The Lobby Code
How to use this guide
Each scenario below shows a top-down view of the moment of contact or near-contact, with two illustrations side by side. One shows the move done within accepted etiquette. The other shows what crosses the line. Underneath, there is a live poll. Vote how you would call it. Results update for the crew as we vote. Drop your name in the optional field if you want the rest of us to see how you weighed in. Wherever we agree, that becomes lobby rule. Wherever we are split, we talk it out on Discord. We mostly run 3 to 5 lap sprints, which puts every lap in late-race territory.
The framework draws from real-world racecraft (FIA international sporting code, SRO motorsports stewards' guidance) and online sim-racing community standards (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play). It is then adapted to what Forza Motorsport actually penalizes and what NASCAR 25 actually rewards, because the games disagree with each other and with real-world series on several points.
One thing the real-world series and the online community agree on near-universally: the burden of a clean pass is on the overtaking car. If you cannot make the pass without contact, most stewards do not count it as a pass. Worth keeping in mind even though we are voting on our own version.
Core principles (what most series agree on)
These are the conventions that real-world racing bodies and the established online sim racing communities mostly converge on. They are starting points, not lobby law. The scenarios that follow show exactly where the various series and leagues disagree, so we can pick our own thresholds.
1. The leading car owns the line
If you are ahead at the braking zone, the racing line belongs to you. The trailing car must make the pass work around your line, not through it.
2. Overlap creates obligation
When the trailing car gets a wheel alongside the leading car before turn-in, most series treat the corner as shared and require both cars to leave room. How much overlap is enough is the single most contested question in racing. See the league-by-league breakdown in Scenario 1.
3. One defensive move
You may move once off the racing line to defend. You cannot move back to your line if a committed overtake is alongside you. Weaving is not defending.
4. Make the corner or back out
If you cannot brake at a normal pace and still hit the apex, you have over-committed. Back out, lift, take the loss. Do not use the other car as a backstop.
5. Off-track gains get returned
If you gained the position by putting four wheels off the track, or by being forced off and keeping the place, give it back within one lap.
6. Contact is not racing
Door-to-door rubbing happens. Punting, dive-bombing, and turning into someone are not racing. The wheel that goes out of line owns the incident.
7. Lap one is sacred
Cars are bunched, tires are cold, and a wreck in the first corner ends your race entirely in a 3 to 5 lap sprint. Patience on lap one is not weakness, it is the most important skill in a sprint-format lobby.
8. Mistakes are paid in time, not in metal
If a guy makes a mistake in front of you, you back out. You do not collect him because he handed you a free pass. The bill comes to him at the next sector.
Vocabulary we will use
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Racing line | The fastest path through a corner. Late apex on most circuit corners, geometric apex on long sweepers. |
| Overlap | How far the trailing car's nose is up the side of the leading car. Where it gets measured varies by series: F1 measures at the apex, most online leagues at turn-in, ACC league play uses percentage thresholds. Our lobby decides where to look. |
| Apex | The geometric inside of the corner. Where the leading car has earned the right to be. |
| Turn-in | The point at which the leading car commits to the corner. The overlap at turn-in is the decisive measurement. |
| Dive-bomb | A late-braking lunge from too far back that can only end in contact or both cars running wide. |
| Send-it pass | An aggressive late-brake from a reasonable distance that the attacker can complete cleanly if executed well. |
| Bump-and-run | A deliberate light contact to a leading car's rear bumper to unsettle them through a corner. Acceptable on ovals and short tracks. Not on road courses. |
| Switchback | The defensive response to a dive-bomb. You let the attacker take the apex wide, then cut underneath them on exit. |
| Racing incident | A collision where no single driver is solely at fault. Both contributed, both lost time. No penalty. |
Forza Motorsport default ruleset
Forza Motorsport (2023) uses an automated adjudication system called Forza Race Regulations (FRR) to handle collisions and off-track infractions. FRR is not a rules-based "any contact = penalty" system. It is a neural network machine learning model, trained on player collision data, that attempts to assign fault to whoever caused the contact. Stated fault-detection accuracy is around 89 percent in the latest updates, up from roughly 80 percent at launch.
