Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Escaping the Chaos: Why Lobby Racing Just Isn’t Enough
I started doing simracing a couple of years ago, and after some rocky days of learning where I was basically just trying to keep the car on the black stuff and not end up in the grass every second corner, I found myself playing Assetto Corsa Competizione the most. Eventually, you get tired of the AI. They are predictable and they don’t make the kind of human mistakes that make racing exciting, so you start to play online. And yeah, that’s a big difference, especially in ACC, playing the AI and playing the people. It’s much more unpredictable, much more fun, and much more crashes, which is the darker part of it.
But yeah, this is very good overall. Assetto Corsa Competizione provides competition races within the game itself, but this service doesn’t have much deeper something in it. It’s quite boring after a while because there is only one option in one time, and sometimes when you don’t have all the stars for the given track, you cannot even join at all. But there is another option, the lobby service, which is where most people start their journey.
There is always around 900 active servers where you can race at any given moment. A lot of them have a pretty full list of people racing, so it’s a big fun when you get a good grid, but it’s dangerous, especially when you are not experienced enough. You will lose your safety rating very quickly because people are crashing like crazy over there. You have to build up the good SA and go to the lobby server where you have to have some amount of SA to join it. Those servers are much, much better than without any restriction, which is basically like Destruction Derby and killing your rating in ACC.
The Independent Powerhouse: Choosing LFM on PC
So after a lot of crashes, a lot of yeeting discussions in the chat where people are just screaming, and quite a lot of races actually on the lobby, I started to look around for even better option to race. And I came across Low Fuel Motorsport as the leading independent platform for racing. Low Fuel Motorsport is mostly focused on ACC, which is excellent for me, and it’s a big service. There are huge amount of organized races, they have a system when and how to join, and so forth. I chose another option on the market. This is for PC players only. If you have a PlayStation or Xbox, you would probably choose SimGrid, which goes for the consoles as well. Another option, similar, is Pitskill.io, but Low Fuel Motorsport is the largest sim racing platform at this very moment in 2025, by far. So this should be your first option, probably, if you are on PC and you want to race a lot with kind of the same quality persons like you on daily races. So I opted out for Low Fuel Motorsport like two years ago, and here is my experience with it.
The License Hurdle: Proving You Belong on the Grid
To join Low Fuel Motorsport and be able to race, you have to prove yourself as a kind of experienced driver, although you don’t need to be that super fast as the top of the race, but you have to be reasonably good. I like the system to join because it makes the good selection and those destruction derby players are filtered out with this system and this is a very good system. So if you want to join races, they have a practice server which is reachable via internet. You can find it within the free lobby servers. Just type in Low Fuel Motorsport LFM into the server selection and you got it. You have to find which is it on the server. To register you can use Steam or Discord. Then you have to go to the race and try to make 7 clean rounds and be within the range of the best times, maximum 5% on the top of the best times. This is the 107% rule they use to keep the pace consistent. After 2 or 3 attempts I was able to reach and I obtained the license to race. So my journey begins here. If you want to race Nordschleife, you have to make a similar license, but I didn’t go for Nordschleife yet. I just like shorter tracks and Nordschleife still has to wait for me. I’m not that interested to get into that.
Tools of the Trade: Technical Requirements for Serious Racing
To join the races you have to obviously sign up for the specific race in time and the other thing you must have is to download the utility which is called ACC connector which somehow translate the IP address of the server to your local IP address and then you have to go to local servers like on the LAN and the server when it goes online it will appear there. This is one extra tool you have to have when you want to race on the Low Fuel Motorsport and well this is a decision they made because you know the ACC had some outages and actually they still have the outages of the network. Low Fuel Motorsport didn’t want to rely on the public multiplayer service of the game and they are building like local servers independent of the race so when the ACC multiplayer is down you can still play Low Fuel Motorsport. This is sometimes problem because when the network is down you cannot even load your LAN server somehow so sometimes it’s struggle but it’s better. It’s more stable the servers especially those which are located in European area has a great ping and technically the servers are very good. Another thing you may want is the LFM Livery Tool.
