The excellent iRacing Stats Center – a third party tool for analysing stats:

http://www.westeurope-racing.org/home.html

Although sometime this system makes me feel terrible as it’s incredibly harsh. It doesn’t lie, if I suck it’ll tell me. So I really had to work hard to keep it up because at some point my skills were not there to continue progressing my license. So it’s not always fun, when I train hard and I don’t progress I often want to give up. But like in any sport, if you keep training you finally reach your goals and it feels great.

I’m thinking that maybe iRacing could benefit from having some game design tricks we see in video games to keep players motivated. Showing only negative numbers after a bad race isn’t something game designers do anymore. In games like Team Fortress 2 and Modern Warfare 2, there’s always something else positive to cheer me up after a bad performance. It could tell me for example that I stayed alive longer than anybody, that I made the most grenade kills, etc. I also acquired experience points there and there, I unlock this and that, I boosed these stats, I moved closer toward reaching that achievement or trophy, etc. I know it’s only psychological, but it helps to stay positive.

It’s great that iRacing is putting up their racing school, it should help drivers progress their skiils faster. These game design tricks I’m talking about here, they would act like a personal coach; “We crashed today, but we learned this and that, we’ve made progress there”