Inside SimRacing Expo 2025: Passion, Progress, and a Market Searching for Maximum Grip
The SimRacing Expo 2025 was an absolutely fantastic experience from a personal point of view.
There’s always the fear with this type of event, where you spend days surrounded by things you think you love, that you’ll feel a bit numb and maybe doubt that passion a little bit when it’s over.
Not even close!
As soon as I walked into the Dortmund Messe I was greeted by a Ligier LMP3 race car and it was all upwards from there.
More race cars.
More simracing wheels.
More of everything that makes this world so fun.
And it still wasn’t enough for me.
I couldn’t imagine feeling bored, and if anything I left even more certain than ever that simracing and motorsport are two of the things that make me happiest.
I know I wasn’t alone because the second day I was there, which happened to be the first weekend day, the line to get through the door went back hundreds of feet and you could just feel the energy and excitement waiting to be unleashed on the show floor.
According to the official SimRacing Expo site, from 2023 to 2024 the number of exhibitors almost doubled, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the attendance figure itself exceeded last year’s 13,600.
Nevertheless, while I had a great time, I was there by myself with the primary goal of putting together a first-hand view of where the industry is today and what that could mean for its future.
Behind the intricate rigs and full grids of simracers, what I saw was an industry with incredible momentum, but one still figuring out what it wants to become.
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In less than 500 words.
The “sim” part of simracing is becoming increasingly well served
The timing of this year’s Expo coincided with a flood of new racing-sim announcements, and together they tell an interesting story.
Assetto Corsa Rally was unveiled on Friday morning, a genuine surprise that instantly dominated conversation.
With the WRC license now back with NACON for a game set for release in 2027, and EA’s recent titles leaving players cold, the Kunos brand name alone guarantees attention as it will be the only new big-name rally title on the market.
Whether the game ultimately displaces Richard Burns Rally or Dirt Rally 2.0 is secondary; its very existence signals how broad and confident the simracing ecosystem has become (after all, the WRC is on life-support, videogames are expensive to develop, and yet here is a new rally title).
Another constant talking point on the show floor was Project Motor Racing, due in November. The demo booth never emptied, and in fact always had a long line in front of it, a reminder that there’s still appetite for new experiences even in a crowded circuit racing sim market.
Add in Le Mans Ultimate, Automobilista 2, Gran Turismo, and iRacing, and it’s clear that simulation racing has never offered more ways to drive.
But abundance brings its own limits.
Racing simulations are already a niche within the broader gaming world, and the sector might just be nearing a saturation point. Every new title divides player attention and forces developers to chase ever-smaller sub-communities.
That’s why the upcoming iRacing Arcade project matters.
If it can bridge the gap between casual racers and full-simulation purists (introducing accessible mechanics like tire wear, fuel strategy, and real circuits) it could be the first genuine on-ramp into the ecosystem. The goal now shouldn’t be to fragment the audience further; it should be to grow the overall pie by making entry easier and progression clearer.
The takeaway from this surge in software isn’t that the market is overcrowded; it’s that it needs structure.
The next phase of growth won’t come from another physics engine. It’ll come from creating a pipeline that converts fans into racers, and, ultimately, into participants in the broader motorsport economy.
You could feel the anticipation in the crowd of people lining up to enter the SimRacing Expo 2025; the simracing community is a deeply passionate one!
A lot of simracing hardware, not much interoperability
From a consumer point of view, the SimRacing Expo is a phenomenal opportunity to get hands-on with the best the industry has to offer; one can easily sample things they could see themselves buying as well as experiencing, if only for a moment, the setups of their dreams.
But from a business point of view the variety of equipment on display in specific categories raised some alarm bells for me.
How many pedal sets can the industry sustain?
How many new direct drive wheelbases will find their way into the market?
Can the simracing industry count on the same people to keep buying racing wheels costing close to (and sometimes more than) 1000 euros?
If not, how will it bring enough people in to provide an outlet for all these products that are so well made they could last for years?
The variety of products is coupled with limited applications for them, because every major brand now pushes for an ecosystem that they can lock people into. There aren’t really any clear standards for inter-operability and this is a risk for the industry because if someone has to upgrade their entire setup to acquire a new wheel, that wheel purchase may wait, or not happen at all.
If there was the equivalent of a USB connection to move from one component to another, that purchase would become much more likely (Asetek has made moves in this direction with their wheelbases and adapters but they are a rare exception).
Perhaps this is what simracing will converge to over time, but in the meantime this abundance of hardware points to a potential sea change in industry structure, because if there is not sufficient demand for all this supply, consolidation is on the horizon.
Fanatec was just the beginning for simracing transactions
While I was the expo I couldn’t shake the feeling that simracing still sees itself as a “cottage industry”.
To an extent, that perception is fair. Not only are simracing titles themselves a small part of the electronic entertainment landscape, but also the community still relies greatly on individuals coming together to solve the problems that inevitably come up when both hardware and software are fractured.
Still, these are highly capable tech companies producing professional-level hardware and the Fanatec acquisition by Corsair, surprising as it was when it was announced, is more likely over the long run to be the start of a trend rather than an outlier.
