Back in July, Ignite Skill Gaming (owners of rFactorcentral & SimRaceWay) announced to have acquired $7.5 million dollars of funding to turn SimRaceWay into an online racing title.

The company isn’t stopping there though as Ignite has announced a new partnership with the Jim Russell Racing Drivers School at the Infineon Raceway in California. The facility is being re-branded as SimRaceWay Performance Center and aims to combine real and virtual racing as Ignite is hoping for synergy effects for the physics developments of their new title as well.

The racing school offers over 70 vehicles to choose from and is now extended by a choice of simulators, giving interested customers the chance to try out their skills in a danger-free environment first before going for the real thing.

The sim facility consists of 12 VisionRacer VR3 Black Label racing rigs, equipped with Logitech G27 steering wheels.

Below are a bunch of photos showing off the new facility, also present is Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon who’s assisting Ignite Skill with his real-life racing experience.

If you´ve been an active in the sim racing community for the past 2 1/2 years, the name Ignite Skill Gaming probably does ring a bell. If it does not, Simraceway surely will.

Back in 2009, Ignite Skill Gaming bought rFactorcentral and subsequently launched Simraceway.com, a platform that hosted paid online racing events with mod community content without the consent of the original creators.

This issue created a big uproar in the community (and on this very website) that led to a boycott of the new website that most major mod groups joined. The boycott caused Simraceway to (somewhat reluctantly) remove the content in question from their website as their service continued.

The whole concept however didn’t really take off in the community much as Simraceway failed to make big a impact in the sim racing community and was quickly forgotten by many people. Now, the chapter can be completely closed as Ignite Skill Gaming has acquired a whopping $7.5 million dollars to turn Simraceway into an online racing game.

Online gaming company Ignite Game Technologies, revving up to release a new racing game, announced Tuesday that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B financing from private investors, led by Steve Belotti and Bill Budinger Jr. Previously, the company had raised a $3 million Series A in 2010 and a $1.7 million seed, for a total of $12.2 million in financing raised.

At its heart, Ignite seeks to continue the tradition of high-quality racing games like Gran Turismo 5, except in the online gaming space specifically.

“There are a number of great racing games on the market but the genre as a whole has seen little real innovation in the past 10 years,” said Jonathan Haswell, CEO of Ignite, in a prepared statement.  “Most titles make year-over-year incremental changes to visual fidelity and the breadth of cars and tracks on the disc – the eye candy.  Ignite will offer a fresh take on the genre, one that rethinks some of the fundamentals and focuses relentlessly on a core aim of live multiplayer racing.”

Haswell suggests there are three tiers of racing games, in terms of fidelity and physics: arcade, realistic and pinnacle. If we think of “realistic” games as those high-end consumer releases like Gran Turismo and “pinnacle” as highly-immersive simulation racing, then you see the two spaces Ignite wants to thrive in.