Frequently asked questions

Race Stencil distributes the mandatory livery designs a racing organization requires, and applies them to each driver's own paint automatically. An organization uploads its sponsor overlay once per car. Every driver in the championship then gets a link, uploads their own livery, and receives it back with the official overlay already applied - correctly placed, every time.

Without it, an organizer sends a template file to every driver and hopes for the best. Some drivers place it a few pixels off, some scale it, some skip it, and the organizer ends up checking every car by hand and chasing people the week of the race. Race Stencil removes that entirely. The overlay is applied by the platform at the exact position the organization set, so every car on the grid is correct by construction - and nobody needs image-editing skills to take part.

No, and deliberately so. Race Stencil does not design liveries and does not replace Photoshop or any painting tool. It does exactly one job: take the livery you already made and combine it with the overlay your championship requires. You keep making your own designs however you like.

iRacing today, with the full car list available. The platform is built to take more simulators, and support for others will be added as demand appears.

No. As a driver you never register. Open the link your organization sent you, pick your car, upload your livery, download the result. Accounts exist only for the organizations that create and manage the catalogs.

Your own paint file and the link to your championship's catalog. Nothing else - no software to install and no account. Your file must be square and a power-of-two size between 256 and 2048 px, which is what the simulator expects anyway. TGA and PNG are both accepted, up to 20 MB.

An uncompressed 32-bit TGA - the format iRacing expects - with the official overlay applied over your paint. It downloads straight away, ready to use as it is.

Usually under a second. A 2048 px livery is processed in roughly half a second on a normal server, so the download starts almost immediately after you upload.

That is exactly why every design also offers a Download template button. It hands you the raw overlay file, so you can open it in your own editor, move your artwork out from under the sponsors, and combine the two yourself. The sponsor placement itself is set by your organization and cannot be moved - but where you put your own design around it is up to you.

Championships often run several classes, and each class usually has its own sponsor layout - Pro and Am, for example. Pick the one matching the class you are entered in. If you are unsure, ask your organization; they named them.

For iRacing, install the downloaded file through Trading Paints as you would any other custom livery, and you are ready to drive. There is a direct link on the download page.

No. Drivers never pay and never register. Race Stencil is paid for by the organizations that run the championships.

A catalog is one championship, season or event. It holds the cars you run and the mandatory designs for each of them, and it is what you share with your drivers as a single link.

A variant is one sponsor layout within a catalog - typically one per class. If your championship runs Pro and Am with different sponsors, that is two variants, each with its own overlay file for each car. You name your variants once, on the first car. Every car after that is offered the same list, so you define your classes a single time.

A transparent PNG or TGA at the same square, power-of-two size as the paint files your drivers use - between 256 and 2048 px. It must have a real alpha channel. Everywhere you leave transparent, the driver's own paint shows through untouched; everywhere you paint, your sponsors go on top. A fully opaque file is refused, because it would hide the driver's livery completely.

Yes. Every car has its own UV layout, so a sponsor placed correctly on one car would land in the wrong place on another. You upload one overlay per car, per variant - the wizard walks you through it car by car and remembers where you stopped.

Yes. The setup wizard saves as you go and can be left at any point. When you come back it picks up at the first car you have not finished, so a long grid does not have to be done in one go.

You get three levels of link, and you send whichever suits the situation: Your organization page, listing every published catalog you run. A single catalog, where the driver picks their car. A single car, for a one-make series where there is nothing to choose. Every one of them has a copy button in your dashboard.

Yes. You can add cars, replace an overlay file, rename or deactivate a design at any time. Drivers always get whatever is current when they generate, so a corrected file takes effect immediately without resending any links.

Yes. You can invite as many people as you need and give them owner, admin or member roles. An organization always keeps at least one active owner, so it can never be left without someone in charge.

Its designs and overlay files are deleted with it, and the public link stops working immediately - so any driver still using it will get a page that no longer exists. You are warned before it happens if the catalog is live.

No. Your upload is deleted as soon as the finished file has been produced, and the result itself is temporary too - generated files are cleaned up automatically after about 60 minutes. Download it and keep your own copy. Nothing about your paint is kept beyond the moment you need it.

No. The result is written as an uncompressed 32-bit TGA, so there is no lossy re-encoding at any point. Outside the areas your organization actually painted, your pixels come back exactly as you sent them.

It still works. The overlay is scaled to your canvas, so an organization that prepared its files at 2048 px still covers a driver painting at 4096 px correctly.

No. In iRacing those live in a separate file, which Race Stencil never receives and never modifies. Only the paint file passes through the platform.