AB Overlays

Start hereThe basics

An overlay is a small always-on-top window that AB Racing Line draws over iRacing. Start the app, start driving, and the overlays you've switched on appear. They follow iRacing on their own: they show while you're in the car (pit road included, because that's exactly when the fuel call matters) and stay hidden in the garage, in iRacing's menus and during a replay. You never have to remember to turn them off.

Everything on every overlay is measured from your own car in the session you're driving. Where a number can't honestly be shown yet, the overlay shows a dash or says what it's waiting for, rather than an estimate that looks like a fact.

Step by stepSet up your overlays

ArrangingSaved layouts

A layout that works in a GT3 can bury the mirrors in a prototype, and a triple-screen arrangement is wrong on a single screen. So you can save an arrangement by name and switch between them:

• Arrange the overlays how you want, press Save current layout and give it a name.
• Pick it from the LAYOUT dropdown any time to put everything back.
• Edit loads a layout and unlocks the overlays so you can adjust it; changes write back to that layout as you make them.
• Delete removes one you no longer want.

ArrangingThe show / hide hotkey

Sometimes you want the screen clean: a screenshot, or a passenger watching. Click the Show / Hide button on the AB Overlays tab and press the combination you want. It works while iRacing is the active window, and both ways: pressed while the overlays are on screen it clears them; pressed while they're hidden it brings them back, including when you're out of the car, which is how you get your overlays during a replay. To clear the hotkey, use the Clear hotkey link under the button.

• It must be a combination: Ctrl, Alt or Shift plus a key. A bare letter would be taken from every other program on your PC, so it's refused.
• Don't pick something iRacing uses. Once set, that combination belongs to AB Racing Line across the whole PC. If another program already owns it, the app tells you.
• Keyboard only. A wheel or button-box button can't be used: Windows doesn't offer those as system-wide shortcuts.

The ten overlaysInput Telemetry

A live dash strip showing exactly what your hands and feet are doing.

• Rolling traces: throttle (green), brake (red) and RPM (cyan). The left axis is throttle and brake as a percentage, the right axis is RPM up to your car's redline.
• ABS shows in yellow on the brake trace, broken into segments: ABS pulses on and off, so a solid line would misstate what the car did.
• Pedal bars for throttle, brake and clutch, with the live percentage above each.
• Shift lights run across the top and flash at the car's own published shift point, and flash all cyan whenever the pit limiter is on.
• The wheel turns with your real steering angle, with the angle in degrees beside it, and gear, speed and RPM alongside.

Speed follows your Display Units setting. To rearrange the pieces, open the cog on the Input Telemetry card in Move / Resize mode and choose Arrange items: drag or resize any single piece, or nudge it with the arrow keys. Reset items puts them back. The cog also sets your own shift-light point for each gear, for this car.

The ten overlaysProximity Radar

A top-down spotter for the cars you can't see.

• Nearby cars are placed by their real gap to you along the track, about 30 metres either side on a road course, class-coloured and numbered. You're the green car in the middle.
• On ovals the reach is measured in time, not metres, so it stretches with speed: at Daytona you need warning of a car a second away; at Martinsville you don't.
• Left and right come from iRacing's own spotter, the same signal that calls "car left" in the sim. When someone is genuinely alongside, that side flashes red with CAR LEFT, CAR RIGHT or 3 WIDE.
• It hides itself when nobody is near, and reappears the instant a car closes in.

The ten overlaysTrack Map

A live map of the lap. It draws the circuit from your own driving, so it works at any track with nothing to download: it says "Building track map…" until you've completed a lap, then remembers that track.

• Every car on track, class-coloured and numbered, with you in green.
• Each sector is coloured by how you're doing there: purple when you hold the session's fastest sector, green when your last time there was your personal best, yellow when it wasn't. A small figure shows how far off the session-fastest your best is.
• Cars you're battling (within about a second) get a pulsing ring and their gap in seconds, with an arrow: red if they're closing on you, green if you're catching them.
• Cars that run off track are flagged, and the ring flashes so you can see who it is.

The ten overlaysG-Force

A friction-circle pad that knows what you have actually done.

• The green shape is your grip envelope, measured live. It starts empty and grows as you genuinely use grip, one direction at a time. It's never a theoretical circle.
• The dot is your car right now, with a tail: braking at the bottom, acceleration at the top, cornering to the sides.
• The headline number is how much of your own proven grip you're using in the direction you're loaded. It reads "--" until enough driving is recorded, and turns pink at your edge.
• It resets when a new session starts.

