Your first 20 hours of sim racing
Everyone crashes. Everyone spins. Here's what separates the people who quit in week one from the people who are still racing six months later.
By The JustBeginning Editors · Published May 24, 2026
Sim racing has a reputation for being a rabbit hole you never climb out of. That reputation is earned. But the first twenty hours are less about the rabbit hole and more about getting comfortable enough to actually enjoy the drive.
Most people arrive thinking they’re already decent drivers — they’ve played Mario Kart, they commute every day, they’ve seen every F1 race since 2019. Then they get behind a wheel controller for the first time, try to navigate Monza, and spin out of the first chicane three laps in a row. That’s normal. It’s not a reflection of your ability. It’s a reflection of how different sim racing is from anything else.
This guide covers what actually happens in your first twenty hours — the setup, the learning curve, and the point where it stops being frustrating and starts being genuinely addictive.
Hours 1–4: Setup and first contact
Before you drive a single lap, spend thirty minutes on setup. Force feedback, button mappings, and assist settings done wrong will make sim racing actively unpleasant. Done right, they disappear and let you focus on driving.
Force feedback (FFB) strength: Start at 60-70% of max. The temptation is to crank it — you want to feel everything. Don’t. Full FFB on a gear-driven wheel like the Logitech G923 causes oscillation (the wheel fights itself at straight-ahead position) and wears out the motor faster. Back off until the wheel feels natural and resistant, not twitchy.
Assists fully on: Traction control at maximum, ABS at maximum, stability control on. Ignore anyone who tells you real sim racers turn these off. They do — eventually. In your first four hours, you’re learning what the car feels like and where the track goes. Fighting physics simultaneously teaches you nothing except how to be frustrated.
Pick one car and one track: This is the most important setup decision. Beginners cycle through twelve cars and eight tracks in the first session, never spending long enough on any of them to actually learn anything. Pick one combination — something easy: a road car, a short circuit, no weather. Brands Hatch Indy in a Honda Civic. Laguna Seca in a Porsche 911. Get familiar with it before you move on.
Your first hour will feel clumsy. You’ll miss apexes you’re staring at, brake too early or too late, and accidentally cut the kerb on every slow corner. That’s the process. The steering wheel input that feels excessive on a gamepad is barely enough on a wheel — your hands are learning a completely different language.
Hours 5–12: Finding the rhythm
Somewhere in this window, the track stops feeling like a series of random corners and starts feeling like a sequence. You’ll begin to recognize the braking zone before you see the marker, feel the car rotate through a turn instead of just pointing it, and notice when you’re carrying too much speed without having to think about it consciously.
A few things to focus on in this phase:
Smooth inputs over fast inputs: The fastest drivers in sim racing are also the smoothest. They brake in a straight line, turn in gradually, and apply throttle progressively. Beginners jerk at the wheel, stab the brakes, and floor the throttle mid-corner. Smooth is fast. Smooth is also easier on the car and gives you more information from the force feedback.
Learn the racing line, not just the track: The racing line is the path that lets you carry the most speed through a corner — late turn-in, hit the apex, unwind to the exit. It’s not the shortest path. It’s the fastest path. In every sim, the ideal line is visible once you know what to look for. Watch a hotlap video for your track and reference it, but then put it away and drive — you learn the line with your hands, not your eyes.
Start lowering assists: Around hour eight, reduce traction control from maximum to medium. The car will feel less buttoned-down. That’s the point. You want to start learning where the limit is — and TC at max hides it completely. Don’t remove ABS yet. Braking is the most complex skill in sim racing and takes longer to master than most people expect.
Lap time is not the goal right now: This sounds counterintuitive, but chasing lap time in hours five through twelve will make you worse. Lap time comes from consistency, and consistency comes from understanding what you’re doing. Drive clean laps first. Lap time follows.
Hours 13–20: Your first online sessions
If you’ve been driving alone against AI, week three is when you should consider going online for the first time. It changes everything — and not just because of the competition.
Racecraft is a completely different skill from pace: Knowing how to be fast around a corner is one thing. Knowing when to yield, when to defend, how to manage a gap, when to let someone past without losing too much time — these are skills you can’t practice alone. Racing close with other humans, even badly, develops them faster than any other method.
iRacing’s Rookie license: If you’re using iRacing, start in the Rookie license class and stay there longer than you want to. The Rookie Oval series and Rookie Road series are populated by people exactly at your level. The license system demotes you for incidents — contact with other cars, going off track. That incentive shapes your driving in ways no self-imposed rule ever will.
Gran Turismo Sport Mode: If you’re on GT7, Sport Mode’s daily races are well-organized and the matching system puts you with drivers at your rating. They’re shorter than iRacing championships but give you real racing without the subscription complexity.
The moment it clicks: There’s a specific session somewhere in this range where you’ll have a clean race — not a fast race, just a clean one. You’ll manage a battle with another driver, defend a position without making contact, and cross the finish line having raced rather than just driven. That session is what the rest of sim racing is about. Once you’ve felt it, you’ll want to do it again.
Things everyone gets wrong in the first month
The same mistakes show up in almost every new sim racer’s first twenty hours. Knowing they’re coming makes them easier to move through:
Overdriving the car. When you’re slow, the instinct is to go faster everywhere — brake later, turn harder, accelerate earlier. But you’re already at the limit of your skill, not the limit of the car. Going faster everywhere just means more spins and more mistakes. Slow down, make it smooth, then bring the speed back up.
Ignoring force feedback information. The whole point of a wheel is the feedback. When the car starts to understeer, the wheel goes light. When the rear is loose, you feel a tug. Beginners focus on the screen; experienced drivers listen to the wheel. Start training yourself to feel what the car is doing before you see it.
Copying the fastest car instead of the best car for learning. The Porsche GT3 Cup is technically correct and demanding. The Formula 4 is nimble and honest. The GT86 or Mazda MX-5 teaches car balance better than anything else at any level. Start slow, not exotic.
Not calibrating the pedals. Most sims let you set the pedal travel range in settings. The default usually assumes a mechanical travel that doesn’t match your pedal set. Spend ten minutes calibrating — it makes braking feel like braking instead of like pressing an undefined button.
What to do at hour twenty-one
After twenty hours, you have opinions. You know which tracks you like, which cars suit your driving style, and what frustrates you. That’s exactly when the hobby deepens.
- Join a league: Most sims have organized leagues for beginners. A weekly race with the same fifteen people at your level, on a rotating calendar of tracks, teaches more per hour than anything else. Find one in your sim’s Reddit community or Discord.
- Start working on setups: Car setup — spring rates, alignment, differential — is its own learning curve. Don’t start until your driving is consistent enough that you can feel whether a change helped or hurt. For most people, that’s around hour 20-30.
- Lower TC to off: By now you should be able to manage throttle application well enough to not spin on corner exit every lap. Turn off traction control. The car will feel alive in a way it hasn’t before — and that alive feeling is what serious sim racers are actually chasing.
Ready to set up your sim rig? See our sim racing gear guide for which wheel, stand, and simulator are worth your money on day one.