The Historic Update 2026 has arrived!
Today's update brings a big selection of new historic racing content to RaceRoom, with new cars for Group 2 and Super Touring, new historic circuits, a new hill climb and an updated Hockenheimring.
But this update goes much further than new content.
Behind the scenes, we are saying goodbye to some of RaceRoom's oldest technology and replacing it with systems that give us a much stronger foundation for the future. There is a completely new menu and backend system, major Force Feedback changes, a manual rolling start procedure, improved performance, updated dashboard displays, the return of statistics tracking and plenty more.
Here is an overview of what is waiting for you.
New Group 2 Cars
Small cars. Big Personality.
The Abarth 1000 TCR and Mini Cooper Mk3 join the Volkswagen Scirocco and NSU TTS to expand RaceRoom's Group 2 class. They come with a selection of liveries from the “Kampf der Zwerge” series.
Abarth 1000 TCR
Mini Cooper MK3
These compact touring cars may not have huge amounts of power, but their low weight, narrow tyres and old-school handling make them some of the most entertaining cars in the game.
We have also revisited the existing NSU TTS and Volkswagen Scirocco Group 2, adjusting their physics, tyres, gearing, fuel tanks and AI so all four cars can race closely together.
Peugeot 406 and Ford Mondeo Join Super Touring
The golden age of Super Touring continues to grow in RaceRoom.
Joining the existing grid are two more icons from the late 1990s:
Peugeot 406 Super Touring 1998
Ford Mondeo Super Touring
Together they add even more variety to one of touring car racing's most memorable eras, with the high-revving engines, aggressive aerodynamics and incredibly close racing that made Super Touring famous.
Four New Places to Race
The Historic Update also introduces four new locations.
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps 1995
Experience Spa-Francorchamps as it was in the mid-1990s, with its legendary “bus stop” chicane and a pitlane exit at the bottom of the Raidillon.
Both Grand Prix and Endurance layouts are included, with the Endurance layout supporting grids of up to 99 cars.
It is a perfect home for everything from Super Touring to endurance racing and classic machinery.
Laguna Seca Historic
Race the ’80s version of one of North America's most recognisable circuits.
This configuration recreates the track as it was before the infield section was built, making turn 2 a fast sweeping left where you’ll find the walls coming way too fast at you. It will be a perfect venue to race the GTO Classics or any other car from that era. Or just to see what it would be like to race modern cars on the classic layout.
Fliegerhorst Wunstorf
Built around a German airfield, like our previous release Diepholz, this German venue delivers a flat layout full of fast sweeping turns, hairy chicanes and narrow taxiways. STW and DTM were both hosted at Wunstorf and it will be a great pick for such historic touring car racing.
Glasbachrennen
After being featured in the FIA Esports European Hill Climb Cup, the legendary Glasbach hillclimb is now available to everyone. Joining our Lakeview and RaceRoom hillclimb tracks, Glasbach will, however, feel quite unique as a much shorter, but still fast-paced stage. Its narrow road offers very little room for mistakes and you will barely catch a breath until you reach the top. The winning lap at the competition was under 2 minutes!
A Completely New RaceRoom Interface
One of the biggest changes in this update is something you will notice before you even start to drive.
RaceRoom's old website and in-game interface have effectively been replaced by one unified system.
The main menu, store, competitions, Ranked Multiplayer, leaderboards, profile, garage and options now share the same design and run on a completely new backend.
The new interface is designed to better surface all the cars and tracks that are available in RaceRoom and lay out all the settings you will need in a much better way, including search, metadata on all our content, sorting and easier access to the content you own.
The new backend should also make RaceRoom more robust and offer much better connectivity and resistance to load than ever before.
Buy the Car, Get the Liveries
We have also changed how liveries work in the RaceRoom store.
From now on, liveries are no longer sold individually.
Buy a car and you receive all of its liveries.
And if you previously purchased even a single livery for a car, all remaining liveries for that car are automatically unlocked for you with this update.
Test Drive has also been improved. As before, you can test any car from the store, but it will now allow you to do so on any track that you own instead of just a small selection of them.
Statistics Are Back
RaceRoom driver statistics return with the Historic Update, and they are much more detailed than before.
Your profile can now track information including:
Time on track
Distance driven
Laps
Races
Wins
Podiums
Laps led
Clean laps
Incident points
Top speed
Daily and weekly driving streaks
Statistics can also be broken down by game mode, car, class, track, layout, manufacturer and country.
Single Player races are now recorded in much greater detail as well, including every session, the full field and the AI difficulty you raced against.
We are also introducing a first iteration of RaceRoom achievements, displayed directly on your profile with progress towards each goal.
Statistics begin counting from 20 October 2026. Unfortunately, the old statistics could not be transferred to the new system.
A Major Force Feedback Update
The Historic Update brings one of the biggest changes to RaceRoom's Force Feedback system in years.
General Improvements:
Tyre Contact Model Improvements: The contact model now takes the whole shape and movement of the tyre contact patch into account, and evaluates it using the exact polygon shapes it is touching. This results in a much more consistent handling of complex geometry like kerb edges or sausage kerbs, and also improves two-wheeling and rollover behaviour. For the FFB, this means fewer noisy artifacts from poorly handled complex geometry, and a more precise FFB reaction to the surface you are driving on.
