iRacing organizes its driver population through a license-class hierarchy. All new members begin at the Rookie level and must advance through grades D, C, B, and A before qualifying for the Pro license reserved for top-tier eSports competitors such as the eNASCAR iRacing Series and the Porsche eSports Supercup. Safety Rating is the key advancement mechanism within this system: a driver cannot move to a higher license class without both participating in a minimum number of sessions at the appropriate level and achieving a sufficient Safety Rating within the relevant iRacing discipline.
The Safety Rating system is built around incident points, which are deducted from a driver's record whenever certain on-track events occur. Incidents include going off the road surface, losing control of the vehicle, and making contact with a barrier, wall, or another car. The system then calculates a metric known as corners per incident (CPI): the ratio of corners completed to incident points accumulated. This ratio is measured across a rolling window of recent corners rather than a single race; the exact size of the window depends on the driver's current license level, with higher license classes requiring more corners in the sample.
The resulting CPI figure is converted into the Safety Rating score. A higher CPI — meaning fewer incidents relative to corners driven — produces a better Safety Rating. Because the calculation is rolling, a particularly incident-free run of races can meaningfully improve the score, while a succession of messy sessions will drag it down.
A deliberate design principle of the Safety Rating system is that it assigns incident points without determining fault. When two or more cars make contact, every driver involved receives the same number of incident points, regardless of who initiated the collision. This approach avoids the need for stewards to adjudicate responsibility after every contact event, though it also means an entirely innocent driver receives the same incident count as the driver who caused the contact.
In-race consequences are also possible. A driver who accumulates too many incident points within a single session can receive in-race penalties or be disqualified entirely from that session.
iRacing divides racing into five disciplines: sports cars (fender-to-fender road racing), formula cars, oval, dirt road, and dirt oval. Safety Rating is tracked independently for each discipline, meaning a driver can hold a high road-racing license class while still being at Rookie level in dirt oval. Advancement in one discipline has no effect on the others. Only participation in iRacing-sanctioned official ranked races affects Safety Rating; hosted sessions and leagues are always unranked and do not influence the score.
A driver's Safety Rating, combined with participation requirements, determines eligibility to advance to the next license class. Official series each carry a minimum license requirement: a C-class series requires at least a C, B, or A license to enter. Drivers at Rookie or D level are generally barred from higher-class series. This structure means Safety Rating acts as a gatekeeping mechanism that incentivizes clean driving and steady improvement before a driver is allowed to compete in faster or more competitive categories.
Safety Rating and iRating are parallel but independent metrics. Safety Rating measures clean and safe driving; iRating measures competitive performance against other drivers using an Elo-type calculation. Both are tracked per discipline, both are affected only by official ranked races, and both influence which race sessions a driver is placed into — but they serve distinct purposes, and excelling in one does not automatically improve the other.