iRacing seasons and the weekly schedule

iRacing runs four seasons a year, and each season is 12 weeks of racing followed by a build week called Week 13. Every official series rotates to a different track each of those 12 weeks, and the full 12-track schedule is published before the season starts, so you can plan exactly what to buy and when. This page covers the structure, when a new season starts, how to read the weekly schedule, and what Week 13 actually is.

The structure: four seasons a year, 12 weeks each

A season is 12 race weeks (occasionally 13 if the calendar demands it) plus Week 13, the off-season build week. Four seasons fills the year: 12 weeks of racing times four, with Week 13 padding out the rest. Each new season ships alongside a software build and a fresh content release, so a season boundary is also when new cars, tracks, and physics changes go live.

When a new season starts

A new season starts at 00:00 GMT on the Tuesday after a build is deployed. The build drops during Week 13, the servers come back up, and the new 12-week schedule goes live on that Tuesday. If you log in and your series looks wrong or missing, check the date against the season start.

The weekly schedule: one track per week, races on a fixed clock

A series is one car (or a class of cars) that runs a different track each week for 12 weeks. Within a week, races repeat on a fixed, repeating clock, anywhere from roughly every 30 minutes for high-population series to every two hours for the quieter ones. You do not sign up for a specific date; you pick a timeslot that suits you and the session fills from whoever registers.

Not every timeslot is equal. A handful of slots each week draw the full grids and the top splits; these are the high-SoF (Strength of Field) sessions, and they shift from season to season as iRacing rotates the race times. Check the series page for the current week to find them. Race well off those slots in a low-population series and you may not fill a grid at all.

Startlight (the $9.99 iOS app, Home Screen widget, and Apple Watch app) surfaces which session is running now, what is next, and time-to-green, so you can catch the SoF timeslot for your series without parking on the schedule page.

Reading the schedule grid

• Dates and times on the grid mark when each repeating session starts; iRacing displays them in GMT, so convert to your local time.
• Ranked vs unranked: ranked sessions count toward your Safety Rating (SR) and iRating (iR). Always confirm which one you are entering before you click register.
• Fixed vs Open setup: Fixed series lock everyone to the same iRacing-supplied setup, which removes engineering from the equation. Open series let you bring your own. See setups for how to approach Open weeks.
• Track and week: the grid lists all 12 tracks up front, so you can see which weeks you already own and which you need to buy.

What Week 13 is (the build week)

Week 13 is the off-season week between two seasons, where the new build and new content roll out and get tested. Tracks change daily instead of weekly during this week. Historically it has been unranked, run-for-fun racing, and most racers treat it that way.

That changed in 2026 Season 1. iRacing added more than a dozen Ranked one-week championships to Week 13 across popular cars and classes, so Week 13 is no longer purely unranked. The Sporting Code still applies in those races. Before you race anything in Week 13, check whether the session is ranked or unranked, because incidents in a ranked Week 13 race will move your SR and iR like any other official race. The 2026 Season 1 Week 13 ran March 10–16, 2026.

Preliminary vs final schedule, and schedule voting

The preliminary schedule drops during Week 13, typically partway through the week, usually several days before the new season starts. It can still change. The final schedule lands before the season begins and is what you plan around. For series that put their track list to a vote, the community votes through that series’ community forum, so the schedule you race is partly chosen by the people who race it.

Planning your season: tracks to buy and avoiding off-weeks

Because the full 12-track schedule is known before the season starts, you can buy exactly the tracks you are missing and avoid “off weeks,” the weeks where your series visits a track you do not own and you simply cannot race. Cross your committed series’ schedules against your owned content and buy the gaps.

Bulk buying earns a discount that scales with cart size:

• 10% off for 3 to 5 items
• 15% off for 6 or more items
• 20% off once you own 40 or more pieces of paid content

If you are filling several schedule gaps at once, grouping the purchases into one cart of 6+ items pulls the price down before you ever turn a lap. For the bigger picture on what to own first, see getting started in iRacing.