Penalty severity is mostly a function of speed delta (the velocity of impact), with additional weight given to whether the other player lost time or position from the contact. Penalties are time penalties applied to race results. Each infraction type has a maximum penalty cap, added in later updates to reduce over-penalization. FRR also feeds Safety Rating, which affects matchmaking in Featured Multiplayer.
Known FRR weaknesses the team has publicly acknowledged: rear-ended players occasionally get penalized when they should not, and low-speed sideswipes can be missed. Accuracy has improved with each update.
Private lobbies have a custom FRR setting that the host controls. It ranges from strict (full penalties, required pit stops, simulated damage) to relaxed (limited penalties) to fully off, with custom event rules in between for collisions, ghosting, damage, and grid ordering. Private lobby races do not affect Safety Rating or Driver Rating regardless of which setting is chosen. Our lobby has been running whichever preset is selected by default (nobody on our side has been adjusting FRR settings), and we have been experiencing some FRR penalties, so the default clearly is not "off." Most likely it is the standard preset. Worth confirming on lobby creation if anyone cares to.
The "I hit a spinning car and got penalized" problem
This is a real and acknowledged FRR weakness, not a misperception. Players have been reporting it on the Forza forums for the life of the game: someone rams or spins another car, that car ends up sideways in your path, you cannot avoid it, and FRR penalizes you for the contact while the original ramming driver gets no penalty. Three things make this happen. Speed delta is the primary severity driver, and the speed delta when you hit a stationary or sideways car is huge, so the system treats it as severe. The ML model evaluates fault at the moment of contact, not the chain of events that led there, so the upstream cause often does not factor in. The model was trained mostly on two-car collisions, so three-plus-car incidents are where the pattern recognition is weakest. The team has called this out as a priority fix and accuracy has improved with each update, but it remains the most common FRR complaint.
Treat the Forza Code of Conduct as the floor (do not grief, do not deliberately ram, do not block ghosts). Treat this guide as the ceiling we are trying to hold ourselves to.
What Forza Motorsport actually enforces
- FRR collision penalties: ML-assigned fault, severity scaled to speed delta and outcome, time penalties applied to race result.
- Track limits: Four wheels off and a gained advantage trigger a track-limit warning or lap invalidation. FRR rates the gain as Small, Large, or Max.
- Collisions in qualifying: Ghosting prevents most of it.
- Safety Rating: Lowered by causing collisions and off-track infractions. Affects matchmaking, not race outcomes directly.
- Lobby ramming: Persistent griefers can be reported and removed from Featured Multiplayer matchmaking.
What our lobby has to enforce on its own
- Dive-bomb judgments
- Overlap calls at turn-in
- Defensive moves vs. weaving
- Lap-one grace
- Off-track passes that were not auto-flagged
- Revenge driving (the single biggest lobby-killer)
Scenario 1: Overlap at turn-in
You have a run on the car ahead at the end of a straight. You are arriving at higher speed but have not pulled fully alongside. The leading car begins to brake and turn toward the apex on their normal racing line. They are not really racing you, they are just running the corner. Do they owe you the corner? And if they see you closing fast and hold their line to the apex anyway, crossing in front of you, are they wrong, or just stupid?
B has front-axle-past-rear-axle overlap before turn-in. A is required to leave a car's width on the inside. Both make the corner.
B is closing fast but has not gotten alongside by turn-in. A keeps the normal line to the apex, crossing in front of B. By convention this is B's problem to solve. The practical question is whether A should lift anyway.
Wrong, or just stupid?