If you don’t have this, everyone is just driving around in a plain white or carbon car and you can’t see the cool designs that teams put together. It makes the grid look much more professional when you can actually see the sponsors and the colors of the other cars. You also have to get used to their custom Balance of Performance, or BoP. LFM adds weight or restrictors to certain cars to make sure the field is even. So even if the game developers made one car too fast, LFM balances it out so you can still drive an older car and not be totally out of the race. This keeps the variety high which is good.
The Daily Grind: Sprints and the Rating Struggle
So I did this basic license and I started to race. The options were to race, it’s quite big, but at the end you don’t have that much when you start. You can only race the 15 minute sprint races at the moment and that’s it because you are not building up your safety rating and your ELO enough yet. So you are doing these 15 minute races. Last year it was 20 minutes, now they push it to the 15 minutes. Well, that’s how they decided. So when you start to race you have to join the race. Every 45 minutes there is another 15 minute race. So you have plentiful options to race during the day, as much as you want, you don’t have any restrictions. You just click and wait a bit and you can join the races. So once you do that you go to practice. There is not allowed to race in the practice, it’s just to prepare your setups and so on. Then you go to qualification which is usually 7 minutes and then 15 minutes race. Races are much better than lobbies. This is the best advantage of Low Fuel Motorsport.
Here the races have its quality, even though when you are on the low tier the people are not trying to hit you as crazy and there are not that many accidents as there are on the ACC lobbies, especially those without SA filter. Here your journey starts, you are building up your ELO and you are building up your SA. When you reach the threshold you can join another races which are only filtered for the people with the higher ELO and higher safety rating. So ELO and safety rating decide everything. I’m not the greatest racer, so I was kind of struggling and stagnating because the ELO and SA rise slower than it falls. So you can build up for several clean races and then you have one wrong race where you get caught in someone else’s mess and it falls down instantly. But this is a fair play system which makes you focus on the safety first and then on the speed. This is the way how you should really learn driving in general. So you know your car, you know the spatial awareness and everything is much more important when racing here than when doing lobbies. So this really makes a big distinction and for those people who want real racing, they will like it a lot.
The Problem with Variety: GT4s and DLC Barriers
You are building up, and once you reach some threshold you can do the endurance racing 45 minutes or a higher league of 20-25 minutes races. They provide even the races for the GT4 cars or like specific BMW M2 races. But I don’t do that because especially those are the GT4 cars. You have to have the DLC and let’s be honest, how many people really do have this DLC? It’s a fraction of those having the base game. So if you really want to play all the races during the whole season, you have to have the DLCs actually because some tracks, some cars are not allowed in the base game so you have to pay for those DLCs of the base game. So here GT4 races are pretty empty. So if nobody is racing, it’s boring.
I tried a couple of times but only a few players joined so I think this is almost useless category on the Low Fuel Motorsport. Endurance is good because and I really love to do the low tier endurance races last year. Because you have to make some tactics, there is always a pit stop so you don’t need to be the fastest but you have to think more strategically because of the pit stop and amount of fuel and it makes it really good. There is not that much players playing 45 minutes but quite enough to enjoy the race. Actually here I’m pretty angry on the Low Fuel Motorsport. They wanted to tweak it up for the ongoing season which is ending by the new year and they made a feedback and forum what to improve. I told them my way, what I want and actually everything happened was the opposite. So instead of 25 minutes like spring race, now we have only 15 minutes spring race and the 45 minutes endurance race is not yet reachable for me because I don’t have enough SA and ELO. So actually I can only do 15 minutes races right now which is ok but I was trying 45 minutes sprints and endurance like almost the same amount of races I did. So now it’s not possible for me. Yes, if I reach the level of SA, of the safety, I can join it but I’m not yet there. As I told you it’s quite tricky to improve but I’m not the best racer. What happened is that the options for me to race narrowed down pretty steeply and especially considering they were asking what to improve and they did the opposite, I’m not that happy with it.
