Startlight iPhone and iPad widgets

The Startlight Home Screen widget puts the current iRacing week, this week’s track and car, the session phase, and a live countdown to the next green flag on your Home Screen — no sim, no PC, no membersite. Glance at your phone and you know whether the next session opens in 14 minutes or two hours. Startlight is a $9.99 iOS app that bundles the Home Screen widget and an Apple Watch app.

What the widget shows

Startlight ships two Home Screen sizes: Small (.systemSmall) and Medium (.systemMedium). Both run on iPhone and iPad from the same WidgetKit widget.

The Small widget shows the week number, a phase indicator (practice, qualifying, grid, or race), a live countdown to the next session, the series name, and the track name — laid over the car image with a faded track-map overlay. The Medium widget adds the car name and a preview of next week’s track.

The countdown behaves in two stages. Beyond four minutes out it shows static text — 14m, 2h — because a per-second tick that far ahead is noise. Inside four minutes it switches to a live SwiftUI timer counting down second by second, so you know exactly when to alt-tab into the sim before the session loads.

Adding the Startlight widget to your Home Screen

The flow is the same on iPhone and iPad.

iPhone and iPad

1. Long-press an empty area of the Home Screen until the apps jiggle.
2. Tap the + (Add Widget) button in the top corner.
3. Search for Startlight.
4. Pick Small or Medium and tap Add Widget.
5. Drag it where you want it and tap Done.

If a freshly placed widget reads “Setup Required / Tap and hold to configure,” you have not picked a series yet — see below.

Pick the series you follow

Choose which series the widget tracks inside the app, on the series-settings screen. Until you pick, the widget falls back to a rookie / D-class series.

Three gestures drive the placed widget:

• Tap the body to cycle through the series you follow — this runs an App Intent and does not open the app.
• Long-press → Edit Widget to configure which series the widget shows.
• Tap the bottom bar to open the app straight to that series’ detail page.

How the countdown knows when your race starts

Every official iRacing session repeats on a fixed interval set by that series — commonly every 30 or 60 minutes, sometimes every two hours. From the moment a session starts, the clock runs through fixed phases in order: practice (up to the practice length), qualifying (to the qualify end), grid (often around 2 minutes), then race (the race time limit), then dead time until the next repeat. Startlight reads the elapsed time since the session start and computes which phase you’re in right now.

The countdown points at the next session’s practice start, because that’s when the signup window opens and you can join. That’s the moment that matters: the sim can take a minute or two to load in, so a mistimed repeat costs you qualifying.

Schedules move. The weekly track flips at midnight UTC Tuesday, and a season typically runs 12 weeks (plus the occasional special Week 13 between seasons). Startlight’s data follows that rollover, so the widget shows the right week without you redoing a spreadsheet. See seasons and schedule for how the season structure works.

Do you need the sim or PC running?

No. The widget reads the published schedule, not live telemetry, so it works with your PC off and the sim closed. It caches series data in an App Group with a one-hour TTL and pulls fresh data through the Startlight proxy, fetching the car thumbnail and track map in parallel. A multi-entry timeline keeps the countdown seamless across session transitions even when WidgetKit is slow to refresh, and if you’re offline it falls back to the last cached data. A persistent “Error / Check connection” means it couldn’t reach the network on its last refresh.

For the same information on your wrist, see the Startlight Apple Watch app, the companion apps page for other tools, and the Startlight overview for everything the app does.