NASCAR 26: the best NASCAR game in years, provided you put the wheel down

There is one thing to understand before approaching this game, and a player states it better than any product page: this is an arcade racing game, so leave the simulation comments aside, because that is not what it is.

There you go. The entire disagreement around NASCAR 26 sits in that sentence.

What the game offers

All four NASCAR national series, with Career, Quick Race, Championship, Multiplayer, and a new mode built around The Chase, the playoff system.

iRacing highlights its laser-scanned assets, a dynamic track, a peak performance training mode, and reworked driving physics across every chassis.

And there is crossplay in multiplayer, which the series badly lacked.

Where everyone agrees

Two things recur with just about everybody, including the unhappy ones.

It is a clear improvement on NASCAR 25. Several players say so without reservation, one going as far as writing that he finally considers this entry good.

And it is excellent on a controller. This is where positive reviews converge most: the car responds well, the feel is pleasant, and you enjoy yourself immediately.

One player sums up the general position: the best NASCAR game in a long while, if you remember what Ignition was in 2021.

What grates

The game shows 127 positive reviews out of 156, roughly 81 per cent, and the complaints are specific.

The wheel is the black spot. It is the harshest and most repeated criticism: several players describe steering that sends them into the wall, and one, who expected better from iRacing, concludes it is clearly a controller game. For a studio whose name is associated with the most demanding simulation on the market, that is a disappointment worth naming.

The AI is judged imperfect, and so is damage: collision physics and the damage model are described as insufficient.

And the gap with the previous entry divides opinion. One player reckons most of this could have fitted into updates to NASCAR 25 rather than a full game at 61.99 euros.

A few comfort irritants also recur, all tied to the sense of a console port: no loading a settings file, no renaming a setup beyond the circuit's name, and no exporting race results for the community to work with.

The disclosure on the store page

One point to know before buying, and it is written plainly in the studio's own declaration on the Steam page.

NASCAR 26 used automatic generation for certain voice lines and other presentation elements throughout the interface.

That is not a rumour, it is the developer's own disclosure, and at least one player raises it in a review asking for it to be dropped in future entries.

Everybody will judge for themselves. But for an official game sold at sixty-two euros, the information deserves reaching you rather than being discovered in play.

For whom, and how

If you play on a pad and want accessible NASCAR racing, with all four series and a Chase mode, this is the best entry point in years.

If you own a wheel and the iRacing name made you hope for demanding driving, wait for a patch or watch the feedback over the coming weeks. It is not the game you sold yourself in your head.

And if you already own NASCAR 25, the honest question is the one a player asks: do the extra tracks, drivers and modes justify a full purchase, or would you have signed for an update?

We have written a guide to getting started, with the settings to change first and the basics of oval driving.

Wheel or pad? We compare lap times on the InsertCoins Discord.