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iRacing have announced that the Chevy Silverado will be available October 15th and that an Impala and Monte-Carlo are in production. Read the full story here.

As posted on the members Web site:

Vintage racers, Grand Prix Legends veterans, F1 fans and anyone who ever wanted to know what it would be like to be Mario Andretti: rejoice! We are very pleased to announce the first vintage racing machinery to be added to the iRacing stable will be the black and gold John Player Special Lotus 79 that carried Mario to the 1978 Formula One World Drivers Championship.

This famous and significant vehicle ushered in the ground-effects era, and through Clive Chapman, managing director of Classic Team Lotus and son of Lotus founder Colin Chapman, we’ve arranged a license to produce an exacting virtual version of the car. With the generous assistance of vintage racer and Lotus 79 owner Joel Finn, our team has already scanned the car, and the production process has begun.

Our connection with Mr. Finn comes courtesy of iRacing director of partnerships Divina Galica, who drove his 79 at Watkins Glen recently - and that was not Divi’s first encounter with this landmark machine. To read more about the 79 (and Divi’s history with this groundbreaking racecar), please visit the news section.

Really exciting that we’re going to be offering this one for those of you who have been fans of Formula One your entire lives! This was a fantastic car and thanks to the sim, you can experience just how fantastic pretty soon. You can read the full article on the iRacing.com Web site.

I am oh-so excited about this car! *Bounces up and down*

Most Successful Grand-Am Prototype Racer To Be Included in Motorsport Simulation

BEDFORD, MA (July 18, 2008) – iRacing.com will add the Riley Mk XX Daytona Prototype to the stable of racing cars available to users of the company’s motorsport simulation software and service. The agreement was announced today by Bill Riley, president of Riley Technologies and Scott McKee, iRacing’s vice president of marketing.

“Riley Technologies is one of the world’s foremost designers and manufacturers of racing cars, and the Mk XX continues Riley’s long line of winning prototype sportscars,” McKee said. “Several Daytona Prototype drivers have already made use of our service as part of their pre-race preparation for Grand-Am events; with the top car in the class becoming available, and so many of the tracks where they race already in our inventory, we expect even more teams and drivers will decide to take advantage of our simulation service for race rehearsals.”

“I drove a pre-release version of the iRacing software last December at the Performance Racing Industry show in Orlando,” Riley said. “The accuracy of the tracks and the cars was just amazing. One of the secrets of our company’s long-term success has been the level of support we provide for our customers. I look at our association with iRacing as an extension of that service; now the drivers for our teams can get meaningful behind-the-wheel practice before a test session or a race. That’s a big advantage.”

Ian Berwick, vehicle dynamics engineer at iRacing, noted that working closely with Riley’s engineering staff and having access to their design and performance data will permit iRacing to produce an extremely precise digital representation of the physical race car. “That’s one of the benefits of licensing all of the content in our simulation – tracks as well as cars,” said Berwick. “To be useful to real-world racers, the level of fidelity needs to be really high; approximations just aren’t good enough.”

One of the keys to making the Riley Daytona Prototype perform in the simulation precisely as it does in the real world is reproducing the car’s aerodynamic qualities accurately. “Our general aerodynamic model is very good, and getting better all the time,” Berwick said. “But we’ll be able to check our values against what the Riley engineers have found in their real-world testing. For a high-downforce car like this one, that’s an important factor.”

The iRacing.com laser scanning team recently visited Riley Technologies’ Mooresville, N.C., facility to scan the Mk XX for modeling purposes. Additional data gathering is underway, and the same version of the car that the Grand-Am professionals will use for their race rehearsals will be available to all iRacing subscribers later this year.

Also announced as “coming soon” on the members home page, Barber Motorsports Park!