If the leading car sees the closer car arriving fast but not quite overlapping, and they keep their normal line to the apex anyway, are they out of line? By convention, no. Across every series above except NASCAR, the trailing car owes the overlap. If they cannot make it in time, that is on them. The leading car is entitled to their normal racing line and is not required to abandon the apex just because someone is approaching from behind. F1 stewards have repeatedly declined to penalize leading drivers who turned in normally and were hit by trailing cars without overlap.
Whether it is smart is a different question entirely. In a 3 to 5 lap sprint neither driver wants the wreck. The trailing car loses time backing out; the leading car risks the same wreck and the same lost race. iRacing's incident-points system penalizes both cars in a contact, so the lift-to-survive instinct has cost-benefit math behind it. There is a school of thought, especially in sim racing, that good drivers do their part to avoid contact even when they have the right to the line. The phrase usually used is "racing for stewards' decisions," meaning you can be technically right and still finish the race in the gravel.
The honest answer: the leading car is not wrong to hold the line, but they are sometimes called stupid for choosing principle over preservation. In our lobby that judgment call is yours to make in the moment.
How the various series and leagues call it
Two dimensions get conflated when people argue about overlap. The first is how far alongside the cars are: a quarter-overlap means the closer car's nose is up to the leading car's rear wheel; a half-overlap means front axles are roughly level; three-quarter overlap means the closer car is nearly fully alongside. The second is where in the corner the measurement is taken (braking zone, turn-in, apex, exit). Series and leagues disagree on both. The table below puts the "how much" question front and center, with the "where" question alongside.
Reference: how the various series and leagues set the threshold
| Convention | How much alongside | Where measured |
|---|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play) | iRacing and LFM ~20%. ACC league play uses 25 / 50 / 75% thresholds. | At turn-in |
| Forza Motorsport (in-game) | Not a fixed overlap threshold. FRR uses ML to assign fault; ~89% accuracy. Penalty severity scales with speed delta and outcome. | n/a |
| NASCAR 25 (in-game) | Yellow line on superspeedways only. | Yellow line only |
| Formula 1 | 25 to 30% (front tire alongside rear tire). | At apex |
| IndyCar | ~50% by turn-in. More contact-tolerant than F1. | Turn-in, judged at apex |
| Sportscar / GT (IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | 20 to 30% (front bumper to front wheel). | At turn-in |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | Quarter-overlap or less. Contact expected. | Anywhere |
| NASCAR Cup (driver convention) | Quarter-overlap on ovals. No formal rule. | Not measured |
The spread on "how much" is wide. The touring car world (BTCC, V8 Supercars) accepts a quarter-overlap as enough. F1, F2, F3, and SRO want roughly a third before they consider the corner shared. IMSA and iRacing take less, around 20 percent, but enforce it carefully through stewards. ACC league play formalizes thresholds at 25, 50, and 75 percent. NASCAR and the in-game enforcement in Forza and NASCAR 25 don't measure at all.
Online community shorthand often quotes the "Gentleman's Agreement" thresholds (quarter, half, three-quarter overlap). These are not written into any rulebook but they map closely to how most experienced stewards call incidents in practice.
The poll below asks which standard our lobby wants. There is no correct answer that comes from outside us. The choice is mostly about what kind of racing we want to have: aggressive door-to-door (touring car), precise and clinical (open-wheel), or somewhere in between.
Vote: How much "alongside" counts as overlap in our lobby?
Scenario 2: Defending the inside line
You are the leading car. Someone faster is closing behind and is going to dive for the inside. You can move to the inside yourself to take the line away from them before they get there, but how much movement is allowed? One move? Weave back and forth to cover both lines? Brake-check? Move back to the racing line right before turn-in?
One move to the inside on the straight, commit to it, take the compromised apex. Slower exit, but clean.
More than one defensive move on the straight, or moving back to the racing line after an attacker has committed alongside.
How the various series and leagues call it
Most racing bodies converge on the same convention here, with some interesting variations.
