Overlays

This page controls MAIRA’s overlay windows. These are always-on-top floating windows that MAIRA can show on top of iRacing.

The current build includes five overlays:

• Gap monitor – the closest car ahead and behind, with race info and time gaps
• Delta monitor – your current lap time and how you are doing against your last lap and the leader
• Grip-O-Meter – a skid/slip and seat-of-pants gauge driven by the Steering Effects
• Captions – live captions of iRacing voice chat (see Captions)
• Graph – a live scrolling waveform of the force feedback torque, pedal haptics, and timer jitter

Each overlay has its own section below with an enable switch and a title switch. The settings at the top of the page apply to all overlays at once.

All overlays

These settings apply to every overlay window at the same time.

Enable edit mode

Turning edit mode on forces every enabled overlay to be visible (even when you are not on track) and lets you rearrange them.

While edit mode is on, each overlay shows a small set of controls in its corner:

• Move – drag the overlay to a new screen position
• Scale – drag to resize the overlay
• Settings (gear) – opens a small window to adjust the overlay’s appearance, or reset it. For the box overlays (Gap monitor, Delta monitor, Captions, and Graph) you can set the background color – using a #RRGGBB hex code or the separate Red, Green, and Blue knobs – along with the opacity. The Grip-O-Meter has no background color, so its window offers the opacity control only.

When edit mode is off, the overlays become click-through so they don’t block your mouse during racing.

Default: OFF

Show when off track

When ON, the overlays stay visible even when your car is not on track (for example, in the garage). When OFF, the overlays only appear while you are on track.

Default: OFF

Show in replay mode

When ON, the overlays are also shown while you are watching a replay.

Default: OFF

Enable per-car overlay position and scaling

When ON, MAIRA remembers a separate position and scale for each car you drive. As soon as you switch to a different car, the overlays jump to the position and size you last set for that car – so a layout that keeps the overlays clear of one car’s on-screen displays doesn’t end up covering something important in another.

The first time MAIRA sees a car, it starts that car off from your non-car layout, so every new car gets a sensible starting point that you can then fine-tune. When this setting is OFF, all cars share the single non-car layout instead (the original behavior), and moving or scaling an overlay changes that shared layout.

Only overlay position and scale are stored per car – background color and opacity are shared across all cars.

Default: ON

Gap monitor

The Gap monitor shows the closest car ahead and the closest car behind you, along with useful race information such as car number, race position, iRating, driver name, and the time gap.

The gap values are based on MAIRA’s timing-marker system rather than a simple distance check, which helps the overlay show a more meaningful time delta as cars move around the lap.

Enabled

Turns the Gap monitor overlay on/off. When ON, MAIRA automatically shows the overlay while connected to iRacing and on track.

Default: OFF

Show the overlay window title

Shows or hides the title text at the top of the overlay window.

Default: ON

The top row shows the closest car ahead of you, and the bottom row shows the closest car behind you. Each row shows the car number, race position, iRating, time gap, and driver name.

The overlay ignores your own car, spectators, the pace car, and cars on pit road.

The position text is color-coded to help indicate whether the other car is effectively on the same lap, ahead by a lap, or behind by a lap. The gap text changes color depending on whether the gap is opening, closing, or staying about the same over recent timing markers.

Delta monitor

The Delta monitor shows your current lap time and how you are doing compared with your own last lap and the session leader.

• Lap – your current lap time
• vs. Last – how far ahead or behind you are compared with your previous lap
• vs. P1 – how far ahead or behind you are compared with the leader of your own car class at the same point on the lap

A negative delta means you are faster; a positive delta means you are slower.

Both deltas are measured at MAIRA’s timing markers, so they update as you pass each marker rather than continuously. The leader comparison uses the lap the leader is running right now, falling back to their last completed lap when they have not reached your point on the track yet.

Enabled

Turns the Delta monitor overlay on/off. When ON, MAIRA automatically shows the overlay while connected to iRacing and on track.

Default: OFF

Show the overlay window title

Shows or hides the title text at the top of the overlay window.

Default: ON

Grip-O-Meter

The Grip-O-Meter is a small gauge overlay driven by the Steering Effects. It shows:

• Skid/Slip indicator (based on under/over deviation)
• Seat-Of-Pants ball (based on the seat-of-pants effect)

The skid/slip indicator is very similar to how this gauge works for aircraft. It stays centered until a calibration file is loaded for the current car (see the Steering Effects page).

