How to plan an iRacing endurance race: a team manager’s guide

An iRacing endurance race is won in the week before the green flag as much as during it. A 6, 12 or 24-hour event asks a team to hand one car between several drivers without losing time, running dry, or putting someone in the seat at an hour they can't make. This is a practical guide to planning one — the steps a team manager works through, and where a plan usually falls apart.

Start with driver availability, not the clock

The most common mistake is to design the perfect stint schedule first and only then find out who can drive when. Do it the other way around. Before you split a single stint, collect each driver's real availability across the whole race window, in their own time zone. For a 24-hour race that crosses three continents' worth of drivers, the overnight hours are the constraint everything else bends around.

Write availability down somewhere the whole team can see it — not in a group chat that scrolls away. When the plan is anchored to hours people actually committed to, you stop volunteering drivers for stints they were never going to make.

Work out stint length and the pit cycle

A stint is one run between pit stops, and its length is set by whichever runs out first: fuel or tires. Start from your fuel tank and consumption per lap to get a maximum stint in laps, then convert to time using a realistic — not qualifying — lap. Leave yourself a lap of margin; a late-race splash-and-dash costs far more than the few seconds you saved trimming it fine.

Once you know the stint length, the number of pit stops falls out of the race duration, and so does the shape of the race: how many stops, roughly when, and which ones are driver changes.

Build the driver rotation

Now lay drivers onto the stints. A few rules of thumb:

• Match your fastest, most consistent drivers to the stints that matter most — the start, and any run into changing conditions.
• Give every driver a rest of at least one stint between seats. Tired drivers make the mistakes that end races.
• Respect availability first and pace second. A quick driver who is asleep is slower than a steady one who is awake.
• Plan double-stints deliberately, not by accident — they save a driver change but ask more of the driver.

Have a plan for when the plan breaks

It will break. A full-course yellow, an unscheduled stop for a repair, or a red flag rewrites every stint after it. The teams that stay calm are the ones who decided in advance how they would re-shuffle — who moves where when a stint is lost — rather than improvising it on the radio at 4 am. When the race changes, re-anchor the rest of the plan from that moment instead of rebuilding it from scratch.

Share it with the whole team

A stint plan is only as good as the number of people looking at the current version. Drivers, spotters and the strategist all need the same view, updating in real time, so nobody is racing off a screenshot that went stale two hours ago. That single source of truth is the difference between managing the race and chasing it.

Let the tool do the bookkeeping

Every step above is bookkeeping a computer should handle. Paddock's stint planner builds the rotation on top of the availability your drivers already marked, keeps the plan shared and live, and lets you re-anchor it in one move when the race throws a curveball. Pair it with driver stats to decide who deserves the money stints, and the plan writes most of itself — leaving you to make the calls that actually need a human.