Reference: how the various series and leagues handle defensive moves
| Convention | Defensive moves allowed |
|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play) | One move rule. Multiple moves trigger an incident point. |
| Forza Motorsport / NASCAR 25 (in-game) | No formal blocking rule. Contact-based enforcement only. |
| Open-wheel and GT (Formula 1, IndyCar, IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | One move rule. Brake-checking is an automatic penalty. Class-passing nuance for endurance series. |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | One move on paper, multiple-move blocking tolerated in practice. |
| NASCAR Cup | No formal blocking rule. Blocking on the straight is part of the sport. |
The common ground: one move off the line, fully committed. You may take the inside on the straight to defend. You may not weave, brake-check, or move back to the normal racing line after a car is alongside you.
Vote: How much defending is too much?
Scenario 3: Side-by-side through a corner
You have come out of the braking zone with significant overlap. Both cars are committed. Who has to yield, when, and where?
Inside car takes the apex tight, leaves one car's width on the outside. Outside car runs a wider arc, gets the better exit. Position can swap on the way out.
Inside car uses the whole road on exit, runs the outside car off. Owns the apex but does not respect the outside car's space.
How the various series and leagues call it
The common ground across most series: once both cars are committed through the corner, both leave a car's width. The inside car has earned the apex, the outside car has earned the exit, and if the inside car drifts wide and forces the outside car off the track, the inside car is at fault. The phrase "leaving racing room" appears in nearly identical language in the FIA International Sporting Code, the SRO Driving Standards, and the iRacing Sporting Code.
Where they diverge is the threshold for "real" overlap that triggers this obligation:
Reference: what counts as enough overlap to share the corner
| Convention | Sharing threshold |
|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM) | Front bumper alongside rear of leading car (~20%). Strictly enforced. |
| ACC league play | 50% or more shares the corner; 25% or less, outside backs out. |
| Formula 1 | Front wheels alongside or forward (~30%). Less than that, outside yields. |
| IndyCar | ~50% overlap. More contact-tolerant than F1. |
| Sportscar / GT (IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | 20 to 30% (front bumper to front wheel). |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | Quarter-overlap. Side-to-side contact is expected racing. |
| NASCAR Cup | No formal threshold. Side-by-side is normal racing. |
Notice the spread: F1 and SRO are conservative (you need real overlap, well forward, before the inside car owes you room). ACC league play is more generous to the outside car. iRacing sits in the middle. NASCAR doesn't engage with the question.
Vote: Who has the right of way side-by-side?
Scenario 4: The bump-and-run
Light contact to a leading car's rear bumper to unsettle them through a corner. A staple move at Bristol and Martinsville in NASCAR. Acceptable on a Forza road course? On a Forza oval? Anywhere?
Light tap exiting a short-track corner. Lifts the leading car just enough to get alongside on the next straight. Both cars stay on the track.
Hitting a car under braking on a road course is a punt, not a pass. Tires are loaded, the leading car cannot save it.
Where the bump-and-run lives
| Track type | Bump-and-run? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Oval, short (Bristol, Martinsville, Richmond) | Yes | Expected. "Rubbin' is racing" applies. Light contact on corner exit is part of the game. |
| Oval, intermediate (Charlotte, Kansas) | Light only | Light side draft contact. Heavy contact wrecks the field. |
| Superspeedway (Daytona, Talladega) | Yes, drafting | Bump drafting on the straights is the whole game. Through the corners is dangerous, avoid. |
| Forza road course (any) | No | Road racing etiquette. Punt under braking is a punt, period. |
| Forza Motorsport oval cars (Hot Lap, Indy) | No | Open-wheel cars cannot take contact. Wheels touch, someone is in the wall. |
Vote: When is a bump-and-run acceptable in our lobby?
Scenario 5: First-lap chaos
Ten cars off the line. Cold tires. Bunched into Turn 1. Someone three-wide on the outside locks up and loses the front. Someone on the inside tries to thread the gap. By Turn 4, three cars are spun and two are in the gravel. How do we want to handle this?
