Drivers! Start your engines! NASCAR is one of those sports that you either get or don’t. To a lot of the audience outside of America, NASCAR is ridiculed for being nothing more than cars turning left, going round and round. Those who know, however, know it’s far, far more than that. NASCAR 25 does an incredible job of putting you, the player, in the seat of a NASCAR race car to find out for yourself.

What makes NASCAR racing appealing? For me, personally, it’s the thrill of extremely close racing at high speeds, mixed with a nuanced positional chess match all happening at 190mph inches away from other drivers all doing the same. NASCAR is not about racing lines or apexes, it’s about drafting, momentum, and yes, I’m going to say it, “the need for speed!” On an oval track, the correct line might be the lower side of the corner one lap, but with a train of cars up high on the next lap, it’s up high with them. The person most likely to win isn’t probably going to be the driver in first place with just a few laps to go. All of this is what makes NASCAR different, and in my opinion, even as a Brit, special. 

So, then we come to the game. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of NASCAR to the point that I watch the races, but I do enjoy the razzmatazz of the NASCAR circus. For iRacing Studios and their first attempt at a game, they have NAILED the experience. NASCAR 25 is a wonderful love letter to the sport that fans of the real NASCAR will adore. 

Let’s start with the presentation. It is superb! There are cutscenes and video montages of real NASCAR racing mixed with a fake podcast show, excellent music and scenes of big crashes. 

The menus are clear, precise, and easy to navigate. You have four options to begin with: Career Mode, Quick Race, Online and Championship. Quick Race and Online modes are self-explanatory. Career Mode has you take part as a member of an already established team and go through the complete RPG elements of a NASCAR team-building experience. Championship Mode is one where you are simply the driver of a team, and you leave the management issues to someone else. 

The actual experience of NASCAR 25, and how deep you want to get into it, is entirely up to you. One of the other strengths of the game is the amazing customizational options for how to play the game and tweak it to your skill level. Easy to use sliders cover many aspects. There are ten slider settings alone just for the AI settings in single-player modes. There are, additionally, six slider settings for driving as well. The point here is that there are a lot of options to tweak the level of competition you want to face during a race. 

When you start your chosen game mode, you literally feel like you can smell the petrol, oil and burnt rubber of a garage. The game has 30 unique tracks, but there are 91 total tracks to race through with variations.  None of this would mean squat, though, if the actual gameplay was awful. But it’s not. It’s superb! 

At higher difficulty levels, it’s extremely easy to spin the car with too much gas or lock up the brakes. Again, you can tune the experience to how you want for your own abilities. However, it’s so satisfying to know and feel that the car is at the edge of grip in a corner, but you hold it and get great exit speed, time and time again. There is one huge gripe I have with the controls and handling. The haptics of the PS5 controller weren’t fully utilized to help PS5 players “feel” what’s going on with the car underneath them through the controller. I was getting inconsistent feedback. I could be wheel spinning and not feel it through the controller, but I could sometimes feel that the back end of the car was coming out. Even so, these “feelings” felt somewhat erratic. Unfortunately, I don’t have a wheel set up to test the same out with it.

There is also a lot of car tuning, which needs a lot of understanding of how you like to race with what you are trying to get the car to do. For example, do you know the difference between tuning your car to be tight into corners or loose? How do you want the car to be? The tuning here is excellent, but only if you know what you want. I have found an excellent instructional video from NASCAR themselves. 

The graphics for NASCAR 25 range from good to excellent. The car models and tracks are excellent; it’s the lighting and rendering that are only just good. The general look of the environments, especially in bright daylight, looks too sterile and pure. It looks like a game, not real life. Racing at night, however, with floodlights was a far more immersive experience. 

Tracks look great with random signs of wear and tear, as well as great road surface details. The game’s audio is also excellent. When you fire up the car’s engines for the first time and hear the roar and deep burble of an engine ticking over, you will be hooked. Hearing 40 cars roar altogether as one at top revs on a banked curve, however, will give you goosebumps! 

There are a couple of negatives though. There were some frame rate drops during single-player races. It’s not bad enough to be game-breaking, but it is occasionally noticeable. My biggest gripe about the game, however, is what it doesn’t do. 

I set up a NASCAR race series with some friends on Gran Turismo 7. Through racing in this series, my friends and I got to understand the best way to race cars, as well as which cars are the best to drive in a NASCAR-style oval race. We learnt about trains, drafting, slingshots, being smooth, getting into position, fuel saving, tyre saving, and just general NASCAR specifics from this. 

NASCAR 25 the game has nothing! It really is an egregious omission from the developers not to have any tutorials, videos or anything on how to go through NASCAR races properly. The driving and techniques required to race with multiple other drivers in close proximity is a paramount skill to learn, both online and offline. Because there is nothing here at all in the way of tutorials or hints, it feels like the game is solely catered to the NASCAR hardcore player. 

It’s extremely unfriendly to any casual gamers trying to learn the ropes of a new racing experience. It’s only because of my own experience of the NASCAR series on GT7 I set up that I know what I should be doing here, and not from the actual licensed NASCAR game! 

At the end of the day though, NASCAR 25 is still a fantastic game. One of my friends, a NASCAR fan, has already put over 100 hours in the single-player modes alone. He would only do that if the game captured the true NASCAR racing experience, and it most certainly does. 

When you put it all together, though, the game delivers utterly intoxicating and immersive racing. I’ve been in online races myself and come second by 0.001 of a second. The game is a fantastic advertisement for the real sport. It delivers amazing experiences, even if you don’t win. Driving three or four cars wide around the last corner, all jockeying for position, the best draft, the best line at 190 mph, with the line fast approaching, never quite knowing who is going to win absolutely NEVER gets old. That feeling can happen in single-player after a long race or in a quick six-lapper online. However long you have, the game will find a race for you. 

 

Summary

What an outstanding first effort of a game from iRacing Studios! They have nailed the NASCAR experience in such a playable, well rounded, fun way. It’s such a shame they haven’t really thought about new or casual players to the sport, and that there are occasional frame rate drops. That aside, NASCAR 25 is an immersive experience and a must-play for anyone interested in NASCAR racing.

Developer: iRacing Studios

Publisher: iRacing Studios 

Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Release Date: 11th November 2025


Peter Keen

The Good

Fantastic NASCAR racing experience
Lots of gameplay/customization options
Deep single-player content
Smooth online functionality

The Bad

Absolutely no tutorials for newcomers
Occasional frame rate drops
Not enough controller feedback while racing

Gaming Respawn’s copy of NASCAR 25 was provided by the publisher.