On 17 August the FIA closes a tender that could produce the first genuinely global, officially sanctioned sim racing championship. Behind it sits something bigger: a rulebook, a licence system and a stewarding structure that already exist. Motorsport’s governing body is quietly building the institutional layer sim racing esports has never had.
At 08:00 CEST on Monday 17 August 2026, the FIA stops accepting proposals from promoters and organisers who want to run FIA-sanctioned Esports Championships.
The call was launched in mid-June and we covered the announcement at the time in our FIA global esports championship partner search piece. What has gone almost entirely undiscussed since is what the tender sits on top of, and what the answers to it would actually change.
Because the FIA is not simply looking for someone to run a tournament. It has spent the last eighteen months building the regulatory scaffolding for competitive sim racing, and it has already road-tested the whole model on rally.
What is actually being tendered
Proposals have to be submitted to esports@fia.com, with the FIA’s sporting manager for esports, Erica Stranne, listed as the point of contact. They must set out a complete championship concept covering four things:
- The tournament format itself.
- The geographical scope of the series.
- Prospective hosts and venues for an in-person final.
- A financially sustainable commercial strategy, including a media rights distribution strategy.
That last point is the one to sit with. The FIA is not asking who can organise races. It is asking who can make competitive sim racing pay for itself.
FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem framed the launch around access, describing esports as one of the most accessible and rapidly growing forms of competition and a new pathway into motor sport. FIA Esports Commission President Niroshan Pereira was more institutional, talking about identifying organisers capable of delivering championships that meet the highest standards of excellence, integrity, innovation and audience engagement, within a transparent framework.
The part nobody covered: there is already a rulebook
This is the foundation, and it predates the tender by eighteen months.
At its meeting in Kigali, Rwanda in December 2024, the FIA World Motor Sport Council approved the creation of an esports regulatory framework as Appendix E to the International Sporting Code, with the explicit possibility of it evolving into an independent code in future. The FIA described it as the first such framework created by a global sporting federation.
What makes it more than a paperwork exercise is what had to be rewritten. Fundamental concepts that have always existed in the International Sporting Code, including the definition of an automobile and the definition of a driver, had to be redefined so they made sense in a virtual context.
Alongside it, the Council approved an International Esports Licence under Appendix L. For the first time, National Sporting Authorities can issue an FIA-recognised international esports licence, being rolled out gradually at FIA esports events. ASNs can also issue National Esports Licences, and can use Appendix E as the basis for writing their own national esports competition rules.
Read the current regulations and the architecture is unmistakable. Competitions are held under the Code and the Esports Code including appendices. Anything not provided for is decided by the Stewards. There are duties of the stewards, FIA delegates, protest procedures, and a requirement that entrants hold a Competitor’s Licence issued by their parent ASN.
In other words, the disciplinary and licensing apparatus that governs real motorsport has already been ported across. It exists now, and competitions have been governed by the Esports Code since the start of 2026.
The rally tour is the prototype, and it answers most of the open questions
If you want to know what an FIA sim racing championship looks like in practice, it is already running.
The FIA Esports Global Rally Tour was announced in Milan on 29 April 2026, driven personally by Ben Sulayem and with unanimous support from all FIA Vice-Presidents for Sport. Its structure tells you almost everything about how the circuit-racing version would work.
- Platform. The FIA selected Assetto Corsa Rally as the exclusive platform, choosing it over EA Sports WRC and DiRT Rally 2.0. Read that again, because it is the single most revealing decision the FIA has made in this space. It picked a title still in Early Access on Steam over the game that holds the actual World Rally Championship licence. Studio Director Mauro Notarberardino of Supernova Games Studios called the selection an important validation step. Our coverage of where the game currently stands is in our Assetto Corsa Rally 0.6 update piece.
- Format. A global online qualifier ran from 12 to 25 May, with times set on an official server and logged automatically to a public live leaderboard. That narrowed the field to 56 drivers: sixteen from Europe with North and South combined, and eight each from MENA, North America, South America, Asia-Pacific and Africa. Regional shootouts follow a knockout structure of quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals.
