Casey Kirwan wins Dale Earnhardt Jr. trophy to punctuate milestone year in iRacing
As Casey Kirwan took the victory lap of all victory laps around the virtual track, someone from his XSET team sprinted on stage and excitedly shook him, as if to ask Kirwan: Can you believe this?!
The driver’s big and bewildered smile suggested that he couldn’t.
Kirwan won the eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series Championship in Uptown Charlotte on Tuesday night, outmaneuvering and then outlasting the other three drivers in the Championship 4 to do it. The win means that he gets to take $100,000 and the series championship trophy — which is named after Dale Earnhardt Jr. and modeled after the old Winston Cup — back to his home in Matthews.
“It’s insane,” the driver of the No. 95 car told The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday. Kirwan said this a few minutes after he’d smiled for cameras and cried while hugging his family, who’d supported him as a iRacing competitor and streamer for years. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”
Tuesday’s race punctuated another milestone year in the world of iRacing. And that was evident within the Hall of Fame’s walls: The four drivers who were competing for the championship were up on a stage, with their own racing rigs assembled the way they like it, and they competed in front of a live audience for the first time in series history. Drivers could hear their fans cheer and their dads and moms and friends anxiously sink deeper and deeper into their seats as the final few of the 110 laps drew near.
The second-biggest cheer on the night came when Kirwan cleared Bobby Zalenski with about 50 laps to go to take second place and to claim the lead among the championship drivers. A mistake-free run helped Kirwan pull away from there.
But the loudest cheer? That arrived when Kirwan’s victory did.
“Just to experience this with everyone who’s here — that’s one of the nice things about being local is I have so many friends and family here,” he said. “To have everyone take a picture with the trophy and to share the experience, it’s so cool.”
The first-place finisher on the night was Keegan Leahy, last year’s series champion who wasn’t in title contention on Tuesday night after being eliminated from the playoffs earlier this season. As far as how the Championship 4 drivers finished: Kirwan finished second, good enough for the series championship; Zalenski finished third; Graham Bowlin finished 18th and Steven Wilson finished 22nd.
Dale Earnhardt Jr.: ‘The whole industry gets it’
Some of the biggest names in NASCAR were in attendance for Tuesday’s event.
Steve Letarte, famed crew chief and NBC analyst, provided color commentary on the broadcast. Cup Series driver Aric Almirola was in the audience to support Wilson, his Stewart-Haas Racing teammate.
Even Dale Earnhardt Jr. was there to deliver Kirwan the championship trophy — the one that bears his name. The two-time Daytona 500 winner called Tuesday’s event “amazing.”
“I think an event like this has a lot of potential and with some tweaks can get more and more energy,” Earnhardt Jr. told The Charlotte Observer. “I think the final event for this series can definitely have a home here at the Hall of Fame.”
There’s no denying that iRacing has become essential to the sport of NASCAR. Its core business model is still centered on putting people in a race car and simulating the race car driver experience — a business that particularly boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic — but iRacing has made itself integral in other ways, too.
It has helped design and prototype new racetracks. (Think the Chicago Street Course, or the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum racetrack.) It has helped innovate and improve old racetracks, like Atlanta Motor Speedway. It has helped the top-tier drivers prepare for upcoming races.
It also, recently, has helped bring back one of NASCAR’s most culturally important venues. In 2019, Earnhardt Jr. brought a documentary crew to clean up the once-abandoned, once-forgotten North Wilkesboro Speedway so it could be scanned and put on the iRacing platform.
That effort set off a whole bunch of serendipitous moments that won’t soon be forgotten. Among those moments: the magical late model stock car race at the Wilkes County racetrack — and, not long after, the naming North Wilkesboro Speedway as the site of the 2023 All-Star Race.
“Now that the industry really has their arms around it and really embraces it, it’s legitimized it in a way,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I used to tell people all the time — crew chiefs, drivers, car owners — that this is a great tool. This could benefit us. And you just could never get anybody to take you seriously.
“But now, it’s like the whole industry gets it. And so the more the (industry embraces it), the better it’ll be for iRacing, the better it’ll be for drivers like you saw here tonight. It’s a rising tide lifts all boats kinda deal.”
iRacing isn’t ‘just a video game’
Steve Myers, iRacing’s executive vice president and executive producer, was also at Tuesday’s event. He’s been part of virtual racing for decades, back when Papyrus ruled the realistic sim racing genre.
He shared a lot of Earnhardt Jr.’s sentiments.
“I think once we did all of those projects,” Myers said, “I think the industry said, ‘Wow, these guys aren’t just a video game company. They are actually helping the sport.’”
The work that iRacing has done in the past 24 months alone — in designing and prototyping and testing new racetracks — has saved millions of dollars for NASCAR. The company is working on a project to improve Texas Motor Speedway now, Myers said.
“For me, nothing makes me prouder than what we’re doing to contribute to (NASCAR),” Myers said. “We’re helping them make changes that they wouldn’t have conceptualized or done previously because of the work that we’ve done.”
By the same token, Myers said, nights like Tuesday couldn’t have happened without the support that NASCAR provides iRacing. In return, it has led to the space’s growth.
All you have to do to understand this growth is to ask Kirwan — the 2022 champion whose beginning in the sport intersected almost perfectly with the sport’s rise.
“I’ve been in the series for five years now,” Kirwan said. “And back then, the first year I ran in it, the total prize pool was 17 grand. It was 10 grand to be the champion. (This year), it was 10 grand to make it into tonight. Like if I finished fourth, I’d still leave here with $10,000.”
He added: “NASCAR and iRacing (has evolved) so much, and just the viewership and everything has grown. And to be here in the first live event, and to cap it off like this, it’s crazy.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2022 at 9:46 AM.
