It started with hosted sessions
A few of us run hosted sessions on iRacing most weeks. No official league, no schedule, just friends jumping into a session when we're free. We'd pick a track, set up a hosted race, and have a great time. The racing was good. The problem was everything else.
The spreadsheet phase
After a while, we started wanting to know who was actually the fastest over the course of a season. Who had the most wins? Who was the most consistent? I tried tracking it in a spreadsheet, pulling results manually from iRacing and typing them in. It worked for about three weeks before I fell behind and the spreadsheet went stale. Manually copying results from iRacing's website into Google Sheets was tedious enough that nobody wanted to keep it up.
So I started building something
I'm a developer, so eventually I started building something. At first it was just a script that pulled results from the iRacing API and calculated points. Then it needed a UI so my friends could actually see the standings. Then they wanted driver stats. Then someone asked if we could post results to Discord automatically. Feature by feature, it grew into a real app.
From side project to product
The more I built, the more I realized this wasn't just a problem for our friend group. League owners on Reddit and the iRacing forums were complaining about the same things: manually entering results, fighting with spreadsheets, trying to keep drivers engaged between races. The tools that existed were either outdated, overly complex, or required too much manual work. So I decided to turn what I'd built into something anyone could use.
What GridChief is today
GridChief pulls in iRacing results using a subsession ID, calculates points however you've configured them, and puts standings on a public page or posts them to Discord. It supports drop rounds, bonus points, multi-class scoring, and incident tracking. The workflow is the same whether you have 50 drivers or 8. Paste the subsession ID after the race and everything updates.
Where it stands now
GridChief exists because I needed it. I built it for groups of friends who race together regularly but don't want to manage everything by hand. If you've ever wished your hosted sessions had real standings without the spreadsheet, that's why I built this.