- Venues. The first regional shootout took place on 23 June during the FIA Conference in Macau. The European shootout runs from 16 to 18 October at SimRacing Expo in Frankfurt. The Grand Final takes place from 7 to 12 December in Shanghai during the FIA General Assemblies and FIA Awards, with the top two drivers facing off live and side by side on stage on 12 December.
- The finalist grid. Sixteen drivers, two per region, four for Europe on the basis of its larger number of FIA Member Clubs, plus two FIA wildcards.
- Hardware. This is the answer to a question the community keeps asking and rarely gets answered. All live events are supported by FIA Esports Official Suppliers Advanced SimRacing and D-BOX, specifically to ensure a consistent hardware standard across events. Standardised equipment at live finals is not a future aspiration. It is already policy.
- Scale. More than 6,000 drivers from 159 countries registered. For context on the audience side, the 2025 FIA MENA Esports Championship reached 111 million views.
The commercial esports world is currently walking away from sim racing. The discipline has lost its place at the largest prize pool event in the industry for 2026, and at least one major esports organisation has publicly withdrawn from sim racing competition citing a lack of ecosystem foundation.
And at exactly that moment, motorsport’s governing body is writing a code, issuing licences, appointing official hardware suppliers and tendering for a commercial promoter. Those two things are not unrelated. The FIA’s tender explicitly demands a financially sustainable commercial strategy, which is precisely the thing sim racing esports has never solved. Somebody at the FIA has clearly looked at the same numbers everyone else has and concluded that the missing ingredient is not audience or competitive quality. It is structure.
The questions the tender does not answer
Assuming a promoter is selected, several genuinely open questions follow, and they matter more to the average sim racer than the commercial detail.
- Which simulator, and how many? The rally precedent suggests the FIA will pick a single exclusive platform rather than run a multi-title series. It also suggests licence ownership matters less than partnership willingness, since Assetto Corsa Rally beat the official WRC game. For circuit racing that opens the field considerably wider than most people assume.
- What happens to the existing championships? Manufacturer-backed and platform-backed series already exist and are healthy. An FIA championship would sit above or alongside them, and nobody has explained which.
- How do you steward a virtual race? The framework says stewards decide. It does not say what evidence they work from, what the appeals route looks like in practice, or how consistent penalties will be across regions. This is the single biggest practical unknown, and it is the thing that determines whether the competition feels legitimate.
- What about cheating and exploits? Neither the Esports Code nor the tender documents publicly detail anti-cheat requirements, telemetry auditing or what constitutes a technical infringement in a virtual car. In real motorsport this is scrutineering. Its virtual equivalent has not been described.
- Does the licence mean anything outside the game? The International Esports Licence is issued by the same national bodies that issue real racing licences. Whether it ever becomes a step towards one, rather than a parallel credential, is the most interesting long-term question in this entire story.
What to watch after 17 August
The deadline is not the event. What follows it is.
- Who bids. Established esports promoters, motorsport promoters, or a game publisher. Each implies a very different championship.
- Whether a platform is named before or after a promoter is chosen. If the promoter picks the sim, the balance of power sits with the promoter. If the FIA picks it, the opposite.
- The October European shootout in Frankfurt, which will be the first chance to see the FIA’s live event production alongside the industry’s main trade show, and to ask officials about the circuit-racing plan in person.
- December in Shanghai, where the Grand Final shares a stage with the FIA Awards. Putting sim racers in the same room as the world champions of real motorsport is not an accident of scheduling.
There is no guarantee the FIA gets this right. Governing bodies are not famous for their agility, the commercial problem is real and unsolved, and a code without a compelling competition is just a document.
But this is the first time an established global federation has built the full institutional stack for competitive sim racing: a rulebook, a licence, a stewarding structure, official hardware suppliers and a search for someone to pay for it. Whatever else you think of the FIA, nobody else has done that.
The deadline is Monday. The interesting part starts on Tuesday.
The call for proposals is published by the FIA, which also details the inclusion of esports in the International Sporting Code. Format, regulations and results for the current competition are on the FIA Esports Global Rally Tour pages and its dedicated registration and leaderboard platform.
See you on the track!
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