Recently I found myself sliding sideways through a gravel parking lot (on purpose) after a beer run in my Subi. My first thought wasn’t, “Maybe I should stop doing that.” It was, “I should finally sign up for that rallycross thing I keep talking about.”
My hands were shaking. It was one of the coolest driving experiences I’d ever had.
Just like that, the bug was buzzing louder than ever somewhere deep inside me, and there was no going back.
Since then, I’ve been calling performance shops looking for advice, binging tutorial videos online, and, maybe most importantly, training in the simulator.
And not road racing, either.
Rallycross.
Before we go any further, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
I’m talking about SCCA RallyCross here in the United States: grassroots motorsport where you race one car at a time against the clock on dirt or gravel. Fastest time in your class wins. That’s it. It’s simple, relatively affordable, and looks like an absolute blast.
Its tarmac-minded cousin, autocross, is more popular. Autocross is typically held in giant parking lots, weaving through cone courses on pavement. Rallycross trades the pavement for dirt, gravel, and enough loose surface to make every corner feel alive.
And man…
I like sliding in the dirt.
The Oddball Cousin
If autocross is rallycross’s tarmac cousin, then sim rally has always been the oddball cousin of sim racing.
Circuit racing has iRacing, with its massive subscriber base, laser-scanned tracks, and painstakingly recreated cars designed to feel remarkably close to their real-life counterparts.
Rally has traditionally lived in a different world.
Smaller communities.
Older software.
More tinkering.
Diehard grassroots contributors.
Ironically, I got into rally before I got serious about simulated road racing.
I spent countless hours in EA SPORTS WRC and DiRT Rally 2.0. Both are available on Steam, both play great with a force-feedback wheel, and for most people they’ll absolutely scratch the rally itch.
They certainly did for me.
But those games can also leave you thinking there’s more grip to be found than there really is. They lean a little more toward game than pure simulation.
That was fine when I was playing for fun.
But now I’m not just looking to scratch an itch.
I’m trying to train.
Fortunately, I’d already been down this road years ago.
One of my favorite simulators of all time is Richard Burns Rally. For a long stretch, it was the only other racing sim installed on my PC besides iRacing.
If I wanted to race on pavement, I opened iRacing.
If I wanted to throw a car sideways through the woods, I opened RBR.
That was my entire setup.
Race.
Or rally.
I was covered either way.
The Most Rally Simulator Ever Made
So what exactly is Richard Burns Rally?
Ironically, it’s probably the most rally thing about rally simulation.
If Formula 1 and GT racing are often the playgrounds of rich folk with bottomless budgets, rally has always felt like the motorsport of the people.
The cars aren’t prototypes or million-dollar hypercars.
They’re Toyotas.
Hyundais.
Fords.
Škodas.
Subarus.
Cars that, at least at a glance, resemble the ones parked in our driveways. You drive the same roads to work that rally drivers close down for a stage on the weekend.
The experience is just as down to earth.
At a Formula 1 race, a mediocre grandstand seat can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
At a rally?
You hike into the woods, wander down a gravel road, or end up watching from someone’s front yard. Before long, you’re sharing stories around a fire pit with locals who hand you a cold beer and point out the best corner to watch the cars fly by.
That’s rally.
Grassroots.
Welcoming.
Unpretentious.
Richard Burns Rally is exactly the same way.
Released in 2004, the game should have disappeared years ago. Instead, a passionate community adopted it, rebuilt huge pieces of it from the ground up, and spent two decades adding cars, stages, physics improvements, pacenotes, weather, online competition, VR support, triple-monitor support, and just about every feature you’d expect from a modern simulator.
Today, it’s less a video game than a community-built simulation platform.
And somehow, more than twenty years after its release, it’s still widely considered the benchmark for realistic rally driving.
Yes.
I’m serious.
Just like Max Verstappen is known for spending countless hours on iRacing, Kalle Rovanperä has trained on Richard Burns Rally.
Think about that for a second.
One of the fastest rally drivers on Earth…
Training on a game released in 2004.
The physics are astonishing. Not just “good for an old game,” genuinely outstanding.
The cars move, rotate, lose grip, and regain it in a way that’s difficult to describe until you’ve experienced it yourself. It gives you the sense that the tires are interacting with a loose surface, rather than the car simply following a predetermined slide animation.
You feel the weight transfer.
You feel the rear beginning to rotate.
You feel the front tires searching for grip.
You feel the difference between saving a slide and merely surviving one.
And the stages?
They’re practically endless.
Thousands of kilometers of roads have been recreated by volunteers from around the world. Many of those creators live in the countries they’re modeling, rebuilding local roads and famous rally stages because they know them, love them, and want other people to experience them.