Forza Motorsport ghosts cars in some featured multiplayer events on lap one, but in our private lobby ghosting is off. The result is usually predictable: the first corner is the highest-incident corner of the entire race.
The lap-one principles
- Single-file through Turn 1. The lobby rule should be that you do not attempt a pass into the first corner of the first lap. Tires are cold, cars are bunched, the move never sticks anyway.
- If you are alongside at turn-in, you are alongside. But you do not create overlap by diving in on lap one. You inherit it from grid position.
- Patience pays even in a sprint. A wreck on lap one ends your race entirely. A pass attempted on cold tires into Turn 1 rarely sticks anyway.
- If you spin someone, even unintentionally, you wait. Pull off, let them rejoin, give the position back. This is the single highest-impact lobby rule.
Reference: how the various series and leagues handle lap one
| Convention | Lap-one rule |
|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play) | Many leagues run a "no passing through Turn 1 on lap one" rule. iRacing's Safety Rating applies but with some leniency for opening-lap incidents. ACC leagues often require single-file through the first two or three corners. |
| Forza Motorsport (in-game) | FRR applies the same ML model on lap one as the rest of the race. Featured Multiplayer events sometimes ghost cars at the start; private lobby ghosting depends on the host's settings. |
| NASCAR 25 (in-game) | Pack contact on superspeedways is normal at the start. Road courses follow standard FRR rules. |
| Formula 1 | "Inherit overlap from grid position." Normal rules apply, but stewards are more lenient on contact because cars are bunched. Dive-bombs creating new overlap are still penalized. |
| IndyCar | Similar to F1, more contact-tolerant. First-lap incidents often called as racing incidents. |
| Sportscar / GT (IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | Same F1 standard. Class-passing considerations add nuance for multi-class fields. |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | Aggressive lap-one expected. Heavy contact tolerated as long as no one is deliberately punted. |
| NASCAR Cup | Pack contact expected, especially at superspeedways. Short-track lap-one contact also expected. Road courses lean toward F1-style stewarding. |
Vote: What is the lap-one rule for our lobby?
Scenario 6: You got punted. Now what?
This is the single biggest lobby-killer. Someone dive-bombs you and you spin. By the time you rejoin, they are eight seconds up the road. Do you race them clean? Hunt them down? Wait until the next race and even the score?
The principles that keep a lobby together
- Voice complaints, not bumpers. If you think it was deliberate, say so on chat. Do not retaliate on track.
- If they wait for you, you take the position back. That is the end of it. No further action. No grudge into the next race.
- If they do not wait, you finish the race clean and raise it after. The lobby decides whether it was racing or whether someone owes a position next race.
- Revenge driving punishes everyone. The lobby loses a guy, the race becomes about settling scores, the rest of the night is ruined.
The hardest rule in this guide: if you have to choose between being right and keeping the lobby together, you keep the lobby together. You can be right next week.
Reference: how the various series and leagues handle a punt
| Convention | When you get punted |
|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play) | Incident points apply to the puncher's Safety Rating. Protests can be filed for deliberate contact. Many leagues require the puncher to wait and give the position back; refusal is a separate penalty. |
| Forza Motorsport (in-game) | FRR applies a time penalty to the at-fault driver scaled to speed delta and outcome. Known weakness: multi-car incidents and rear-end hits can misassign fault. |
| NASCAR 25 (in-game) | FRR-style penalty for fault. No formal "give the position back" mechanic. |
| Formula 1 | Stewards investigate during or after the race. Time penalties or grid penalties applied if deliberate or careless. No place-give-back convention; the punted driver races on and the penalty corrects the result. |
| IndyCar | Similar to F1. Stewards more contact-tolerant, especially on ovals. |
| Sportscar / GT (IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | SRO Stewards Manual is explicit about contact penalties. Drive-through or time penalty applied to the offender. |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | Contact is part of the sport. Stewards penalize only deliberate or excessive contact. Punted drivers race on without expectation of give-back. |
| NASCAR Cup | Self-policing. Drivers handle it on track over the course of the race or the season. Late-race retaliation is part of the sport. NASCAR rarely intervenes unless contact was egregious. |
Vote: How do we handle a guy who punts you and does not wait?
