GassyHaggis So, iRacing isn’t as daunting as it first looks. The business model is a bit off-putting but it has as many pluses as minuses.
As @Brave says for your first season you should stick to rookies (you have no choice anyway). You have MX5 and Formula Vee now. I’d suggest MX5 for your first races as the Vee has a bit of a knack to it. All the content for the rookie season is included in the main subscription, so you don’t need to buy anything else.
The license system is governed by SR (safety rating), which is gained by completing corners without getting incident points. That’s the only metric used when deciding license promotion. So long as you drive lots of corners without having off-tracks, spins or crashes, you will gain lots of SR each race. A driver of your skill will be winning races in the MX5 rookies, as I did.
After MX5s you need to consider what to do for the next season. You don’t buy all iRacing content at once, you decide which category you’re going to do for that season and then buy the content as you go. I normally buy two or three new tracks per season, which is about forty quid. Obviously this need goes down as you accumulate content.
iRacing can cost loads of money but it doesn’t if you’re smart about it. Also as Brave says the fact iRacing is a bit expensive is almost as significant as the famed license system in terms of making people race better. If you’ve paid a bunch of cash for a race you are much less likely to come into it as a mental crasher.
Anyway, as much as I like AC and ACC I am pretty committed to iRacing. There’s just something about it that has its claws in me, more than any other sim racing I’ve done. It’s a brutal taskmaster but you can’t help but love it. Those moments of success just mean more than other any other sim because they are so hard won.
Honestly I’d say that iRacing is the best gaming experience I’ve had since World of Warcraft.