History of RSC

Things began with Tim Wheatley’s league races late 1998/early 1999. As a racer in John Simmons Grand Prix Legends league Internet Grand Prix Series (IGPS), Tim began to write race reports and eventually catalogued news for the other league members at hondafreek.clara.net and timwheatley.co.uk on a site called Tim Wheatley’s Honda Homepage.

After a while and around the release of NASCAR Legends in 1999 the Honda Homepage was renamed to Legends Central, a general sim racing news Web site. The site eventually was picked up by sports-gaming.com and became hosted at legends.sports-gaming.com until a legal issue brought the site offline. All data was lost, and the site was brought back at legendscentral.com.

In 2001 Tim lost control of the Web site when he couldn’t financially support it. Operations were taken over by some prominent users and staff members who – with Tim’s approval – merged Legends Central with a large Danish sim racing community from simracing.dk. The new site was also renamed and self hosted again at racesimcentral.com and later hosted by Danish ISP boomtown.net at rscnet.org.

By 2005 the forums had grown massively and there were now more than 80,000 registered users in the forum. Tim left the site ‘for good’ to avoid a conflict of interest while now working for iRacing and that same year the site and forum (now using a combined software suite) was hosted by SIMBIN (developer of the GTR series).

In late 2007 the hosting company the site was now using after moving away from SIMBIN suffered a failure in both their live server and backup server that resulted in total data loss yet again. A couple of years later the same thing happened again (yes, really). Then a couple more years later the Web site was sold on to Ignite GT who were developing the big budget SimRaceway product and wanted to use RSC to promote their own sim and SRW-S1 steering wheel while covering others. It continued like this until the collapse of the SimRaceway with financial difficulties that included their inability to pay licensing to Image Space Incorporated for the rFactor engine. Tim, now working at ISI and responsible for licensing the rFactor engine, took back the Web site.

RSC sat inactive for a few years until summer 2019 when Tim, upon leaving the industry, decided to resurrect it at racesimcentral.net with the intention of shedding light on what had been lost in all those server crashes. It was decided that each sim would be profiled with all available cars and tracks indexed, along with all the downloads and news that could be found retroactively posted.

The Web site still continues this path, adding information on old simulations in-between the latest news on the latest sims. It remains privately owned and solely operated by Tim Wheatley.

RSC Logo

The RSC logo is based on one that was made for the original Web site back in 2001. In 2019 I added a circled and squared variation. You can download the RSC logos here: 1.16 MB.

Sponsorship and Donations

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