Scenario 7: The sprint-race square tap
Specific to our format: short 3-lap races with no time to recover from a deficit. You catch a slower car. They are not slow enough to pass cleanly on the straight, but they are slow enough to be holding you up. The race is half over. Is a square tap on their rear bumper, hard enough to break their momentum but not hard enough to wreck them, an acceptable move?
This is the question the format actually forces. In a twenty-lap race you have laps to set up a clean pass. In three laps you do not. Different racing traditions answer this very differently.
How the various series and leagues would call it
Reference: how the various series and leagues would call it
| Convention | Sprint-race tap to slow a blocker |
|---|---|
| Sim racing online (iRacing, LFM, ACC league play) | Not acceptable. Safety Rating drops, collision penalties, protest review. |
| Forza Motorsport (in-game) | Depends on speed delta. FRR may not penalize a light brush at low speed. A firm tap that costs the blocker time or position triggers a time penalty scaled to severity. |
| NASCAR Cup (short track, late race) | Acceptable. Bump-and-run is a recognized move. |
| Touring car (BTCC, V8 Supercars) | Acceptable. Contact is part of the sport. |
| NASCAR Cup (road course) | Conditional. Light push at low-speed corner exit only. No contact under braking. |
| IndyCar | Conditional. Short-track ovals yes; road course no. |
| Open-wheel and sportscar (Formula 1, IMSA, WEC, SRO GT3) | Not acceptable. Deliberate contact is a penalty regardless of race length. |
The split is sharp. American oval racing and touring car racing accept deliberate light contact as part of the sport. Open-wheel, sportscar, and sim racing treat it as a foul. The deciding question for our lobby: is our 3-lap sprint format closer to a Bristol short-track sprint (contact tradition) or to a Watkins Glen sprint qualifier (no-contact tradition)? Different answer depending on which we pick.
Vote: Is a square tap on a blocker acceptable in our sprint races?
NASCAR 25: where the rules diverge
NASCAR 25 (the iRacing-developed title) applies most of the same racecraft principles as Forza, but several scenarios play differently because of car characteristics and track geometry. Stock cars take contact in ways open-wheel and GT3 cars cannot. Drafting changes the strategic geometry of an oval. Yellow flags introduce restart sequences that road racing does not have.
What NASCAR drivers actually consider (vs what the rulebook says)
Real NASCAR has almost no formal overlap rules. The yellow-line rule at Daytona and Talladega is the main written restriction. Almost everything else we would think of as the rules of racing is driver convention, well understood and self-enforced. The conventions are more lenient than F1, SRO, or the sim racing world while still being recognizable as rules.
The practical NASCAR oval convention is roughly quarter-overlap forces the lead car to hold their lane. If you have a front fender alongside the lead car's rear quarter panel, the lead car is expected to hold their lane and not move into you. Less than that, the lead car can move freely. This is more lenient than F1 (which wants front wheel alongside rear wheel) but stricter than the formal NASCAR rulebook (which says nothing on the question). On road courses NASCAR drivers shifted toward road-racing conventions over the past decade, but contact tolerance is still noticeably higher than F1 or SRO. Roughly IndyCar levels.
