Lets Go! Just the Basic Stuff

Screenshot

Overview

The main purpose of MAIRA is to give you a force feedback experience that is improved over the stock force feedback offering from the iRacing simulator.

Summary

  1. Run the iRacing simulator.
  2. Disable iRacing simulator’s built-in force feedback support.
  3. Run MAIRA.
  4. Set the wheel max slider to indicate the maximum torque of your wheel.
  5. Drive around in your car.
  6. Increase or decrease the overall scale slider until you are happy with the general feeling of the wheel.
  7. Increase or decrease the detail scale slider until you are happy with the detail feeling of the wheel.
  8. Enjoy racing!

Setup

You must disable the iRacing simulator’s built-in force feedback feature. To do this, run the iRacing simulator and then go into the Options screen, and into the Drive tab, and disable force feedback by unchecking the Enable Force Feedback checkbox.

Logitech wheel users must also disable the iRacing simulator’s support for TrueForce. To do this, edit the app.ini file which is located in the documents iRacing folder, and find and replace loadTrueForceAPI=1 with loadTrueForceAPI=0 and save.

Device

You would indicate which force feedback device you want the app to use, by selecting it from this dropdown box. If there are no devices listed in this box, make sure that your force feedback wheel is plugged in, is turned on, and is not sleeping, and then restart the app.

Wheel Max

The wheel max slider is how you tell the app how strong the motor in your wheel is – what its maximum torque output is in Newton-meters. For example, my Logitech G Pro racing wheel is rated at 11 Newton-meters, so that is what I have it set to in the app for my wheel.

Overall Scale

The overall scale adjusts the strength of the force feedback that is sent to your wheel. The range of this slider is from 0% to 100%.

When you have this set to 100% this means that if iRacing says to apply 10 Newton-meters of force to the wheel, then that is exactly what happens.

If you set this to 50% then when iRacing says to apply 10 Newton-meters of force to the wheel, the app applies 5 Newton-meters to the wheel instead.

The overall scale defaults to 10% for safety. You will want to turn this up until your wheel force feedback reaches a comfortable level.

Auto Overall Scale Button

This is the process to use the auto button –

  1. Set the detail scale slider to where you want it to be
  2. Drive around the track, taking at least one tight corner at speed
  3. Press this button

While you are driving around, MAIRA will keep track of the peak steering column torque. You can see this number displayed inside the button. The button will light up with a green border when it has detected a peak steering column torque of at least 1 Nm, indicating that you can press it.

When you press this button, MAIRA will automatically set the overall scale for you. After MAIRA updates the overall scale slider, you can manually turn it down if you feel that the wheel is too strong. Or, you can turn it up some to make the wheel stronger, understanding that the force feedback signal will likely have some clipping. Some clipping is fine. Too much clipping can mask the oversteer and understeer feeling when taking high force corners.

You can also right-click on this button to clear the stored peak steering torque value. The reason you would want to do this, is because sometimes you’ll hit something, or drive over some intense kerbs, and this results in a really big number showing up in the auto button. In this situation, if you press the auto button, you will end up with an overall scale value that is probably too low.

Here is a video showing how to use this feature.

Detail Scale

The detail scale adjusts the strength of things like road bumps, tire chatter, and things like that. The range of this slider is from 0% to 500%.

If you set this to 100% then basically the force feedback signal is passed from iRacing, through this app, and to your steering wheel virtually unchanged.

If you set it to 50% then the details are cut down in half, and if you set it to 200% the details are twice as strong.

Button Mappings

There are several button mappings that can be set up to control MAIRA while you are driving. When you begin to set up a button mapping, you will see this screen –

You can map either a single button click, or you can map a button hold + button click. To map a single button click, just press any button or knob on any controller device, or your keyboard, and then click on update to save the button mapping.

To map a button hold + button click combo, first press and release the hold button, then press and release the click button, and then click on update to save the button mapping. If you mess up, you can always click on the clear button to start over. The result of mapping a button hold + button click combo looks something like this –

Reset

When you press the reset button, this will cause the app to re-initialize the force feedback device. If your steering wheel has gone to sleep while waiting for a race to start, MAIRA might have lost the ability to control the force feedback in your wheel. To fix this, just press the reset button to tell MAIRA to gain control back of the force feedback device. You can also press the reset button if the iRacing simulator has started up and taken control of your wheel, to tell MAIRA to take back control.

Set Auto Overall Scale

You can map the set auto overall scale button to a button on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can hit this button to tell MAIRA to automatically set the overall scale slider for you without needing to take your eyes off the road.

Clear Auto Overall Scale

You can map the clear auto overall scale button to a button on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can hit the button at any time, to tell MAIRA to clear the auto overall scale value and start over.

Overall Scale Increment / Decrement

I recommend that these buttons be mapped to a knob on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can increase or decrease the overall scale while driving around the track.

Detail Scale Increment / Decrement

These buttons can be mapped to a knob on your button box or steering wheel. This way you can increase or decrease the detail scale while driving around the track.

Next: Troubleshooting