Startlight: the iRacing schedule app

Startlight is a $9.99 iOS app, Home Screen widget, and Apple Watch app that shows what iRacing session is running right now, what’s next in the series you care about, and the time-to-green countdown to the next session. It answers the question you’d otherwise have to launch the sim or open the iRacing schedule page to settle: is the race I want running soon, and when does it go green.

What Startlight shows you

Three things, at a glance:

• Now — which official session is currently open in your tracked series.
• Next — the next session and its start time, shown in your local time.
• Time-to-green — a live countdown to that next start, so you know exactly how long you have before the session opens.

iRacing’s official sessions launch on fixed, repeating timeslots, so “next” and “time-to-green” are always knowable. Startlight does the math and keeps the number on screen.

The problem it solves

iRacing’s own session list and the schedule on iRacing.com don’t surface a live countdown to your next race — you check by opening the sim or the site. iRacing’s Companion app and third-party tools (iRacePlan, RCRPlanner) exist to add reminder-style behavior, but they’re full apps you open rather than an always-on glance.

The session times are also stamped in UTC or EDT in every release and event post, which means you’re converting to local time in your head. Startlight shows local time directly, so the conversion step disappears.

Track only the series you care about

Most racers run a limited set of series and ignore the rest. Startlight lets you track just those, so the widget shows your races and not the other four categories’ worth of noise.

That focus matters in two spots people hit often:

• One-off events. You mostly run your regulars, but a specific race is worth driving once — a Street Stocks round at Lime Rock, an endurance special. Track it and the countdown finds you instead of you remembering to scroll the schedule.
• Moving up license classes. When you need a particular track or series to chase a license, you’d normally hunt the schedule by hand to find which week it runs. Tracking the series surfaces the next session without the search.

On your Home Screen and Apple Watch

The Home Screen widget is the always-on version of the reminder racers reach for third-party tools to get. The next session and its countdown sit on your phone without you opening anything. The Apple Watch app puts the same time-to-green on your wrist.

The point is the glance. You skip the open-the-sim-or-browser step entirely and still know exactly when green is.

How it fits the iRacing season

iRacing runs four seasons a year, each 12 weeks of racing (occasionally 13). Between seasons, during the build break, comes Week 13 — a separate single-week event where the track changes every day instead of every week, and many series are “fun” series that don’t count toward standings and confuse people every quarter. Within a series, the track rotates every week across those 12 weeks, so what you raced last week is gone this week. See the 12-week season format and weekly track rotation for the full structure.

Series live in racing categories — Oval, Sports Car, Formula Car, Dirt Oval, and Dirt Road — and each runs official sessions on its own fixed timeslot interval. Special and endurance events (Bathurst 12 Hour, Petit Le Mans, the Nürburgring Endurance Championship) run a small number of fixed UTC timeslots, sometimes split across multiple start times, and teammates coordinate to a specific timeslot. Startlight tracks all of it against your local clock.

Price and platform

Startlight is a one-time $9.99 purchase on iOS. That includes the full schedule app, the Home Screen widget, and the Apple Watch app — no subscription.

If you want the deeper iRacing material the app supports, see the iRacing section for season planning and series guides, and the rest of the Startlight pages for setup and how each surface works.