Good to hear of a new recruit
Firstly, worth mentioning I've always found the 'feel' of Papyrus/iRacing and Simbin games like GTR2 to be quite different, both good but worth considering unless you've already played GPL it may take some time to get used to...
Ok, so costs, the fun bit
You've got the 'monthly' subs which you can buy in 1, 3, 6, 12 and 24 month subscriptions, personally I'd start out with a 1 or 3 month (there's usually a code for a '3 for 1' offer, dunno where right now though) sub just to get used to it, and then wait around for the offers (usually around 'black friday' etc) for buying longer subs, my last one was a 2 year offer for $99 iirc, $4 a month is a great price (I'm so hooked I'll pay pretty much whatever tbh, been a member since September 2008...)
Cars/Tracks, £11.95 or $14.95.
The only other thing that costs is 'hosting', so rather than setting up your own server like in other games if you want to run races that aren't in the official series you need to buy a 'hosted session' which cost somewhere around the $2 per 2 hours iirc. You can use credit that you acquire in game for participation in official series (max of $10 per season, 4 seasons a year) to pay for this, and content/subs.
You don't have to pay for official races, or to enter hosted sessions others have paid for, as for setups others can freely share them with you either in-game or the file directly, and iRacing provides baseline setups of varying quality for all cars.
So initial setup costs really depends on how you do it, you could just go all in and spend >$1000 to get all content, road and oval. Or you can find a 3-for-1 offer for $9 (iirc) and that'll give you enough to get started certainly for at least a month if not the full 3 without any expenditure. Probably the most common choice is to enter on a 1 or 3 month sub, then if they enjoy it buy the content for one series (I'll probably expand below) when they want to go up a level, and so on until they end up with a decent selection, to do this you're probably talking $80-120 per series if you do it in one go, depends on series/discounts or whatever.
It is kinda ameri-centric, but there is a decent selection of road course stuff, and some of the American road racing tracks are pretty good, VIR is a blast (except North layout, that sucks balls
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Basically the entire service revolves around the idea of 'Series' which are 1 to 3 cars, they run a 12 week schedule (1 week == 1 track), 4 times a year (with the 'week 13' being useless for racing but they use the time to roll out a new software build).
As a driver you have 3 'ratings', ttRating is crap (time trials, and screwy formulae basically). iRating is 'how good' you are, it goes up if you win, down if you finish in the bottom of the field, it's used when a field 'splits' (so if a series has a max of 12 cars per race, and 20 join you'll get 2x 10-car splits) to determine what one you go in, in theory racing others around the same level.
And the most important, especially for a rookie, is Safety Rating. This is based on a count of 'corners per incident', and the incidents are given on a completely non-fault basis, if there is car contact you get 4 incidents (a '4x'), a spin is 2, going off track is 1, no matter what the reason is. The aim for Rookies is to get out of rookies, avoid everyone/everything, winning means nothing if you collect enough incidents to prevent you getting your licence level up.
As kinda mentioned, as a driver you also have a licence level, this is based of SR and goes:
Rookie -> D -> C -> B -> A -> Pro -> WC (the last two are iRating+SR based and limited numbers, nothing to think about just yet
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Get your SR (safety rating) >4.0 and complete the minimum participation requirements, you level up instantly, otherwise there are set promotion dates where you can level up with >3.0 + MPR.
The driver ratings/licences, and the series, are split then into Oval and Road. Inside each category you have several series per licence level (if you want I can grab a list, cba right now though). Each series runs a championship with divisions split on iRating over the 12 week period, 8 weeks scored and 4 weeks dropped.
Races are scheduled every day at either hourly, 2-hour or 4-hour intervals for every series. However you do need a certain number, defined per series, to make the race 'official' (where it counts towards championship points), and an unofficial race will generally see no-one bother racing. Some series suffer for participation and so not all sessions go official, however for the road series by and large you'll find several timeslots a week where it will go official.
No OcUK league, there are also 'clubs' inside iRacing, with ours being UK and Ireland, or UK&I, and as a club we do have sessions at a set time/day every week for a variety of different road and oval cars (oddly I believe there's more Oval than Road atm, although it's worth giving Oval a try, vastly different from Road but great fun still
Bit of a length post, any questions I'll try to answer them
Let's see how I get on...