Climbing the Ranks: Licenses and Tier Divisions
Even though the sprint races are short, the system behind them is very deep. When you join for example the 15 minutes sprint, there are a lot of people really in the tables, so it’s divided to even six divisions. So you’re usually playing the lowest tier division and as your indexes go up you are joining the higher divisions in the tier, like tier one, tier two. So there are six divisions for example. So you are not just attending more professional races, but even within those races you are divided to the division, so it’s pretty complex and you are racing against people on the similar skill set that you have and comparing to them. This leads to the actual License Tiers which are the backbone of the whole thing. You start as a Rookie and you have to grind your way through Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and eventually the Alien tier if you are fast enough. Each of these tiers has specific Safety Rating (SR) and ELO requirements. It’s a proper hierarchy that keeps the racing clean because nobody wants to lose their hard-earned indexes. But like I said, when they change the rules and lock you out of the endurance races you used to love because your ELO isn’t high enough yet, it feels like the goalposts are moving.
The Frustrating Reality of the Appeal System
Now, how to handle all these situations like accidents, appeals, and penalties. This is something which works technically, but I have to say I don’t like it very much. If you think somebody crashed you, you can appeal, but you have to make a video on YouTube, you have to put some specific information into that video, and then you can place an appeal. You spend a lot of time doing videos and stuff, and then the appeal might go wrong anyway. I didn’t do this yet because it’s a pretty time-consuming process to appeal, so I don’t appeal when I’m being crashed by people, but other people do appeal against you. I had some penalties where you have to agree with the decision of the arbiter who said that you did a mistake. Usually, you get some deduction of your Elo and you lose some seconds in the race results. But when they decide that you hit someone by purpose, like a retaliatory accident, you can get even 28 days of ban, and I actually got one. The situation looked like I really did it on purpose, but I know myself and I know what really happened. The guy who went against me in this appeal made the video in a way that looks like I was the one at fault, but actually, it was his fault. Because I didn’t make my own video, I couldn’t prove anything. What really hurts me is that there is no easy possibility to appeal against these big ban penalties. For small penalties, you can appeal right away from the form, but for a 28-day ban, you have to go to some hidden menu, create a ticket, and it really sucks. They don’t give you any guidance or a simple button to click, so they really don’t care much about this process or hearing your side.
Utility Over Community: The Patreon Model
The communication with the creators and the arbiters is very weak in my opinion. Even though they have a sophisticated website and a Discord server, the feedback feels read-only. You make a question, they reply, and that’s it. If the reply isn’t good enough, you have to create a whole new thread. It makes Low Fuel Motorsport feel more like a utility or a tool rather than a community-building service. They will likely have a problem with this at some point because there is no emotional attachment. They are even very strict about the in-game chat; if you say “sorry” to someone you crashed by mistake, they might penalize you for chatting, which is crazy to me. This cold environment is visible in how they handle the business side too. There are premium options where you can become a Patreon donator. This gives you things like deeper statistics and the ability to sign up for races sooner. I think the early sign-up is pretty useless because the servers usually only get full right before the race starts anyway. They probably make a couple of ten thousand euros per month from these donations and affiliations with brands like Fanatec or Syncmesh, but it’s a donation model. I don’t donate yet, especially after being angry about how they handled my ban. Most people don’t donate, and since the communication is so weak, you don’t feel like you are part of something you want to support with money.
The Road Ahead: ACC Stagnation and Future Sim Titles
The system is super reliant on ACC, and as we know, ACC is getting less focus from the developers because of the new games they are building. This might be the end of the road at some point. LFM is trying to move into games like Le Mans Ultimate or the original Assetto Corsa, but those races are often empty or feel like a beta. 90% of the players are on ACC. They are scared that the game is at the end of its life cycle and they are making petitions like the #SaveACC one to the developers, but it feels like they are just trying to save their own business model rather than the community. Everyone is waiting to see if they will move to Assetto Corsa EVO in 2026. If you are looking at this from a global perspective, it is mostly a European service. During the day, the European servers are packed, but the US servers during the night are pretty empty. I estimate only 10-15% of the players are from outside of Europe. You can still join with a higher ping and it’s playable, but it’s not the same experience. To conclude, the racing on Low Fuel Motorsport is unmatched in the current environment—only iRacing is on this level. It’s a great service for the racing itself, but do not expect to join a community. It is a utility to get clean races, and the moment a better option comes along, people will probably just jump off to that. If you want real racing, go for it, but keep your expectations low for the social side.
