When I read the iRacing release notes and saw that they planned to remove the What’s Hot widget, I didn’t think I was going to like it. I was right.
The What’s Hot widget was the simplest way to find races on iRacing. The filters were good. You could find what you were looking for at a glance. The new design just makes it more difficult to find races.
It’s no secret that I don’t like NASCAR or anything related to NASCAR, so the Popular Races & Practices button is pretty much useless to me. I figure, since NASCAR is popular, most things listed on a page of popular races is going to be NASCAR related. I can’t really tell what’s going on on that page either. Mostly I just see a long list of broken images, and a lot of tracks that don’t interest me in any way. I’m a short track guy 100%. Talladega bores me. Charlotte puts me to sleep. I don’t own Gateway and I never will. I don’t have any interest in Autodromo Nazionale Monza, whatever that is. I did see South Boston there. If I didn’t already know, I wouldn’t be able to tell what car is running there without doing some additional clicking. I didn’t have to do that with the What’s Hot widget. It was all there at my fingertips with one quick glance.
So that’s Popular Races & Practices. What if I want to run something that is unpopular? I guess I’m just the redheaded stepchild then. I guess I’ll just take a cold tater and wait.
Then you have the Official Races button. This just takes you to the old Race Guide page. That’s something I never liked and never used before. For one thing it only shows races. But, worse than that, it doesn’t update automatically. So if you’re looking at the car count on the Race Guide page, you’ll have to reload the page to get it to update, which renders the page pretty much useless. I did find one solution, though. You can get an addon or plugin for your browser (Chrome or Firefox) to set a page to reload every X seconds. I just set the Race Guide page to reload every 30 seconds. I sure am jumping through a lot of hoops just to use the iRacing service. Wouldn’t it be neat if they had something like a What’s Hot widget so I wouldn’t have to do all this?
And while we’re at it, why not make filters that will filter by car and track. That way I could filter out everything over one mile, and all cars that I’m never going to run; anything other then Street Stock, Late Model, Super Late Model, SK Modified, and Tour Modified. Why can’t iRacing just simplify when something needs simplifying, and leave well enough alone?
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