In this article, we’ll take a look at the differences between the best spotters for iRacing, DRE and Crew Chief (CC)
Jon Barton reviews DRE vs CC in Spring 2021 on the iRacing Forum:
[…] I struggled and struggled with voice recognition in Crew Chief, and some other miscellaneous things like being able to change my Pit options once I’m already in the box. My experience with CC was that I would turn off Fast Repair in the first couple of laps, then when I needed it, I couldn’t get it turned back on, and the same thing for tires and fuel.
I retired from my first 4 League races after I started using Crew Chief because I couldn’t get CC to give me any gas. When CC *would* set the setting, I’d have to drive out of the pits, make a lap, then come back into the pits to get the gas I asked for.
Could be unique to me, could be that I only used CC for 2 weeks before getting frustrated and quit using it (so at least I could finish a race without running out of gas!)
None of those have ever been a problem with The Digital Race Engineer. I can drive all the way down pit road and park THEN ask for autofuel and all 4 tires and a fast repair and get them all immedately. The voice recognition is top notch, since it relies on VoiceAttack, which relies on Microsoft’s voice APIs – so when those get better (and they definitely have over the years) then DRE gets better.
An additional benefit is that DRE is ultimately a profile for VoiceAttack, which means you can add (or change) commands however you like. I’ve added commands to dynamically show/hide RaceLab Overlays in VR, because Racelab supports keybinds for those commands, and VoiceAttack allows you to send keystrokes to a specific application when a command is triggered. I’ve also added commands to switch to my Trucksim and Elite Dangerous profiles with a voice command (and commands in each of those to flip back to DRE, of course)
In early 2021, the primary differences between Crew Chief and Digital Race Engineer are:
DRE is absolutely 10/10 for VR use. My biggest challenge is simply remembering all the hundreds of useful commands that are available. What a problem to have!
Interested in the latest features in DRE?