iRacing Pitwall

Real-time telemetry dashboard for iRacing.

A single self-contained .exe (~3.3 MB) that reads the iRacing SDK and opens a live overlay dashboard in your browser. No installer, no background service — just run it while iRacing is open.

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Screenshots

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Features

Widgets (all draggable, resizable, individually configurable):

• Standings — live race/session order, gaps, incidents, pit state
• Strength of Field — iRating-based SoF display
• Track Map — animated car positions at 60 Hz with sector labels and wind compass
• Telemetry Inputs — throttle, brake, steering, gear
• Lap History — lap times, gap to leader, incident dots per lap
• Fuel — fuel level, laps remaining, projected usage
• Tires — tyre temperatures and wear per corner
• Electronics — brake bias, TC, ABS, engine map
• Weather — air/track temperature, rubber state, humidity, wind
• Wind — dedicated wind compass with vehicle silhouette and relative wind direction

Dashboard UX:

• Drag-and-drop grid layout (saved per session), resize any widget
• Per-widget settings drawers (columns, units, display options)
• Global UI scale slider — works at any screen resolution / overlay size
• LAN access — open the dashboard on a phone or tablet on the same network
• Single-instance — launching a second copy opens the browser instead
• Auto-shutdown — the bridge exits when all browser tabs close (configurable)
• No data leaves your machine: all traffic stays on 127.0.0.1

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Installation

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit)
• iRacing client (the bridge reads its shared memory — iRacing must be running for live data, but the dashboard opens regardless)
• A modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge)

Steps

1. Download iracing-pitwall.exe from the Releases page.
2. Place it anywhere (e.g. your Desktop or a Tools\ folder).
3. Double-click to run. Your browser opens automatically at http://127.0.0.1:8765.
4. Start an iRacing session — telemetry appears in the dashboard automatically.
5. Close all browser tabs to shut down the bridge (or press Ctrl+C in the console).

Antivirus false positives: see the dedicated section below.

LAN access (phone / second screen)

The bridge also announces a LAN URL in its log (http://192.168.x.x:8765). Open that address on any device on the same Wi-Fi network to follow the session from a phone, tablet, or a second PC.

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Updating

Starting with v0.1.86, iRacing Pitwall checks for new releases automatically.

When a newer version is available, a small ⬆ update badge appears next to the version number in the header. Open the ⚙ UI Settings drawer — there you'll find an "Download update" button that takes you directly to the GitHub Releases page. Download the new iracing-pitwall.exe, stop the running instance (close all tabs or press Ctrl+C), and replace the old file.

No automatic download or self-patching — the update check is read-only. The app never downloads or executes code on your behalf.

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Configuration

All settings are optional environment variables. The defaults work for most setups.

Variable	Default	Description
BRIDGE_WS_PORT	8765	HTTP + WebSocket port
BRIDGE_KEEP_ALIVE	0	Set to 1 to prevent auto-shutdown when all tabs close
BRIDGE_SHUTDOWN_GRACE_SEC	5	Seconds to wait after last tab disconnects before exiting
BRIDGE_STARTUP_GRACE_SEC	30	Seconds to wait for the first browser connection before giving up
BRIDGE_NO_BROWSER	(unset)	Set to any value to suppress the automatic browser launch
BRIDGE_LOG	info	Log verbosity: trace, debug, info, warn, error

The log file is written next to the executable as bridge.log.

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Architecture

iRacing sim
    │
    │  Named Shared Memory (MMF)
    │  "Local\IRSDKMemMapFileName"
    │  60 Hz, triple-buffered, event-synced
    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Rust bridge  (iracing-pitwall.exe)      │
│                                          │
│  iracing_sdk/   — MMF reader, YAML       │
│                   session info parser    │
│                   (ISO-8859-1 encoded)   │
│  telemetry/     — snapshots, standings,  │
│                   track recorder,        │
│                   pit/sector/finish      │
│                   trackers               │
│  ws/            — axum HTTP + WebSocket  │
│                   server                 │
└───────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                │  HTTP + WebSocket
                │  127.0.0.1:8765
                ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  React dashboard  (embedded in .exe)     │
│                                          │
│  Built with Vite, served via rust-embed  │
│  Types shared with bridge via ts-rs      │
│  Layout: react-grid-layout + @dnd-kit   │
│  Charts: uplot                           │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Key design points:

• The entire React app is compiled into the .exe via rust-embed — no separate files to distribute.
• Shared types between Rust and TypeScript are generated automatically by ts-rs (cargo test writes to shared/*.ts).
• The SDK reader uses WaitForSingleObject on IRSDKDataValidEvent for frame-accurate, zero-CPU-waste synchronisation.
• Session info YAML from iRacing is encoded in ISO-8859-1 and decoded before parsing.

