “This has been a lot bigger than anyone has expected it to be.”
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