This page contains the best iRacing setup help guides that I’ve accumulated so far. If you read through these guides and follow what they have to offer, you’ll be well on your way to building competitive iRacing setups. I also highly recommend the Gary Hensley setup video available here.
iRacing Stock Car Setup Component Guide by Matt Holden
This guide was published by Matt Holden in 2010 and almost all of it still applies today. It provides a lot of detail in explaining what each setup component in the car actually does. Reading through it carefully and thoughtfully will provide you with a quick foundation on the physics of iRacing and stock car racing in general.
Matt produced this detailed guidebook after about one year’s worth of trial and error, research, and a lot of torn up virtual race cars. It is not a setup guide per se, but it does tell you how things are supposed to work.
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Download iRacing Stock Car Setup Component Guide
Commodore’s Garage
This is another guide published by Matt Holden in 2016. This can be considered an update to the the iRacing Stock Car Setup Component Guide from 2010.
Download Commodore’s Garage
LoWLiNE Racing Oval Setup Guide
Like the Oval Crew Chief, this guide presents just enough information without overwhelming you. There are one or two things in this guide that contradict information provided in either the Oval Crew Chief or the iRacing Stock Car Component Setup Guide. I don’t remember specifics, but in those cases I always found it best to defer to the Oval Crew Chief or the Component Setup Guide. Lowline has a good guide, but it seems they got one or two things wrong.
Download LoWLiNE Racing Oval Setup Guide
Oval Crew Chief by Mark A. Carpenter
This is the Oval Crew Chief guide by Mark A. Carpenter. This is one of the best guides in my opinion. It gives you enough information but not too much, and it does it in steps that you can follow as you build a setup. As I’ve become more experienced with building setups, I sometimes deviate from the flow presented in the guide, but I seem to come back to it or stay pretty close, regardless.
Download Oval Crew Chief
Oval Spring & Shock Tuning Chart by Pat Dotson
This is the oval shock and spring tuning guide by Pat Dotson. It provides a great place to start with your shocks and springs. I always found springs pretty easy, but shocks a bit more complicated. I refer to this guide a lot when I start to tweak shock settings. I encourage others to do so, and also to step outside of the numbers and guides of this chart, and try something a little different once in a while.
Download Oval Spring & Shock Tuning Chart
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I need a fast setup for IRacing Talladega Qualifying at Mitch’s Host races he runs every hour. Talladega only.
You can go there and see his track condition. I currently have a setup that will do 49.385
Bur Rusty Greer is making a setup that does 49.339. I have tried everything I can to try to make my setup faster. But every setting I try makes it go slower.
I have a 100.00 budget for this if you are interested.
Reggie Jewett
reggieone@gmail.com
Mark A Carpenter,
Your crew chief documents helped me understand what I was doing wrong with setup building.
Thank you so much for putting time into it.