Essential Third party addons.

[Silent Hastati]

Hey guys, 1 year iRacing veteran (still a greenhorn by most people's sights I'd wager) here witha bit of a tip. While iRacing is pretty good, there are certain thrid party apps/mods that are essential to enjoying the sim in my opinion. Not to worry, all are adknowldged by iRacing, so they won't get you banned or anything like that for hacking.

First off is Trading Paints[www.tradingpaints.com] which is essential for anyone who likes to paint their cars, or who just wishes to see toher's cars. By default iRacing lets you choose from preset patterns and sponsors, each pattern having 3 color channels that you can choose the RGB value of. You can paint your own cars in a more complex manner (recreations of real race cars is a popular one for instance) using provided tempaltes and Gimp/Photoshop, but only you can see them. TP acts as a central repository for paints. It scans your current session, and if anyone in your session (quite a few usually) has a TP account with a paint set for the car they are in, it automatically downloads it so you can see it.

Second is the Jimmie Johnson Spotter Pack[www.dwarehouse.com]. Oval or Road, this will increase your enjoyment immensenly, as the spotter sounds much more fluid and natural than the default ones, and has many, many more voice clips to keep it from getting stale. The only difference between the two versions is the cuss pack obviously includes clips of your spotter cursing, always worth a laugh when after a wreck he says "F***ing Rookie....".

Lastly, is iSpeed.[www.nessoft.com] iSpeed has two functions. First is telemtry analysis which helps you figure out where your weakspots on a circuit are. The second, and for me more important function, is it includes overlays that normally you'd need to cycle through the ingame UI for, such as estimated fuel remaining.

[K Steinwand]

Also iSpeed will announce more sector times, or gains/losses in times, and even how many laps remain as per the leader's car, not your car. The default spotting (even the JJ pack) only reports on how many laps you specifically have until 2 laps to go. So you could be 2 laps down, hear 5 to go with 5 to go on your end, but then next lap hear 2 to go becuase the leader has 2 laps to go. A very useful thing to have.

[Silent Hastati]

One more app, iRDDU[www.shedsoft.co.uk] allows you to use secondary screens as a dashboard, which is great if you ahve triples and the instrument panel is cutoff. FOr Ipods and stuff any app that allows you to use it as a screen should work.

DashMeterPro[www.sensadigit.com] is much the same except it doesnt need additional software to work, but it costs money, so there's that. Note that DashMeterPro also has rFactor and Assetto versions, but all are seperate purcahses.

[BaronVonHaggis]

ShiftTone[iracerstuff.com] i find invaluable, especially if you drive a tricky shifter like the SRF.

[Themac]

Honestly, for a rookie, none of these are "Essential" :P (hell even for veterans they aren't "Essential" it's just that 99% uses em :P

[LAX]

I tried downloading the JJ Spotter and it wouldn't allow me to run the game. It would be cool if steam add's these things so you can download them threw Steam because our iRacing is located in different location then every other user and it's not so easy to get threw

[TONKLER]

iR Pit Crew is very handy as well for races requiring pit stops, you can set it to take tyres, do repairs, tearoffs etc, and it works out exactly how much fuel you need to finish (with an extra little bit to be safe).