This Week on Trading Paints: March 28, 2025
News and updates from the world of Trading Paints from the past week.
Welcome to This Week on Trading Paints, the pulse on what’s happening in the Trading Paints world while you’re recovering your iRating from the Sebring 12-hour.
✨ What’s New
- iRacing has updated the new ARCA cars with graphical updates in this week’s patch. The update now forces manufacturer branding — no more simulating teams that can’t afford headlight decals, or worse, whatever this is.
🗓️ Coming Soon
- Our new Artist Spotlight drops Tuesday. We won’t spoil it, but this month’s featured designer has achieved a lot in a short amount of time in the racing world.
🌟 Fresh Official Paints
Lots of Verified Official paints landed on the Showroom this week. Here’s what’s new.
🏆 Paint of the Week
Community Manager Patrick has selected a slick retro ride on the FIA F4 by Keri C. as this week’s Paint of the Week.
2003 FW25 Bmw/Williams FIA F4 by Keri C.
🏎️ Staff Picks
Here are some faves from Team TP this week.
“Liam Lawson’s new ride.”
–Shawn, Development
Who doesn’t like a little bit of spec map trickery?
Good night, sweet prince (of the party).
👉 A Closing Note: Monday’s Outage
If you tried to use Trading Paints Downloader on Monday or part of Tuesday, there’s a good chance you were greeted with an annoying “Waiting for internet connection” message. This was an issue on our end that we’ve since resolved.
So, what happened?
As iRacing and Trading Paints continue to grow, we’re committed to providing the best and most reliable service possible (which is fully funded by Trading Paints Pro members). That means we regularly upgrade our hardware and infrastructure to improve performance, with our aim in particular improving performance during peak times when there are lots of people online.
On Monday at around noon EDT, we attempted to roll out a backend upgrade to improve download speed and reliability. We expected this to be an instantaneous change, but unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned.
Once we pointed the Downloader to the new system, we quickly realized that, despite our testing, it wasn’t working as expected — and it wasn’t going to work. To fix the issue, we immediately rolled back to our original servers. Simple enough, right? Normally, that should have resolved things right away, but not this time.
Why was the outage so long?
When we reverted the change, the Domain Name System (DNS), which tells computers where to find things online, held onto the incorrect destination (the non-working new destination, which we shut off) for much longer than expected. As a result, some internet providers continued directing users to the wrong place, even though we had already corrected it.
We worked closely with our provider to release the outdated information as quickly as possible, but since DNS updates take time to spread across the internet, some users experienced issues for nearly 24 hours, while others barely noticed a blip.
The issue has since been fully resolved, and the Downloader is back to working as expected. We truly apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while we worked through this unexpected snag. We’ll revisit this upgrade again soon — hopefully with a much smoother roll-out next time. Thanks for sticking with us!
What did you think of This Week on Trading Paints? Let us know on Instagram and Bluesky. 🏁