That community spirit shows up everywhere.
Best of all…
It’s free.
The awkward part is getting it installed.
There’s no giant publisher footing the bill for endless file hosting, so the project is distributed a little differently from a normal game. You rely on peer-to-peer downloads for the raw files and then use a third-party installer.
I use RallySimFans, which packages a huge amount of the community work together and makes the whole thing far more approachable than it sounds.
Once it’s installed, you have access to what many people, including professional rally drivers, still consider the best rally simulator ever made.
For free.
That is kind of insane.
Why It Matters for Rallycross
Of course, stage rally and SCCA RallyCross are not the same thing.
In rallycross, you’re only in the car for a minute or two at a time. The courses are shorter. The corners are tighter. There’s no co-driver reading pacenotes while you charge blindly through a forest.
But almost everything I’m trying to learn still transfers.
Looking farther ahead.
Managing weight transfer.
Braking on a loose surface.
Rotating the car before the apex.
Using the throttle to adjust the car’s attitude.
Finding grip where it barely exists.
Keeping momentum.
Staying calm while the car moves around underneath me.
Most importantly, it teaches you to stop fighting every little slide.
On pavement, any movement can feel like a mistake. On dirt, movement is part of the conversation. The car is always shifting, floating, digging, and searching.
The goal isn’t to lock it into one perfect line.
The goal is to understand what it’s doing and work with it.
That’s exactly what I need before my first SCCA RallyCross.
Oh, and There’s One More Thing
Now, if you’ve been following sim rally over the past year, you’re probably thinking:
What about Assetto Corsa Rally?
Fair question.
I’ve been following the project since it was announced. Like a lot of rally fans, I was cautiously optimistic.
Richard Burns Rally has sat on the throne for so long that any new rally simulator claiming to focus on realism is going to be met with some skepticism.
But recently, Assetto Corsa Rally entered Early Access.
And it’s good.
Like…
Really good.
Not a mod.
Not an expansion.
A standalone rally simulator, and the first title I’ve driven that genuinely rivals Richard Burns Rally in physics and overall driving feel.
Except this time, it’s wrapped in a thoroughly modern package.
The graphics are gorgeous.
The lighting is incredible.
The environments feel alive.
The roads look like actual places rather than textured ribbons laid across scenery.
And somehow, despite still being in Early Access, the driving already feels remarkably mature.
Assetto Corsa Rally isn’t trying to be another yearly rally game. It’s following the same broad philosophy that made the original Assetto Corsa so respected:
Simulation first.
Its rally stages are laser-scanned. The cars are licensed. The physics are clearly the priority. The Early Access roadmap calls for more than thirty cars, additional real-world rally locations, VR support, career progression, a rally school, multiplayer development, and continued physics refinement.
Then came the announcement that made people pay even closer attention.
The FIA selected Assetto Corsa Rally as the platform for the inaugural FIA Esports Global Rally Tour.
For a simulator that hasn’t even reached version 1.0, that’s a serious endorsement.
It also means Assetto Corsa Rally isn’t merely arriving as another rally game.
It’s being positioned as a competitive platform.
And that makes this a fascinating moment for sim rally.
I feel incredibly lucky to be here for both sides of it.
I get to enjoy the culmination of more than twenty years of community work poured into Richard Burns Rally. Thousands of people have collectively built something extraordinary and kept it alive far beyond any reasonable commercial lifespan.
At the same time, I get to watch what may become the next de facto rally simulator grow up in real time.
That’s a pretty exciting place to be.
Why I’m Still Driving Richard Burns Rally
Assetto Corsa Rally may be the future.
But for now, Richard Burns Rally still has some undeniable advantages.
Because the graphics are from another era, the game runs beautifully on modern hardware.
Triple monitors?
No problem.
VR?
Smooth.
You can push high frame rates without needing a computer powerful enough to model weather systems for the federal government.
And here’s the funny thing.
After about five minutes behind the wheel, you stop noticing that the game is old.
Your brain becomes completely occupied by what the car is doing.
The weight transfer.
The grip.
The suspension loading up.
The steering going light over a crest.
The rear stepping out under throttle.
The front tires biting again as the car straightens.
You don’t notice the flat trees or the old textures because the physics are doing a far better job of convincing your brain than the graphics ever could.
And that’s the best compliment for a driving sim.
Interactive driving lesson
Same corner. Different job.
Scrub through one identical ninety-degree corner. On tarmac, the car's heading and direction of travel stay nearly aligned. On gravel, the driver rotates the car earlier so it points toward the exit before its momentum has fully changed direction.
The gravel car is not taking a magical shortcut. The important difference is timing: it changes its heading earlier, accepts controlled slip, and reaches the exit already pointed where it wants to accelerate.