I built a one-click switch between my work and sim-racing PC setups

GridSherpa — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:57:05 +0000

If you use the same Windows PC for work and sim racing, getting ready to drive can turn into a checklist: rearrange monitors, change the default speakers and microphone, start companion apps, and then reverse the whole thing when you're done.

I built Sherpa Manager to make that switch a repeatable profile rather than a ritual. It's a standalone, open-source Windows utility linked from the GridSherpa site. GridSherpa helps you explore iRacing schedules; Sherpa Manager solves a different problem: changing the PC setup around a racing session.

What a profile saves

A display layout captured from your current Windows setup.
Playback and recording devices, so a headset/mic can belong to a racing profile and desk speakers to a work profile.
Companion apps to launch, with optional apps to close on a switch.

It starts with Work, iRacing, and ACC profiles, and you can create your own. Profiles can be activated from the app, a keyboard shortcut, or a desktop shortcut. The app also supports tray controls and a Restore Last action.

Why the display test matters

Monitor configuration is the risky part of a one-click switch: a wrong layout can leave you looking at the wrong screen. Sherpa Manager asks you to arrange your displays first and capture that known-good state. When you test a layout, you have 10 seconds to keep it; otherwise the display change reverts. If a monitor, cable, or driver changes later, recapture the layout on that PC.

The NVIDIA Surround option needs a compatible NVIDIA GPU and driver; it isn't a promise that every display configuration will work on every rig.

A sensible first run

Arrange your displays in Windows or NVIDIA settings, then capture a Work layout.
Set the playback and microphone devices, and add the apps you want for that profile.
Repeat for Racing, test the display change, and only keep it if it looks right.
Save anything open before activating a profile if you enable Close on switch; apps in that list may be force-closed.

Sherpa Manager runs on 64-bit Windows 10/11. The release has an installer and a portable build that share profiles. It is MIT-licensed, requires no account, and has no telemetry. The downloads are currently unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen may warn; inspect the source and release details before deciding whether to install. It is not affiliated with iRacing or ACC.

You can find Download Sherpa Manager for Windows in the GridSherpa header or go directly to the source and README and releases. If you run a mixed work/racing PC, I'd be interested in what part of the switch still takes manual effort for you.

How I Turned iRacing’s Season PDF Into a Local-Time Schedule Explorer

GridSherpa — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:59:00 +0000

When iRacing publishes a new season, the source is comprehensive—but it is still a PDF designed for reading, not querying.

I built GridSherpa to turn that document into answers such as:

What can I race today?
Which sessions start at a sensible time in my timezone?
Which purchase unlocks the most weeks for the series I actually run?
Which team events need another driver?

The 2026 Season 4 import currently contains 155 official series and 2,002 scheduled series-weeks. Getting there required more than extracting a table.

The PDF is a document, not an API

GridSherpa’s backend is TypeScript and Express. The import pipeline uses pdf-parse, then normalizes the extracted text into series and week records.

The first pass reads the table of contents to recover category, license group, and series order. A second pass locates each series body and parses its preamble and week blocks.

That sounds straightforward until layout becomes data.

Track names can wrap across physical lines. A hyphenated car name can be split in the middle of a word. Weather and rule text wrap differently depending on length. Some series change cars by week. Offseason documents label consecutive calendar days as “Week 1” through “Week 7.”

Each of those cases needs a narrow rule. A broad cleanup regex may make one row look better while silently corrupting another.

The most important distinction: simulation time is not start time

The schedule can contain an in-session simulated date and clock. That value must not be treated as UTC and converted into the driver’s timezone.

The published race cadence—such as “every two hours at :45”—is a separate concept.

GridSherpa stores the simulated clock without a timezone and derives actual event occurrences from the cadence. Keeping those concepts separate prevents a plausible-looking but incorrect local schedule.

Normalize first, trust later

The importer produces normalized JSON, but the runtime does not trust it simply because TypeScript generated it.

The loader validates:

real ISO dates
positive week numbers
non-empty series and track names
safe artwork filenames
valid optional time multipliers
duplicate series and week numbers
bounded day spans for daily offseason rows

This matters because generated data can still be truncated, hand-edited, or copied from an incompatible release.

Make season changes transactional

A new schedule affects more than one file. The normalized schedule, artwork, and generated SEO pages need to describe the same release.

The import command supports a dry run. The production workflow stages and validates generated outputs before promotion, and one exclusive lock covers the full process so concurrent imports cannot interleave releases.

Schedule data changes only after a reviewed PDF import is promoted. GridSherpa deliberately does not pretend to be a live iRacing API.

Turn the normalized data into decisions

Once the schedule is structured, the useful product work begins:

local-time Today and This Week views
filters for category, license, car, track, weekday, and time
season-over-season diffs
track-use and buying analysis
calendar subscriptions and reminders
team-race share cards

For Season 4, the report shows 141 cars, 251 track configurations, and 17 rookie series. The global venue ranking is interesting, but it is not a buying recommendation: disciplines reuse tracks differently, so the useful answer appears only after filtering.

Explore the current Season 4 report.

View the GridSherpa source on GitHub.

If you have built an importer for a document that was never intended to be a database, I would be interested in the edge case that caused you the most trouble.

GridSherpa is an independent fan-built tool and is not affiliated with iRacing. The Season 4 figures measure scheduled use, not participation.

DEV Community: GridSherpa