Haven't played in years (I think the last time I was active, racing daily was in 2021), and randomly thought of LFS while playing Assetto Corsa. Installed and was surprised there were 400 people online. I get into the server browser and I almost chuckled to see the stupid cruise servers were still a thing, then I hit "sort by number of racers" and it's a pee pee pants city -moment when I realize there are literally no s2 racing servers from all the drift, roleplay and drag nonsense.

I have hundreds of hours spent in this game and my fondest memories are from the FM (?) FOX racing server and after that cargame, sadly both of which seem pretty dead.

So the question I guess is, are there public servers where you can still have a good race? Cheers.

Your race servers may be on s3, but you can stay on bug ridden Assetto. No one cares.

Cruise servers have kept this game alive for years so this may not be the place for you anymore especially on a demo license.

The racing scene is mostly alive in leagues nowadays, although there is AA Multiclass server - the one where you have to up your rank, starting with UF1. All of it is S2 and up though. S3 is where all of the life is moving now, especially with the mods support.

Quote from devinfarrell :

Haven't played in years (I think the last time I was active, racing daily was in 2021), and randomly thought of LFS while playing Assetto Corsa. Installed and was surprised there were 400 people online. I get into the server browser and I almost chuckled to see the stupid cruise servers were still a thing, then I hit "sort by number of racers" and it's a pee pee pants city -moment when I realize there are literally no s2 racing servers from all the drift, roleplay and drag nonsense.

I have hundreds of hours spent in this game and my fondest memories are from the FM (?) FOX racing server and after that cargame, sadly both of which seem pretty dead.

So the question I guess is, are there public servers where you can still have a good race? Cheers.

FM Fox is still running strong as ever, but as its name says its FM FOX FRIDAY league, so just a league racing, not pick up race. We also do FM GTi Thursdays if slower cars are something you like.

As for answer to your question, except AA multiclass, not really. Not in a "pick up racing" sense.

The problem as i see it is chicken and egg one. There are no servers because there are not enough drivers willing to race. And there are no drivers willing to race because there are no servers. We at FM tried to do something on back of new mods, it was cool for 2-3 days, then people realized they dont want to race half made shit i guess. I dont blame them. I believe LFS pick up racing is dead and it will stay dead. No amount of rain, snow, night, new graphics or sounds or lightning or cars will change that.

As NumberTwo suggests, a true pick up racing is kinda dead in LFS (except for demo maybe).
But that is not necessarily a bad thing, as the racing community is now more focused on on time-specific pick up racing (weekly events like RTFR, GTi Thursday, FOX Friday, FBM Saturday,...) or serious championship events (BF1 League, E-Challenge, GT2/TBO Challenge, Layout Racing League,...)

The league racing is now better than ever, but it apparently comes at the cost of reduced "random racing" activity...