Its financial and organizational issues aside, Fanatec for years was the face of simracing and it makes sense that a computer parts conglomerate such as Corsair would bolster its product catalog by swooping in to acquire it before simracing took off even further.
Since then we’ve seen Cosworth sign agreements with iRacing, Next Level Racing and Simlab. Who’s to say Cosworth don't go all in by complementing their existing (limited) simracing hardware offerings with a fully branded suite of products via full acquisition of Next-Level Racing and Simlab?
This is just a hypothesis, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility and there are other examples. For instance, I have no internal knowledge of Sabelt’s plans but this is one of a few real-world racing companies that had a presence at the show; would they be tempted to grow faster, or indeed would one of their competitors want to get into simracing as well, by acquiring a simracing company?
For this to happen, there would have to be more industry involvement than just one company such as Sabelt.
The tech and motorsports industries must (presumably…) be keeping tabs on simracing afar, because their absence at the SimRacing Expo was notable.
How long can tech and motorsports stay on the sidelines of simracing?
Of the roughly 80 or so exhibitors at the show, two stood out to me because they were suppliers to the other industries, but made a strategic decision to adapt their core competencies to simracing equipment as a complementary revenue stream in their existing portfolios, which included renewable energy equipment, among other sectors.
Those niche cases aside, where were all the car brands, motorsport teams and tech companies?
Almost every booth had a simracing rig and every one of those rigs was running an NVIDIA graphics card, yet there was no NVIDIA booth.
The heart of a simracing rig is the PC, yet where were all the PC and PC accessory companies?
The same can be said of car brands and motorsports teams and series.
There were certainly race cars on display to get people into booths, but there are huge missed opportunities here.
At the SimRacing Expo, motorsport teams have a chance to connect directly with the most passionate fans out there and, crucially, the most likely to spend large amounts of money on this passion.
Why were they not here selling gear and building out their social followings?
Why was no one talking at length about their real sim-to-track pipeline?
At a time when many car brands are struggling (Porsche arguably being the most high-profile in the motorsport community), this type of the event is a perfect forum through which to activate the demographics that are most likely to evangelize their cars.
Sparco was another major player that was absent, and this is a major motorsport player that happens to have quite a developed simracing offering.
Puma wasn’t there either, but other, much smaller racing glove manufacturers were nevertheless at the expo bringing in new customers.
I understand that there is only so much space to rent and perhaps there is even a desire by the simracing community to stay insular, but if this greater involvement from the outside is inevitable (and I believe it is), it would be more beneficial for simracing to start that outreach first and maintain some of that control.
More importantly, this crossover would cut both ways and hopefully alter some of the demographics of simracing, because I noticed some troubling trends at this year’s expo.
The demographics of simracing do not represent the changing demographics of motorsport
What I noticed immediately while standing in line and then walking around was just how male-dominated this subculture is.
Sure, there were a handful of women walking around, but it was such a small amount so as to be almost insignificant from an overall view, and that’s not accounting for the fact that some women may only have been there to support their partners (though I’d love to be told otherwise or hear stories of how some such women came way interested in simracing!).
F1 is not necessarily a proxy for all of motorsport, but nevertheless the 2025 F1 Global Fan Survey states that: “Female respondents skew overall younger and are newer to the sport—64% have followed F1 for 5 years or less.”
The survey report also shares that “F1 fandom [has reached] 42% female”.
I just did not see this reflected during the conference, and crucially I did not see this among the children and teenagers in attendance.
Indeed, the SimRacing Expo’s website features a data set indicating that in 2024, just under 17% of attendees were under 24 years of age. That age breakdown feels right” for this year’s event, and while no gender breakdown is provided from what I saw it might as well have been 100% male in that age range.
This is significant from two angles.
First, bringing in more women simracers would be bringing in more racers, full-stop, and that would provide an important outlet for all of the simracing equipment that is coming into the market.
Second, if simracing is to become an increasingly viable path to a racing career (and I believe it will) then not bringing women in early, at the sim level, is only going to put them at a further disadvantage when trying to become full time drivers.
Quite simply, they will be left behind by all the boys who started simracing in their infancy, as many of the top drivers did in karts when they were young.
This goes against the conclusions of collected data, with the F1 Fan Survey stating: “23% of surveyed fans say they follow F1 ACADEMY, and among women that rises to 42%, making it the second-most-followed series after Formula 1 itself. The all-female racing platform is gaining momentum among newer audiences too, with 37% of Gen Z and 36% of newer respondents engaging – underscoring the demand for inclusive storytelling and representation on the grid.”
How the simracing industry brings in young girls and women to align itself more closely with the demographics of motorsport overall is outside the scope of this piece, but it will be one of the defining challenges of this next phase of simracing’s growth.
What now, after the SimRacing Expo 2025?
This year’s SimRacing Expo 2025 proved simracing has passion, products, and momentum.
What it still needs is connection; to the broader motorsport world, and to the people who will define its future.
Will the simracing community fuel further growth by embracing the trends that are powering real life motorsport, and if it does, will real life motorsport finally begin to care a little more about simracing?
I’m already counting down the days to SimRacing Expo 2026 to find out.
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