The free base content used in iRacing’s lower-level road series includes the Mazda MX-5 and Pontiac Solstice roadsters, the entry-level Spec Racer Ford prototype, and towering over them all, the bulky Cadillac CTS-VR GT sedan.

One of these things is not like the others.

For new drivers wading in the pool of online racing, the Cadillac may seem like a dive into the deep end. Compared to those other cars, it’s much bigger and heavier with more horsepower, all of which makes it comparatively hard to handle.

Despite that seeming imbalance of performance compared to the other beginner-accessible content, the tale of the Cadillac on iRacing is in many ways a success story. The car was developed through a partnership with Cadillac, which requested that it be made free to all members.

For a full year after its release, Cadillac offered prizes including merchandise and signed memorabilia to competitors in the rookie-level Cadillac Cup series. While it wasn’t unheard of for a manufacturer to incentivize participation in their car — a previous partnership with Volkswagen offered the iRacing series champion a shot in the real-life Jetta TDI Cup car — Cadillac made their prizes available to all divisional champions so that nearly everyone had a shot. And they did it for four seasons instead of just one.

It was a smart deal for all parties. iRacing gained credibility by working with a big-name manufacturer. Members got a brand new car for free. And Cadillac — a car company pigeonholed as a brand for rich old fogies — got exposure among the key age 18-to-34 car lover demographic by partnering with a burgeoning simulator popular among that group.

Growing Pains

When the Cadillac was released, I was as excited as anyone. It nicely filled iRacing’s mid-level GT car void, which at the time had nothing between the Ford Mustang and the Corvette GT1, and I was at the point in my sim racing career where I was looking to move into that sort of vehicle.

However, when I tried the Cadillac for the first time, I was disappointed. It didn’t drive at all like I expected. It felt unpredictable, untameable, and overall not very fun. Maybe it was the baseline setup, which was pretty bad. Or maybe I wasn’t quite prepared yet to move from the track day cars to the tools of the professionals.

In any case, during its first few seasons on the service, I avoided the Cadillac and the siren song of prizes offered in the official series. As other GT cars came out, I flocked to those, and I never gave the Caddy a second chance until about a year ago, when I drove it in a one-off official race. By then, it had a completely different setup and tire model, and I was more accustomed to driving cars like it. But that still doesn’t mean it’s easy.

It’s heavier than a GT3 car with less downforce, so it’s tough not to overdrive corners. With so much weight, especially from the large fuel load of the fixed setup, if you don’t get the car slowed enough, the back end tends to slide mid-corner. And even though it has traction control, if you’re not easy on throttle application, you’re still likely to break traction on corner exit.

The Cadillac now makes its iRacing home in the D-class Fanatec Global Challenge series, which is modeled after the 2012-13 Pirelli World Challenge. As I started my Summer Road Trip in this series, I hoped to assess whether the Cadillac remains a success six years after its release.

Knowing that a crop of recent rookie graduates would likely be making their D-class debuts in a free car and at a free track (Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca), I also wanted to survey the driving standards and quality of competition to see if drivers new to the Cadillac struggled with it as much as I once did.

Starting Strong

For my first race of the week, I chose the 5:30 pm EDT time slot on Tuesday afternoon. Based on past seasons’ participation statistics, I knew it wouldn’t be the strongest field of the week, but I would get a well-populated race to ease my way into the summer.

I put in a qualifying lap 3 tenths faster than anything I’d run in practice, and I took the pole position by 8 tenths of a seconds. I had a two-second lead after the end of the first lap, but the race was far from won.

With a nearly full field of 23 Cadillacs — anything above 24 entries causes the race to split — plus a gap of 5 seconds separating me from the slowest qualifier, I would have to deal with some lapped traffic during the race.

Some of those drivers weren’t exactly predictable. A few ran through the dirt before I got to them and rejoined the track as I snuck through. Others didn’t make their intentions clear, forcing me to tread carefully lest they change lines right in front of me. But with a six-second lead, I could afford to be careful, and I was able to negotiate the traffic and make it to the finish unscathed.

Last summer, it took until my third week and ninth race of the season to find victory lane. This year, it happened in my very first race. But without being able to race with someone my own speed, it wasn’t exactly satisfying, so it left me searching for more.

Enter the Optima

I tried again in the same time slot on Thursday night. This time, a few extra drivers signed up so the field split. While that would mean less Cadillac traffic to deal with, I would have to encounter some additional traffic that wasn’t around in my first race.

