iRacing Helmet Design: How Custom Paints Work

In iRacing your helmet is visible in onboard replays, broadcasts and to anyone watching your stream, so plenty of drivers want a custom one. There are two routes: iRacing's built-in paint shop, and a fully custom helmet painted as an image file and shared through Trading Paints. This guide explains how each works and how to plan the design before you start painting pixels.

Things change. iRacing and Trading Paints update their software regularly. The details below were checked in October 2026; if a menu or file rule doesn't match what you see, iRacing's support site and the Trading Paints help centre have the current versions.

Option 1: the built-in paint shop

The quickest route is inside the iRacing UI. Open My Content from the left-hand menu, where you can customise your car, helmet and firesuit, and choose your driver model. You pick from iRacing's preset patterns and set the colours, using hex codes or sliders. iRacing also lets you save colour swatch sets so you can apply the same colours to your car, number, helmet and suit quickly.

The advantage of the built-in system is that every other driver sees your helmet without installing anything, because iRacing draws it from your saved settings. The limitation is that you're choosing from preset patterns, so you can't place your own shapes, text or logos.

Even if you plan to run a custom helmet, it's worth setting up a built-in one in matching colours. Anyone who doesn't have your custom file will see the built-in version instead of a plain default helmet.

Option 2: a custom helmet file

A fully custom helmet is an image file that wraps around iRacing's helmet model. iRacing's support article on custom paints sets out the rules:

• The file is a TGA image named helmet_<id>.tga, where <id> is your iRacing customer ID. Suits follow the same pattern as suit_<id>.tga.
• Your customer ID is shown on your profile (click the helmet icon at the top right of the iRacing UI, then Profile).
• Placed in the root paint folder, Documents\iRacing\paint\, the helmet becomes your default for every car. Placed in a specific car's folder, it's used only with that car.
• Files at the wrong size are ignored, so check iRacing's current size and format requirements before you export.

The catch is that a custom file only appears for people who have it in their own paint folder. Custom paints aren't saved into replays either. That's the problem Trading Paints solves.

Sharing it with Trading Paints

Trading Paints is a third-party service that distributes custom iRacing paints. You upload your car, helmet and suit files to your account, and the Trading Paints downloader app on each driver's PC fetches the paints for the people they're racing with. If both you and the other drivers in a session run it, everyone sees each other's custom helmets.

A few points worth knowing:

• You need an iRacing account and your customer ID to sign up.
• Paints in My Paints are private to you. Uploading to the public Showroom lets others browse and, by default, race with your design.
• Using a different helmet or suit for each car is a Trading Paints Pro feature. On a free account you run one personal helmet across all cars.
• Teams can set a team helmet and suit. If a team has no helmet assigned, your personal helmet shows instead.

Some older cars in iRacing use only a small portion of the helmet texture, so very detailed designs can lose detail on those cars.

Plan the design in 3D first

Painting a helmet texture is fiddly. The template is a flat, distorted layout of the helmet surface, so it's hard to tell how a stripe will cross the crown or whether your name sits straight on the side until you load it in the sim. Every check means exporting, copying the file and reloading.

A faster way is to settle the design first on a 3D helmet, then recreate it on the template knowing exactly what you want. In Helmet Designer you paint on flat side, top, front and back views and see the result on a live 3D shell immediately. You can try colour schemes, move a number, swap a font or change a stripe width in seconds, then share the link with your team or league for feedback.

Then, with the design agreed:

1. Export a PNG render from the editor, or use the shared 3D link, as your reference while you paint.
2. Open the helmet template in your image editor (Photoshop, GIMP, Photopea and so on).
3. Block in the base colour and the large shapes first, matching proportions by eye against the reference, and check in the sim early.
4. Add the detail last: pinstripes, numbers, names and logos. Thin lines and small text that look fine in the editor may need to be bolder at helmet texture resolution.
5. Export as a TGA named with your customer ID and upload it to Trading Paints.

Helmet Designer doesn't export iRacing TGA files directly. It's a design tool for working out what your helmet should look like; the template work still happens in your image editor.

Design tips for sim helmets

• Design for the onboard camera. Chase, cockpit and TV cameras tend to show the top and back of the helmet more than the sides. Put your strongest graphic on the crown.
• Go bold. Broadcasts and streams compress the image, and the helmet is small in frame. Big shapes and high contrast survive; hairline pinstripes don't.
• Match the car, or don't. Many drivers run one helmet across every car, so a helmet that works with any livery, such as white with a strong accent, is often more practical than one matched to a single car.
• Use the visor strip. A name or league logo across the visor strip is visible in almost every front-facing shot.
• Avoid real drivers' designs and real brands you don't have permission to use. iRacing's paint policy and Trading Paints' rules both apply to what you upload.

For layout, colour and font choices in more depth, read how to design a racing helmet. If you race in other sims too, see which sim racing games support custom helmets.

Common questions