The ten overlaysGrip

The G-Force pad answers "how much grip am I using?" at the moment you're far too busy to look. This one keeps the answer on screen long enough to read it.

• The trace is the last few seconds of grip use, so you can look after the corner and still see what happened in it.
• The bar on the right is right now: green below 75%, purple from 75 to 90, red above 90, the same colours as the G-Force pad.
• It's measured against your own envelope, and the trace is redrawn as the envelope grows, so a lap spent cruising never reads as a lap at the limit.
• The mini map shows the road just ahead and behind you, coloured by the grip you used.
• The cog sets how many seconds of history to show.

The ten overlaysLap Log

A pit-wall lap history rather than just a list of times.

• Each completed lap with its time and the gap to your session best; the best row says BEST.
• Three sector chips per lap: purple for the session-fastest sector, green for a personal best, yellow when you were off it. The same timing as the Track Map.
• The fuel that lap burned, measured from the tank at each crossing of the line.
• A dash where a number can't honestly be shown: a lap with a pit stop in it, or a lap with no valid time.

The ten overlaysConditions

For races long enough that the weather changes.

• Track and air temperature with a trend arrow when they're genuinely moving: amber rising, cyan falling. A cooling track means grip and tyre pressures are about to change.
• A wind compass, the arrow pointing where the wind is blowing to, with the speed.
• Track state and time of day: dry, damp or wet, and day, twilight or night.

Nothing here is a forecast: it reports what the conditions are doing now, and which way they're moving.

The ten overlaysRelative

Who's about to be on top of you, and how long you have.

• The leader, the cars around you on the track, and you. A car two laps down right behind you matters more to your next corner than whoever is running second.
• You choose how many cars either side, one to five, in the overlay's own settings.
• The gap is coloured by lap: white on your lap, red a lap or more ahead of you, blue a lap or more down. The + or − already says which side of you they are.
• Cars in the pits are dimmed and marked PIT.

A dash instead of a gap means there's no lap time yet to turn it into seconds, as on an out-lap.

The ten overlaysStandings

• The leaders, then the cars around you, with each driver's last and best lap.
• The gap column is the gap to the leader in a race. A car a lap or more behind the leader of its class shows 1L, 2L and so on, dimmed. Outside a race it reads OFF P1: how far each driver's best lap is off their class leader's, and nobody is shown as lapped.
• Your row is always shown. A dotted line marks where the order jumps from the leaders to your group.
• Grouped by class in multiclass racing, with each class's car count and strength of field, and positions within the class.
• Drivers in the pits are dimmed and marked PIT. Anyone on wet tyres is marked. Time left in the session sits beside the car count.

The ten overlaysFuel

The number you type into the pit menu.

• ADD x litres: what to take at the next stop, which isn't the same as the total still needed to reach the flag. At the last stop it takes only what reaches the flag.
• It reads the pit menu back. iRacing broadcasts how much fuel you've dialled in, so the overlay compares it with what you need ("dialled 45 L, 7 L short, 3 laps") on the lap before the stop.
• MEASURING n/3 LAPS until your burn is steady. A call built on one lap moves every lap.
• In practice it shows laps of fuel instead.

Good to knowWhat needs a few laps first

• Track Map: one complete lap, to draw the circuit. It remembers each track afterwards.
• G-Force: enough driving for a grip envelope worth comparing against.
• Fuel: three racing laps (MEASURING n/3). A pit stop doesn't throw the measured rate away.
• Lap Log and sector colours: a completed lap, and a completed sector.
• Relative gaps in seconds: one lap time.

Good to knowWhat the overlays don't do, and why

• No traction-control light. iRacing publishes when ABS is working but nothing for traction control, only the dial setting.
• Left and right only when the sim knows (see the radar).
• Sector colours are you against this session, not iRacing's own timing screen, which answers a different question. Neither is wrong.
• No exclusive fullscreen, for any overlay tool. Use borderless.
• Nothing is predicted. Every figure describes what has already happened.

StreamingOn your stream

Every overlay can also go into OBS as a Browser Source, placed per scene, separately from where it sits on your monitor: the cog on its card copies the address. Your on-screen overlays are untouched, and the address only works on your own PC. The step-by-step is in the tutorial Put your overlays on stream.

QuestionsQuestions

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