We are very proud to announce that TURN (The Ultimate Racing Network) has officially launched, and with it, a new era of organized sim racing is dawning. TURN is a product of the idea that organized sim racing helps racing fans extract so much more longevity, enjoyment, excitement, and ultimately yields more friendships than simply playing racing games solo, or through public lobby multiplayer.

You already know the usual drawbacks to online racing in more serious games. You wind up seriously wrecked off track, seriously fast. The problem is that the other drivers aren’t properly incentivized to race for the win, without unceremoniously smashing everyone else off the track. If you knew that everyone else was time invested into a season of racing that took place over weeks, rather than minutes, you’re pretty much guaranteed an upgrade in driver respect for your position on track. This forms the basis for why some have come to be so passionate about organized sim racing. This is the ethos for what The Ultimate Racing Network hopes to anchor itself. TURN is a platform and hub for community (rather than game developer) based organized virtual racing. There are six staff members which are highly skilled and motivated to ensure that our community is brought the very best racing, content, and site features.

There are two primary components that will cement TURN as the preferred organized racing hub for drivers, organizers, and racing fans themselves.

       TURN OFFICIAL SERIES

The first component are the TURN official racing series, initially hosted on Project CARS on Xbox One. At launch, we will have three different series:

TURN Masters 

Relatively short six event seasons using generally one or two road cars to keep competition tight. This series is ran with one event per week, with a championship for North America on Tuesday nights at 8pm EST, and a seperately scored championship for Europe on Wednesday nights at 8pm BST. This series is likely to attract a lot of attention due to the quick nature of the seasons, and the variety of cars and tracks that can be covered in a calendar year. It also caters a bit towards drivers that love racing, but with a more sports car club feel, rather than the frantic pace of race cars. Races are less demanding than the other series as well, with races lasting between 30 to 60 minutes. At the end of a six event season, a bonus World Masters Champion title round is scheduled that invites the top seven drivers from both the North American championship and the European championship.TURN Masters will start with Mitsubishi Evos.

TURN Virtual Endurance Championship (VEC) 

Monthly multi-class endurance events loosely based on FIA’s WEC, with a similar class structure of LMP1, LMP2, and GT3. Console lobbies hold 16 users, so we have limited the entries per lobby to 15 drivers; five from each of the three classes will be on track at the same time, with a live streaming broadcaster able to use the last connection slot to show the race to the world. Typically 11 events during a calendar year, most of which are 6 hour races stitched from several 90 minute stint races with three drivers per entry. There are a few exceptions to this, such as the 24 hours of Le Mans. This race will allow for four drivers per entry, but the racing itself will indeed last for 24 hours. VEC is a showcase of overtaking skill, consistency, and sometimes a bit of luck at the right time makes these events incredibly engaging to watch, not just participate in.

TURN Grand Prix

Our signature series will play host to an international Formula A championship over 12 events. Teams will form with a pair of drivers each with their own car as an entry. Due to the long nature of this championship, reserve drivers are often recommended to keep your team in the fight for the team championship, but it is in every driver’s best interest to make every race to try to win the driver championship. This series will attract the absolute fastest drivers in the community and is sure to be a display of daring overtakes, mind-blowing corner speeds, and quite twitchy cars that take a smooth hand and quick reflexes to control. This series is likely to have a much bigger following than the number of drivers in the championship. All races will have the top split commentated and broadcasted. This series also uses two rounds of live broadcasted knockout qualifying for the top lobby.

All of our official series will be complimented with in-house written articles with pictures from the events, event posters created by our Promotions and Graphics Manager, a video archive of the races that were broadcast, a dynamic spotters guide to help followers and entries alike know who is who on the track, and a monthly video podcast featuring at least two dynamic personalities as well as the potential for driver or team interviews as well as talks with other members of the TURN staff. Our goal is to broadcast as many of our races as possible, especially for our series that are likely to have more audience than drivers.

Live streaming gameplay of incredibly skilled players with an informed and lively personality commentating has already become a huge audience builder in this generation. E-sports are also growing in popularity at a pretty remarkable pace. When considering that real motorsport is the largest advertising engine in the sports world, and along with it, has the largest audience of any sport genre on the planet, we think you’ll agree that simulated organized racing is a largely untapped market that is on the verge of an explosion of popularity, if an organization could simply get the formula right, for what the audiences want to see. It becomes more a question of when this will happen and who will be the organization to take it there. We believe that while we might not be the only group to capture some of this, we think TURN is part of that push and will be a part of the coming wave.

       COMMUNITY SERIES

The second critical component of TURN is our website itself. Most every sim racing website uses a forum engine to host all the files they need to run a series, with online spreadsheet documents showing the standings, grid ordering, results, and even timing in some cases. This means that the organized racing community is deprived of a truly integrated experience, and furthermore means that events ran by the community are generally less professional than they would like.

With TURN, all series are run through our website using custom php / javscript / css / html5 driven pages with a mysql backend to make a fully integrated site with the tools for creating an entire series directly though the website. We will be opening up these same tools for use to our community to host their own organized racing events and series. Rather than needing to know how to code, our userbase will be able to define their series name, create a rulebook, schedule events, define their own points scale, set up qualifying (or race without qualifying, if they so choose), manage team entries, adjust the race grid for any penalties or absences, update event results including award penalty points if any should arise, as well as creating their own articles for their series, which can link to their own unofficial series broadcasts or videos…all without needing assistance or an approval process from TURN staff, in any racing game, on any gaming platform. TURN official series will show the community unparalleled levels of professionalism and content when supporting and promoting the races, but it may well be the TURN unofficial series that make TURN as popular as we envision.

This feature of the website is not released as we launch the website, but we are committed to being open and transparent about the development of these tools and features. Those that are particularly interested in organizing community series may even want to offer opinions and suggestions on how some of these features might be changed to better serve our community. We will constantly evolve the functionality of the website, and because we are using the same series management tools as the community, when we make updates to features for our official series, the community gets them immediately.

       START YOUR ENGINES

We are so thrilled to have you be a part of our community and its growth. We know that you will love what we have in store for the rest of the site as those features come online in the near future. Until then, please feel free to register here on our site, read the articles we are creating on a regular basis, hit up the discussion in our TURN community forums, and get ready to join the new era of organized sim racing.

The very excited and motivated,
TURN staff