The Chequered Flag is Out

It all kicked off when I joined Vicmania Racing and wanted a way to check practice times and compare laps with other drivers. The original plan? A simple Discord bot. Nothing fancy, just something that'd pull server data and spit out times.

Then I told my mate about it over the weekend. He's a web dev, and instead of a bot, he went and built a whole website prototype — series, rounds, the lot. We looked at it and pretty quickly realised it was a much better idea than the bot. And just like that, TheSIMLeague was born.

Early on, we started thinking this could maybe become something charity-related. The idea was to build a platform people genuinely used, make it profitable somehow, and donate the profits to charity. Simple idea in theory. In practice, we struggled to make it profitable at all.

For about a year, we poured weekends and late nights into building features and trying to make the platform work, and it basically made no money. There was no business plan, no investors, just enthusiasm, SIM racing, and a lot of time spent building something we believed in.

At that point, my mate decided to move on. Fair enough too. But SIM racing was already my hobby, so I kept going. I didn't really mind continuing, even if by then it was obvious this was more passion project than business.

From day one, I made one promise to myself: no ads, no selling your data. And I'm glad to say I stuck to it.

At its peak, TheSIMLeague supported about five leagues. It never really grew beyond that, but that doesn't make it any less meaningful to me. I still cared deeply about it and put a lot of myself into it.

To every single person who was part of this journey — whether you were a driver, a league admin, or just someone who supported the platform — thank you. Your support, feedback, and excitement for the platform kept me going through every bug, every feature request, and every "just one more thing" at 2am.

Building TheSIMLeague and being part of the SIM racing community has been an absolute privilege. Helping make your racing experience even a little bit better — that was always the best part of it for me.

TheSIMLeague was built around Assetto Corsa Competizione, and I had hoped to support new SIM titles as they launched. But when Le Mans Ultimate (LMU) dropped, its server model was completely locked down — zero support for third-party integrations. No API, no hooks, no workarounds.

Then there was Assetto Corsa EVO. I was genuinely hopeful. But when Kunos announced they would stop maintaining ACC to focus on EVO, they also revealed a closed server model there too — same deal as LMU. I waited for the online release hoping things might change, but it ended up being locked down as well.

The SIM racing industry is clearly moving towards walled gardens. Platforms like TheSIMLeague just can't plug in anymore, and there's nothing I can do about that.

With Kunos officially moving on from ACC, the community has naturally started to shrink. Fewer updates mean fewer players, which means less activity around the kind of data TheSIMLeague depended on. The game that made the platform possible is slowly heading into retirement — and unfortunately, so is the platform.

There was a whole roadmap of features I wanted to build — things that could have made TheSIMLeague even better for the small group of leagues that used it. But I was waiting for the new titles to land before investing more time into that work.

Instead of writing code for those features, I'm writing this goodbye post.

Maybe if ACC had stayed stronger for longer, TheSIMLeague could've kept going a bit more. But it is what it is, and I'm still grateful for the run it had.

I could have left the website up and running for the one league that still used it. But, a bit naively, I built this platform to scale. The infrastructure, running costs, and maintenance effort were designed around something bigger.

Keeping all of that going for a single league is hard to justify. Not because that league didn't matter — it absolutely did — but because the platform was never built to be such a small and simple thing to maintain.