| NASCAR track type | Overlap convention | Contact tolerance |
|---|---|---|
| Superspeedway (Daytona, Talladega) | Quarter-overlap and the lead car holds the line. Aggressive blocks get self-policed by the field, sometimes physically on the next restart. | Bump drafting on straights expected. Yellow-line rule on the apron is the only hard line. |
| Intermediate oval (Charlotte, Kansas, Las Vegas, Atlanta) | Quarter-overlap and the lead car holds the lane. Side-drafting is the primary move. | Light side-panel contact normal. Moving the lead car up the track with air is part of the sport. |
| Short track (Bristol, Martinsville, Richmond) | Overlap convention matters less because contact resolves disputes. | Bump-and-run, slide jobs, side rubbing all standard. Late-race contact is expected. |
| Road course (Watkins Glen, Sonoma, COTA, Indianapolis GP) | Closer to F1 / SRO conventions, but more permissive on light contact. | No contact under braking. Bump-and-run still appears at low-speed corners. Slide jobs expected but must complete cleanly. |
The takeaway: NASCAR's lack of a formal rulebook on overlap does not mean drivers race without rules. They race with detailed conventions, just ones that allow more contact than the sim racing world generally tolerates.
Superspeedways: Daytona and Talladega
The pack runs in formation at 200 mph. Bump drafting is not optional, it is the entire strategy. Side drafting is a known move. The yellow line on the apron is a hard rule.
What changes
- Bump drafting is expected. Light contact to the car in front on the straights pushes both forward. Required to make passes work.
- Bump drafting in corners is dangerous. Save it for the straights. Contact in the corners loads the rear at the worst possible moment.
- The yellow line rule. No passing below the yellow line on the apron at Daytona and Talladega. NASCAR 25 enforces this with penalties.
- Side drafting. Pulling alongside and slightly ahead of a car to cut off their air, then letting them fall back. Strategic, not contact.
- The Big One. Statistical certainty. If you are not in front of it, expect to be in it. Patience over half-distance pays.
Short tracks: Bristol, Martinsville, Richmond
Half a mile of pavement, forty cars, 500 laps. Every car will have contact. The question is what kind.
What changes
- Bump-and-run is the move. Light tap to the leader's rear bumper on corner exit lifts them just enough to get alongside on the next straight. Both cars stay on the track. This is the move.
- The chrome-horn punt is not. A bump-and-run that wrecks the car in front is a foul, not a pass.
- Side panel contact. Door-to-door at 90 mph on a short track is normal. Pinch a guy, do not push him.
- Slide jobs. A pass where you cross under the leader through the corner and end up on the outside on exit. Acceptable if you complete it without contact. A botched slide job that fences the leader is a foul.
Road courses: Watkins Glen, Sonoma, COTA
NASCAR road course events revert to road racing etiquette. Stock cars are heavier and less precise than purpose-built road racers, but the rules are the rules: no dive-bombs, no punts under braking, leave racing room.
What stays the same
- All seven scenarios above apply. Bump-and-run is off the table.
- Track limits are enforced. NASCAR 25 will give you a stop-and-go if you abuse them.
Quick reference card (common standard)
The common standard on one screen, drawn from the conventions most real-world series and online leagues converge on. Print this for reference. Once the lobby votes, the right-hand column may shift to match what we actually settle on.
| Situation | Rule |
|---|---|
| You are catching a car on the straight | Get overlap by turn-in or back out. |
| You are defending on the straight | One move. Commit to it. No weaving. |
| Side-by-side through the corner | Inside gets apex, outside gets exit, both leave a car's width. |
| You went off track and gained a place | Give it back within one lap. |
| You spun someone, even unintentionally | Wait for them. Hand the position back. |
| Someone spun you and did not wait | Finish clean. Raise it after. No revenge driving. |
| Lap one, turn one | Patience. Single-file. A wreck on lap one ends the race. |
| You are bump-drafting at Talladega | Straights only. Never in the corners. |
| You are at Bristol | Bump-and-run, do not punt. |
| You are at Watkins Glen | Road racing rules. No bump-and-run. |
| You are about to send a dive-bomb | Ask yourself if you can make the corner alone. If not, do not send it. |