The seat-of-pants ball likewise stays centered unless the seat-of-pants steering effect is switched on, since it reads that effect’s output.

Enabled

Turns the Grip-O-Meter overlay on/off. When ON, the overlay is shown while your car is on the track.

Default: OFF

Show the overlay window title

Shows or hides the title text at the top of the overlay window.

Default: ON

Captions

The Captions overlay shows live captions of iRacing voice chat. The transcription itself is set up on the Captions page (recording device and ElevenLabs account); this section controls the overlay window.

Enabled

Turns captions on/off. This is the same switch as on the Captions page – when ON, MAIRA captures audio, sends it to ElevenLabs for transcription, and shows the caption overlay.

Default: OFF

Show the overlay window title

Shows or hides the title text at the top of the overlay window.

Default: ON

Graph

The Graph overlay is a live scrolling waveform of several internal signals, showing the last three seconds. What you see depends on which of the eight layer switches you turn on. It is meant for at-a-glance monitoring while you drive and tune, and it only records and draws while the overlay is showing.

This is a live view of what is happening right now. If you want to stop and study a stretch of force feedback in detail – scrub through it, zoom in, compare it against the track – record it and use the preview graph on the Racing Wheel page instead.

Enabled

Turns the Graph overlay on/off. When ON, MAIRA automatically shows the overlay while connected to iRacing and on track.

Default: OFF

Show the overlay window title

Shows or hides the title text at the top of the overlay window.

Default: ON

Each of the remaining switches turns on a layer in the graph. Layers are drawn on top of each other, so turning on only the one or two you care about is usually easier to read than turning on all eight.

Input torque

Shows the 360 Hz steering torque iRacing is providing (the input the FFB graph receives), drawn in red. This is the raw signal before any of your FFB graph modules touch it.

Default: ON

Output torque

Shows the final force value MAIRA is sending to your wheel after the FFB graph has run – every module in the graph, plus the fades MAIRA applies when it starts, stops, or hands control back. Drawn in cyan. Comparing this against Input torque is the quickest way to see what your graph is actually doing to the signal.

Default: ON

Input torque (60 Hz)

Shows the 60 Hz steering torque iRacing is providing, drawn in red. This is one value per telemetry frame, held for the whole frame, so it looks like a staircase next to the 360 Hz trace.

Default: OFF

Input LFE

Shows the current low-frequency-effect magnitude MAIRA is producing, drawn in blue. More information about Wheel LFE can be found here – Wheel LFE.

Default: OFF

Clutch pedal haptics

Shows the current clutch haptics waveform MAIRA is generating (a live sine-based signal), drawn in blue.

Default: OFF

Brake pedal haptics

Same concept as clutch, but for the brake haptics waveform, drawn in red.

Default: OFF

Throttle pedal haptics

Same concept as clutch and brake, but for the throttle haptics waveform, drawn in green.

Default: OFF

Timer jitter

Shows timing jitter in the playout timer loop – how stable MAIRA’s 360 Hz timing is – drawn in green. Each tick is plotted as how far it landed from the ideal 2.78 ms period, so a flat line on the center is perfect timing and the full height of the graph is one whole period late or early.

A little fuzz here is normal. Large, repeated spikes mean something on your PC is starving the timer thread, which is worth chasing down because it shows up in the wheel as roughness.

Default: OFF

Reading the graph

• The vertical center is zero, and up/down is positive/negative depending on the signal.
• The top and bottom edges of the graph are full scale. For the torque traces that is your Max force setting on the Racing wheel page – a trace touching the edge is a force as large as your wheel is set to produce.
• Horizontal grid lines mark every 25% of full scale, with the two halfway lines picked out in a lighter color so you have something to judge against.
• The intensity of the line increases with magnitude.

Background flashes

Instead of drawing anything extra on the waveform, the graph tints its own background while something notable is happening. The tint is painted column by column as the graph scrolls, so you get a colored band that lines up with exactly when the event happened:

• Red – output torque is clipping. The graph asked for more force than your wheel is set to deliver, so the peaks are being flattened. This is the one to care about: it means detail is being thrown away.
• Orange – crash protection is active.
• Yellow – curb protection is active.

Only one color shows at a time. Clipping wins over crash protection, which wins over curb protection. Crash protection and curb protection are FFB graph modules on the Racing Wheel page – if your graph does not include those modules, you will never see their colors here.