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Build from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.80 or later (rustup)
• Node.js 18+ and npm

Windows (native)

# 1. Generate shared TypeScript types from Rust structs
cargo test --manifest-path bridge/Cargo.toml

# 2. Build the React dashboard
cd dashboard
npm install
npm run build
cd ..

# 3. Build the bridge (embeds the dashboard at compile time)
cargo build --release --manifest-path bridge/Cargo.toml
# Output: bridge/target/release/iracing-pitwall.exe

Important: step 1 must come before step 2. shared/*.ts is gitignored (generated output). If you skip cargo test, the TypeScript compiler will fail to resolve @shared/* imports.

Linux → Windows cross-compile

The repo ships a build-release.sh script that uses cargo-xwin with a Zig-backed MSVC toolchain to produce a native x86_64-pc-windows-msvc binary from Linux. Additional prerequisites:

• cargo-xwin installed (cargo install cargo-xwin)
• A Zig 0.13+ installation with zig cc, zig lld-link, and zig ar on PATH (or wrapper scripts pointing at them)
• MSVC CRT headers/libs (downloaded once automatically by cargo-xwin)
• Rust target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc added (rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-msvc)

bash build-release.sh
# Output: dist/iracing-pitwall.exe

The script auto-bumps the patch version in bridge/Cargo.toml, builds the dashboard, cross-compiles the bridge, and copies the binary to dist/.

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Project Layout

iracing-pitwall/
├── bridge/                  Rust bridge (iRacing SDK reader + HTTP/WS server)
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── iracing_sdk/     MMF reader, YAML parser, shared-memory types
│   │   ├── telemetry/       Snapshot builders, pit/sector/track trackers
│   │   └── ws/              axum HTTP + WebSocket server, lifecycle watcher
│   ├── assets/              App icon (.ico, .o COFF resource)
│   └── Cargo.toml
├── dashboard/               React + TypeScript + Vite frontend
│   └── src/
│       ├── widgets/         One file per widget component
│       ├── components/      Shared UI components (SettingsDrawer, WindCompass …)
│       ├── layout/          Grid layout, widget registry, storage helpers
│       └── ws/              WebSocket client
├── shared/                  Generated TypeScript types (do not edit by hand)
└── build-release.sh         Linux → Windows cross-compile script

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Antivirus / False Positives

Some antivirus engines may flag iracing-pitwall.exe. This is a false positive.

As of v0.1.85, VirusTotal reports 2 / 71 engines flag the binary. Both are pure ML/heuristic detections (*!ml, HighConfidence) with no identified malicious behaviour.

Why AV scanners flag it

The binary combines several patterns that individually trigger heuristics, even though each has a legitimate purpose:

Trigger	Reason	Actual behaviour
No Authenticode signature	Unsigned binary	No cert yet — planned post-release
Low download reputation	New/unknown file	Resolves naturally as downloads grow
Named Shared Memory access	OpenFileMappingW	Required by the iRacing SDK protocol
No console window (windows_subsystem = "windows")	Common in malware	Dashboard opens a browser instead
Browser launch (webbrowser::open)	Common in downloaders	Opens http://127.0.0.1:8765 only

Mitigations already in place

• v0.1.84: Replaced 8.8.8.8 (used for LAN-IP detection via routing table) with 192.0.2.1 (RFC 5737 TEST-NET, never routed on the internet) to eliminate the "hardcoded external IP" heuristic.
• v0.1.85: Switched from MinGW (x86_64-pc-windows-gnu) to the MSVC target (x86_64-pc-windows-msvc), eliminating MinGW-specific PE-format patterns. These two changes brought the count from 5 down to 2.

What the binary does NOT do

• No network traffic outside 127.0.0.1 (plus the one-shot UDP connect to RFC 5737 TEST-NET to read the local routing table — no packet is sent, the socket connects instantly and is closed).
• No registry writes, no autostart, no scheduled tasks, no services installed.
• No file writes other than bridge.log next to the .exe.
• All Windows API calls are read-only access to the iRacing SDK shared memory.

Building from source

If you prefer to verify the binary yourself, build it from source (see above). The entire codebase is in this repository.

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

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Acknowledgements

• This project is an independent, community-built tool.
• iRacing is a trademark of iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations LLC. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way associated with iRacing.com.
• The bridge reads iRacing's telemetry via the official iRacing SDK shared-memory interface (read-only).