SimRacing Expo's first-ever US event proves driving sims have finally hit the American mainstream Can't afford a $15 million F1 car? Sim racing can get you seat time. Sim racing may finally have broken its glass ceiling; or rather, the plasterboard ceiling of the basements that used to house every car nerd's Logitech wheel-and-pedals setup. If the rest of the family once found the hobby slightly embarrassing, those days appear to be ending. The proof: thousands of car enthusiasts, motorsports fanatics, and sim techies of all ages and backgrounds gathered in Charlotte, NC this past weekend for the first-ever US-based SimRacing Expo. The expo—inaugurated at the infamous Nürburgring racetrack in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, in 2014—has traced the meteoric rise of the sim racing industry. The 2026 SimRacing Expo hosted dozens of vendors from the hardware and software sides of the hobby: Fanatec, Thrustmaster, iRacing, NASCAR, Red Bull. Even the auto racing equipment manufacturer Sabelt showed up in full force. While industry leaders spoke on the ever-growing market and unstoppable advance of haptic-feedback technology, kids drove their favorite cars on sim setups, the fanciest of which cost more than a down payment on a house. Simulation racing takes motorsports video games ranging from the arcadey Forza Horizon to the hyperrealistic iRacing and applies the physical hardware of cars—a steering wheel, a pedal box, sometimes a manual shifter, and occasionally, tens of thousands of dollars worth of "force feedback" technology with motors built into actual racecar seats to provide games with an ever-improving facsimile of the experience of driving a car in the real world. You can even buy a rig used by F1 drivers for $12 million, if you're the kind of person who wants to spend more on a gaming setup than on an actual Enzo Ferrari. Since the mid 2010s,