The iRacing system assigns incident points for three broad categories of event. The first is leaving the racing surface — going off the track or onto the grass, gravel, or runoff in a way the system judges as a loss of control or violation of track limits. The second is losing control of the car itself, such as a spin or uncontrolled slide. The third is contact: hitting a barrier, wall, tire barrier, or another car on track.
Contact between cars is the most common source of incident points. Importantly, the system does not attempt to assign blame when two cars touch. All drivers involved in a contact event receive the same number of incident points, regardless of who moved first or who caused the collision. This no-fault design avoids the need for real-time adjudication but means an innocent driver accumulates the same points as the one responsible.
Within a single race session, a driver who accumulates too many incident points faces escalating consequences. These can include in-race penalties such as drive-throughs or other time-based sanctions, and at a higher threshold a driver may be disqualified from the session entirely. The specific thresholds vary by series and license level, with higher license-class racing tending to carry stricter incident limits.
After an official ranked race session ends, iRacing calculates a figure called corners per incident (CPI): the total number of corners the driver has completed divided by the total incident points accumulated across a rolling window of recent racing. The window covers considerably more than just the most recent race; its exact size depends on the driver's current license level, with higher classes using a larger sample to smooth out variance.
The CPI figure is the primary input into Safety Rating. A driver who completes many corners between incidents will have a high CPI and a correspondingly high Safety Rating, while a driver who regularly collects incidents relative to the corners they complete will see their Safety Rating fall. Because the window is rolling, recent improvement is reflected within a few sessions, and a single unusually bad race does not permanently damage the score.
Incident points and their effect on Safety Rating only apply in iRacing-sanctioned official ranked series. Hosted sessions and league races, which are user-created and always unranked, do not affect incident totals or Safety Rating. Additionally, a minimum number of participants — typically six — must be present in a race for either Safety Rating or the related iRating to be affected by the result.
The system tracks incident history and Safety Rating separately across iRacing's five racing disciplines: sports cars, formula cars, oval, dirt road, and dirt oval. Incidents incurred in an oval race do not influence a driver's road-racing Safety Rating, and vice versa.
Incident points are among the most discussed mechanics in the iRacing community because they shape the entire driver progression system. Drivers must hold an appropriate license level to enter higher-class series, and license advancement requires improving Safety Rating by keeping incident counts low. New drivers at the Rookie license level are therefore incentivized to drive carefully and learn proper racecraft before attempting to compete in faster, more competitive categories. The no-blame contact rule is also a recurring point of debate, as it means a driver can be penalized without having done anything wrong when another car hits them.