Hi, first post here however I have been following this thread for awhile to see the outside perspective of people with more sim experience than me, however I figured I may be able to help some of you out with you're questions about iRacing.com I'll start off with some backround info do some quick pro cons of iRacings service, and at the end I'll talk about licencing and cost since these two like it or not are closely tide.
I would love to see more people in the service however I don't want to see people going in without all the info to make a good choice. The biggest complaint I have seen is people go in love the racing than find out that there are all these 'fees' to drive the higher level cars. For me it has been well worth it, others have left feeling robed or lied to somehow.
Background info:
I've been a member for about 9 months now and I have loved every minute of it. Great competitive, mostly clean racing against real people. However this isn't everyones experience so you're mileage may vary. I would like to say though that although opinions vary, there is plenty of clean racing to be had and your driving style, not just how safe you are independently, seams to dictate a lot (not ALL) of how many times you will get taken out by no apparent fault of your own. I have only done GT1-3 and a little bit of FIA GT2 back in the day and I got nothing but contact, however I was never in league racing that clears most of that up from my understanding. So if you can follow a scheduled season and don't have a lot of cash LFS, GT2, or other sims may be your best bet.
Quick Pro cons : This will be a quick run down, most of the cons I pulled from other user experience and I don't necessarily agree however enough people have complained I think it's relevant.
Cons:
1. Cost
I don't think most people have an issue with the monthly fees however at some point if you want to race at higher levels you will be dealing out about $175.00 to race a full 12 week series for your first one. This is because most series use little of the base content and you will have to buy the car + 9 or more tracks. If you wan't to run road & oval well the even less of the content crosses over so thats another & $175.00 for your first upper class series there. After that I figure, and this is a very very loose figure since things are always changing, you next series will cost someware between $45-$60 for each full season, the next maybe $15-$25, after that it will mostly be just the price of the car once you have all the tracks. This is all worst case but this hobby is expensive
2. Class A and B series don't go official much ie. Not enouph participation in those series
This means that if you are going for CRED (more on that later) you may only have 1 or 2 chances to get an official race in since only official races count for points and CRED. For more about official races and participation numbers you can go here:
http://statmonkey.is-a-geek.net/ilom/whatWhen. This becomes even more of a problem if you only have 8 or 9 of the tracks so if you get taken out of one or two races you may be done. Never happened to me but it's definitely possible.
3. Not as clean racing as expected (mostly rookie series)
This wasn't my feeling however I definitely experienced my FAIR share of crashes, punts, bad overtakes, and in general just bad driving by both myself and others. This is aggravating and takes a bit of dedication to push threw until you get your iRating up enough to get into higher splits. The way around this is to tough it out and be a very passive non aggressive driver. It gets better for most people.
Pros:
1. Round the clock racing
In the popular series you can get a race every 2 hours or so threw out the week. If you botch one race you may take an SR(saftey rating) and iR(iRating) hit but you have plenty of opertunities to recover. Champ points is the mean of the best half of your races. Do 4 races it's the average of your best 2 do 5 races it's the average of your best 3. Yes 3, always do even numbers since the next race to make it even will basically be free.
2. Competitive racing(iRating explained)
When you join iRacing.com you start off with 1200? I don't know the exact number it may be in the sporting code. Anyway as a rookie you still have iRating you just can't see it until you get a D licence. Every official race you enter if you beat people with more iRating you take theirs if someone beats you in the race they take yours. It's a zero sum system so iRating is only introduced by new members. Irating is what places you into divisions for championship points as well as places you into the splits for racing. This is important because generally those with higher iRating 1500+ are much safer drivers than those with less, hard to gain positions and iRating if you cant finish a race. So if 10 cars are allowed on the track and 40 people sign up for that hour than their will be 4 races each with 10 drivers. This division is done mostly on iRating and qual time has no effect. Sounds dumb but some guys are super fast but cant complete a race so their for are not good racers.
3. CRED getting paid to race
Although not much it definitely helps in the long run. Basically out of each 12 week season if you complete 8 official races, complete at least half the laps of the lead car, than you get iRacing credits. These can be used to buy more content or go toward monthly fees. Class D & C series gives you $4 for each season completed class A & B series gives you $7. If you do a class C and class B series you only get $10 since that is the cap for each 12 week season, $40 a year.
4. Updates self explanatory, always evolving always adding more content.
Only down side is with more series and more content older series tend to suffer making it harder to get an official race.
5. Fast tracking licences
More on this in the next section but basically you can gain licenses very very fast and you can also race one level higher with a 4.0 SR rating. This can save you a bunch of $$ and you can skip levels to some extent that doesn't have a car you like.
COST:
This is a big one and a few people have asked how much $$ will it take to drive X series. The explinations so far have been decent however you can skip licence levels. Each series D-A can be run with a licence of one lower with a 4.0
For instance I ran rookie solstice, back in the day, until I got a R 3.0 licence. I than moved to the SRF, base content car but requires R 3.0 or higher. I did that until R4.0 ware I was instantly promoted to D something.... 3.5ish I think. I continued with the SRF until I reached D 4.0
At that point I went and purchased the Star Mazda, still my fav series, and raced in that sereis with a D 4.0 license although the Star Mazda(SM) is a C class car. To this day I still have 0 D level content .. Meh. Now I got stuck their because I was having fun and later with my CRED and some of my promotion money, I got $30 for purchasing a year sub for $99 during black friday sale, I got the Vette and raced that to A.
Once I got into the SM as a D 4.0 I got my C license within a few races. Can't remember if the requirement was 2 or 4 but I fulfilled the requirement at that level not the D series. I than raced the SM all the way to a C 4.0 ware I was instantly promoted to a B license, since I had already done the 4 race or TT requirement on the way. At that point I could have done the SM to B 4.0 than raced the F1 in order to fulfill the 4 race or time trial requirement to get the A licence.
So best case, get your subscription. Race time trial to D 4.0 in rookie series MX-5&SRF than buy say the SM for $11.95. Personally I would do the series but say you are cheep so you decide to race until the SM gets to Okayama a track you already have and you TT/Race like a pro being SUPPER carefull, and this would be hard to do, but you do it to C 4.0 get the B than go on to a B 4.0 TT at Okayama until you feel sick. Now you can take your B 4.0 and go buy $175 worth of F1 car and tracks to race there. So even best case you are looking at another $200 to get to A licence.
My accounting section as an example:
Aug 2010 = -$12 Three month membership
Oct 2010*= *-$138.72 (star mazda + all the tracks I didn't have to run full 12 weeks)
Nov 2010 = -$99 (year membership with $30 in credits)
*****************+$30
Mar 2011 = -$75 ($75 with 25 free credits)
**************** +$25
Apr 2011 = +$10 (CRED for SM and Vette fixed sereis)
---------------------------------------------
total spent = $324.72
total credits = $69 (includes $4 for my first SM series completion)
My account still has a balance of over $100 since I bought SPA, F1, and the Vette with credits but purchased $75 worth to get a free $25. The $75 is going toward my nex full year membership hopefully with another $30 black friday deal
...
Anyway ignoring the credits for now but including the $75 I have already spent toward next years membership I have spent an average of $40.59 a month. This isn't cheep by my standards however even if I have to buy a few tracks I probably wont spend more than another $30 of my money and as time goes on this per month expense since I started will drop significantly.
Anyway thats all I got for now, hope it helps some people understand what is going on a little better.
and I haven't had the extra cash to get 2 more monitors yet.
Then a guy spun out directly in front of my & I couldn't move, ruined my car, race & now my rating is 2.21 