Physics Loop Optimisations: Our physics calculations run at a fixed update rate of 400 Hz, which is guaranteed by doing multiple physics ticks in one logic loop to catch up if the CPU is struggling. This ensures the physics behaves the same for everyone and in every situation. However, the FFB output rate is still tied to the logic loop update rate, which would previously slow down significantly in large grids, significantly degrading the FFB signal and delay. We have optimised many parts of the logic loop so that most systems should be able to keep it running at the full 400 Hz in almost any situation. Only in massive 100-car grids might it slow down slightly, but still remain fast enough to not degrade the FFB in any noticeable way.
Simplified wheelbase communications: Our FFB now only ever uses one DirectInput effect to output the FFB to your wheel. Before this, the game was opening and updating many different DI effects at the same time, potentially causing extra delay and other random issues. This new method is the modern industry standard, so this should hopefully help improve wheel compatibility across the board.
Summary of FFB changes:
Fixed a significant error in our calculations of the gyroscopic effects of the front wheels. This previously added a lot of extra constant steering weight while cornering, which ends up drowning out the dynamic and detailed forces coming from the tyre contact patch. This old gyro effect did also have some benefit for car control in slides and makes the FFB more tame and stable, so we added a gyro effect slider to add some or all of this effect back to get close to the previous FFB feel if you liked it. We recommend giving the new feel a good try before trying this slider, though, as it really is a big upgrade in terms of details and car dynamics.
Completely rebuilt power steering system with support for engine-driven hydraulic, electro-hydraulic, and fully electric power steering systems. The power steering is not a simple scaling of the FFB forces; it is a transient system that reduces strong constant cornering forces, while letting fast details and oversteer snaps through. This retains and even enhances the dynamic feeling of the steering, without having to crank up the FFB Strength. Also added a new option to run power steering on cars that originally don’t have it, which can improve the FFB a lot on those cars, especially for lower-end wheels.
Properly modelled steering rack types: different levels of friction from very old worm box racks, to modern, purpose-built racing racks.
Added smoothing slider: Filters out any unwanted high frequencies from the FFB, can eliminate a grainy feeling at low settings and tone down sharp hits from kerbs or bumps at high settings.
Added Gyro Damping Slider: Exaggerates the existing gyroscopic stabilisation of the tyres, to improve stability of the wheel on straights.
Fully physics-based stationary and low-speed FFB: The stationary friction is no longer an added effect. Now it is fully modelled as the low-speed tyre friction and tyre twisting forces, resulting in a much more consistent and realistic transition from standstill to racing speeds. Note that this means that the steering can be extremely heavy when standing still, especially with brakes held and engine off (no power steering). This is realistic, and reduces very quickly as the tyres roll even at crawling speeds. But the stationary friction slider can help reduce it if you prefer it to be lighter.
Added road noise slider: A substitute for the general vibrations you feel when driving in a real car, translated to the FFB signal.
Rolling Starts Are Now in Your Hands
RaceRoom now includes a manual rolling start system where you are now in full control.
The exact start procedure that we implemented is as per the regulations of the Nürburgring 24 Hours where the green light is decided by the acceleration of the leader: Drivers maintain formation speed as they approach the start area and once inside the start corridor, the leader chooses when to accelerate and the race goes green at that moment.
For multiclass racing on the Nordschleife, up to three separate start groups are created, each separated by a 3-minute gap.
Visual guidance is provided with HUD overlays as well as 3D elements showing you where you should be positioned.
Data displays in the new renderer
After replacing the HUD earlier this year, we have now converted every remaining in-car dashboard away from Adobe Flash and completely retired all the ActionScript from RaceRoom. This is the last big piece of legacy software that disappears with this update.
We have converted all the data displays to use the new renderer and started to bring new designs in this update: the Aston Martin Vantage, Lamborghini Temerario and Ford Mustang already received completely new dashboards built directly with the new technology, and more will follow.
Faster Everywhere
A large part of the recent work has been focused on making RaceRoom faster and more efficient.
Dozens of improvements have been made throughout the game to end up with a startup process that lands you on the main menu much faster than before while loading cars and tracks is taking half the time it used to.
On the performance side, AI physics can now run across multiple CPU cores, improving performance with large offline grids.
You may notice that this update is a particularly large download. There is a good reason for that: every RaceRoom car and track archive has been repacked using a format that can be loaded more quickly.
OpenXR VR Support
RaceRoom VR now uses OpenXR.
That means we no longer need separate Oculus and SteamVR rendering paths, allowing RaceRoom to work through the OpenXR runtime used by your headset.
Multiplayer Improvements
A lot has changed in RaceRoom Multiplayer over the past few months, some of it already quietly introduced before today's update.
We have fixed issues including players occasionally ending up alone in a session while being invisible to everyone else, server interruptions causing entire grids to be disconnected because of high ping, and players leaving a server causing freezes.
After the update, we will finally schedule that big multiplayer test that has been teased and mentioned on our Discord, and continue the optimizations to bring large splits in the near future.
The Historic Update Is Available Now
“Historic” is a fitting name for this update in more ways than one.
We are adding cars and circuits from some of our favourite eras of motorsport, but we are also entering a new era of development for RaceRoom, where new possibilities and creative freedom are finally possible without getting bogged down by old tech. The next updates will keep this momentum going.
And of course, there is plenty to drive right now.
Pick a Mini. Pick an Abarth. Throw one around Wunstorf.
Or put 99 RR Trucks on Spa 1995. We won't judge.
The RaceRoom Historic Update 2026 is available now.
See you on track!
