TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Safety Rating?
One of the two factors in license progression is your Safety Rating, referred to as SR. Safety Rating is an indicator of the number of incident points you typically receive. A driver with a lower safety rating is expected to have incidents more often than a driver with a higher safety rating.
iRacing tracks a driver's safety rating independently for each discipline - oval, road, dirt oval, and dirt road - as each of these disciplines is different and a driver's safety in one may not be the same as their safety in another. The Safety Rating scale is numbered from 0.00, all the way to 4.99. You can check your Safety Rating for any of your licenses by clicking on your helmet in the iRacing UI.
After every session, you can see any changes to your SR by going to the “Results” for the last session you ran. Your final safety rating will be listed, along with whatever changes were caused by the race that resulted in the listed SR. To be clear, a value of 3.6 (+0.2) means that the driver gained 0.2 SR from the session and their total SR is now 3.6.
Whenever a driver’s Safety Rating increases across a whole number value, an additional 0.40 Safety Rating is added.
Inversely, whenever a driver’s Safety Rating decreases across a whole number value, an additional 0.40 Safety Rating
is subtracted. These adjustments are made to prevent impactful fluctuations near these key whole number values. For
example, if a driver’s SR continually fluctuated across a 3.00 value, they would constantly be qualified or not qualified
for events requiring a minimum 3.00 SR value, or even their eligibility for a License Class Promotion.
How is Safety Rating Determined?
After a session that impacts safety rating, iRacing will do calculations to determine each driver's new safety rating. Safety rating calculations looks at three things:
- How many incident points did you receive?
- How many corners did you complete?
- What type of session was it?
Incident Points
Incident points are the 1x, 2x, and 4x values shown at the top of the screen when driving. These are added together to determine your total incident count for a session.
Sometimes incident points will display as 2x -> 4x. This means that there was a 2x incident assessed, but it was followed very quickly by a 4x incident. In these cases we do not want to pile on incident points, so we ignore the 2x and simply assess the 4x penalty, since it was the greatest of the incident values seen during that short time span. It is not possible to be given more than a 4x for any single incident.
The following situations will negatively impact your Safety Rating by accruing Racing Incident Points:
Driving off the Racing Surface
Losing Control of your Car
Contact with another Object
Contact with another Driver
A full table of incident types and their incident point values can be found in the iRacing Sporting Code.
The more incident points you rack up during a race, the more negative your net safety rating from that race will be. But if you drive clean and avoid these racing incidents, the more positive your net safety rating from that race will be. Keep in mind: Incidents are assessed to all involved drivers individually on a no-fault basis – no matter the circumstances.
Corner Count
Each track configuration in iRacing has a defined corner multiplier. When assessing your safety rating we look at this corner multiplier combined with the number of laps you completed to determine the total number of corners you completed.
Corner Multipliers that are assigned based on the complexity of the track so that the relative impact of an incident on a short track with 6 corners is roughly equal to that of an incident at an extremely long track like the Nürburgring Nordschleife with dozens and dozens of corners. This also applies to Ovals, with short tracks having lower corner multipliers than intermediate or superspeedway tracks.
Session Type
While race session incidents will have their full effect applied to the driver's safety rating, not all sessions operate this way. Sessions such as pre-race practice, qualifying, warm-up, and Time Trials have multipliers applied to reduce the impact of incident points received in those sessions. For example, Time Trials multiply your total incident points received in that session by 0.35 before applying them to your safety rating calculations.
A full table of session types and their multipliers can be found in the iRacing Sporting Code.
Promotions and Demotions
At the end of each iRacing season, which happens quarterly, drivers who have completed their Safety Rating requirements, as well as their Minimum Participation Requirements, will be promoted to the next license level.
If you don’t feel like waiting for the season to end, you can “Fast Track” to the next license level by raising your Safety Rating to 4.00, or 3.00 as an iRacing Rookie. This will automatically promote you without having to wait for the end of the season, provided you have completed your MPR.
Conversely, drivers who fail to maintain a minimum level of Safety Rating will be demoted to their previous license level. Drivers with a Safety Rating below 2.00 will be demoted at the end of the season, and drivers below 1.00 will be demoted immediately.
Drivers that are between a 2.00 and 3.00 Safety Rating will not have their license affected at the end of the season.
Whenever a driver receives a License Class Promotion, their Safety Rating is reduced by approximately 1.00. This
“reset” provides drivers with additional room for improving their SR at the new License Class level before earning the
opportunity for another promotion.