The iTested multiclass starts went green at Watkins Glen this week, and sim racers running GTP, LMP2, and GT3 are already forming opinions about what the new per-class pace car system feels like from the seat. Splits are filling up across all three classes. What early sessions are revealing is worth paying attention to, because the data from this week feeds directly into when this feature ships to the full iRacing service.
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➡️ iTested Series Goes Live This Week at Watkins Glen
🏁 iRacing 2026 Season 3 Overview
The thing most drivers are noticing first is how different the race start feels with a dedicated pace car for each class. In the current multi-class format, GTP has to manage a gap to the slower cars throughout the pace lap while one leader controls the timing for the whole field. With the iTested system, each class has its own pace car and takes the green independently. GTP gets a clean green among GTP cars, LMP2 takes theirs, and GT3 does the same. The staggered release changes the first corner from a three-class shuffle into something that looks a lot more like real endurance racing.
The start zone mechanic is clicking for drivers who have spent a session or two learning it. There is a fixed window on track where each class must take the green. Drivers who accelerate before entering the zone get penalized. The old game of timing a run off the chicane and jumping the field is gone. For experienced multi-class drivers especially, that structure is familiar, because it mirrors how professional starts at circuits like Daytona and Road Atlanta are actually managed. The green drops in a defined zone, not whenever the leader decides to make a move.
What is also standing out is how much cleaner the first stint of traffic feels. Because each class has already sorted itself before the green, the blending that happens in the early laps is more predictable. Drivers are reporting fewer situations where GTP cars are threading through a GT3 pack that is still bunched from a combined start. That predictability does not eliminate traffic entirely, but it changes the shape of it in ways the sim racing community has wanted from multi-class events for a long time.
Not everything is smooth yet, and that is the point. The biggest adjustment for many drivers is unlearning old habits around the green flag. Drivers who are used to controlling the start are getting caught by the zone boundaries. A friction point in early sessions is the transition between class releases, where faster cars catching a class that has not fully cleared the zone can create contact that would not happen in a standard format. There is also the usual new-format chaos in opening laps: drivers running their first multi-class sessions add to incident counts, and the combination of SR risk with a new procedure creates early splits that are rougher than a settled series would be. The iTested badge is drawing in members who would not normally run multi-class, which is exactly the kind of real-world pressure test iRacing needs.
None of that friction is a failure. iRacing built the iTested format specifically because internal testing cannot surface these situations. Real drivers in live sessions, with real iRating and safety rating on the line, race differently than controlled environments allow. The incident patterns, start zone behavior, and class interaction data from this week are exactly the information engineering needs to dial in the system before it goes to every multi-class series on the service. The roughness of week one is the whole reason week one exists.
iRating is protected during iTested sessions, so only safety rating is on the line, not iRating. That has lowered the barrier to entry for some drivers and contributed to the broader skill range in early splits. As the week goes on and the field learns the format, the quality of the starts should improve. That improvement arc is also data.
The series runs through July 26 with races every hour on the :30. If you have run any sessions this week, the Season 3 Patch 3 release notes detail exactly what the dev team was targeting with the new start procedure. Saving your replay file from any session you enter is worth doing. The team has specifically asked for them, and in a week where every lap is contributing to how the final version lands, that replay is a direct line into the development process.