Enter the Kia Optima — the other half of the Global Challenge car lineup, but based on the participation last week, only about 4 percent of the number of entries. The Kia represents the Pirelli World Challenge’s GTS class, and it was a winning car in its real-world racing stint. However, it’s been less successful in terms of gaining overall acceptance on iRacing.

While the Cadillac is similar enough to GT3s to serve as a jumping-off point for those popular cars, as a front-wheel drive racer, the Kia has only one counterpart on iRacing — the Jetta TDI Cup, which faded into obscurity after its Volkswagen-sponsored promotion — so it’s something of a dead end on iRacing’s road ladder.

It once found a niche as a global touring car surrogate in a league environment, but even those dedicated drivers haven’t been enough to keep the entire Kia class in the Global Challenge series afloat. Last season, just 256 drivers ran at least one race in the Kia compared to 3,427 in the Cadillac.

In my second race of the week, we had a relatively sizable contingent of four Kias — tied for the most in a race all week. Fortunately, navigating through them is easier than passing some slow Cadillacs since the Cadillac is stronger than the Kia in nearly every aspect, including both straight-line and cornering speeds.

In this race, the Kia drivers were all accommodating of lapping Caddys, even though two of them were locked into their own race-long battle — a rare sight for a rare breed of car.

For me, the final result of that race was the same as the first: a victory by a little over 8 seconds. But before I wrapped up the week in the Cadillac with a 100% win rate, I wanted to find some tougher competition to test myself against.

Last Stand on Saturday

By checking the race results, I could see that a few fast drivers were running in the earlier afternoon time slots. However, due to my work schedule, I couldn’t run at those times during the week. Instead, I hoped for some better and stronger fields over the weekend.

I signed up for a mid-day race on Saturday, expecting that a few quick European drivers might provide some competition at the front of the field. While there were a handful of new names toward the top of the qualifying heap, I still took pole by more than a second and pulled away once the green flag waved.

It was clear from the start that my biggest competitors in this race would be traffic and my somewhat tenuous connection to the Europe-based race server. The former did cause a brief moment of panic when a lapped car abruptly swerved in front of me exiting the final corner and we made contact, but my car and Internet connection were fine for the rest of the race and I cruised to my biggest margin of victory of the week.

Series Status

I know there were some fast drivers racing last week, but I never got a chance to drive against them. Despite my own missed connections, though, it doesn’t mean that some things aren’t working well with the Global Challenge series.

While the races are only 25 minutes long, the speed differences among Cadillacs plus the occasional Kia sighting make this series a decent introduction to multi-class racing, or at least single-class passing.

Knowing that plenty of new and inexperienced drivers would be behind the wheel, I was impressed with the lack of chaos in the races. I only had one unsuccessful encounter with a slower car, and that may have been because of a miscommunication — or lack of communication — about whether I would pass to his inside or outside exiting a corner.

Even though the real-world Cadillac and Kia race cars are deprecated now, the iRacing Global Challenge series has held up reasonably well over time, keeping decent participation and official races almost around the clock.

I’m not sure whether this series belongs at the D license class, though. As I mentioned when I drove the Ford Mustang FR500S in the D-class Grand Touring Cup series last summer, it teaches lessons needed for driving any GT car such as tidy braking and throttle management without overwhelming one with horsepower. Having prospective Cadillac drivers first race a car like the Mustang might better prepare them for a higher-level GT car and also narrow the spread in speeds among the field.

Burdened by unpopularity, the Kia could potentially benefit from being made free to all members. iRacing did that with the Radical SR8 in the most recent week 13 and the initial results from last week look extremely promising.

However, the Radical is a blast to drive and teaches lessons transferable to higher-level prototype and open-wheeled cars. Unless iRacing adds a true global touring car, the Kia is likely to remain an oddball front-wheel drive racer with a limited following, whether it’s free or not.

Eventually, a version of the 2018-spec Pirelli World Challenge series featuring GT3 and GT4 cars could find its way into iRacing. That could either be the nail in the coffin for the Global Challenge series in its current form, or the Cadillac could maintain a core contingent of drivers who would keep it alive in a league-like official series.

Until then, it’s likely to remain an enigmatic element of iRacing’s base content package — free, but not easy to drive, although that won’t stop people from driving it anyway. While you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding an official race, because of the skill needed to drive the Cadillac and the varied talent levels throughout the field, actually finding someone near your pace to race against may be the greatest challenge of the Global Challenge series.