You line up for the start, look around the grid, and every car is blank white. No teams, no colours, no personality. That's iRacing without Trading Paints. Turn it on, and the same grid loads a full field of custom liveries — including yours, on every other driver's screen.
This guide gets you from blank white to a fully painted grid, then shows you how to design a livery of your own. You'll learn what Trading Paints is, how to set it up in about ten minutes, how to find and race community paints, and how to create your own from scratch. It works for any skill level, whether you've never touched a paint file or you want a proper team livery on the grid this weekend.
What Trading Paints actually does
Trading Paints is a free companion app for iRacing that syncs custom car liveries between drivers. iRacing doesn't load custom paints on its own, so Trading Paints fills the gap.
When you join a session with the Trading Paints Downloader running, it reads the list of drivers on track, fetches each driver's chosen livery from its servers, and loads those paints into your sim. At the same time, it serves your livery to everyone else who's running Trading Paints. The result is a grid where every car looks different — no manual file swapping, no forum hunting.
Without it, you only see the default iRacing paints plus any TGA files you've manually dropped into your paint folder. With it, the whole process runs in the background.
Free vs Pro
The free version covers what most drivers need: download and display custom liveries, run your own paint, and browse the full community library. You only need Pro for extras like custom-numbered paints — where the number is baked into the design instead of stamped by the sim. Start free. Upgrade only if you hit a wall.
Step 1: Set up Trading Paints
1. Create a free account at tradingpaints.com and link your iRacing Customer ID. You'll find your Customer ID in the iRacing app under your account settings — it's the number that ties your paints to your car in every session.
2. Install the Trading Paints Downloader. Grab it from the profile dropdown on the website. This is the small app that does the actual syncing.
3. Run it in the background. The Downloader sits in your system tray and wakes up automatically when iRacing launches. After the initial setup, there's nothing left to configure.
That's the whole install. Ten minutes, once.
Step 2: Find and race a community paint
The Trading Paints Showroom hosts thousands of liveries for every car in the service. Browse by car, search by team or keyword, or sort by popularity.
When you find one you like, hit Race This Paint (or Use on my car). Trading Paints assigns that design to your account and loads it every time you drive that car. Next session, you're on the grid in a proper livery — and everyone else running Trading Paints sees it too.
Troubleshooting: paints not showing
The most common issue is custom liveries not appearing on cars around you. Usually the fix is simple:
- Open the Downloader and let it refresh. Cars often load blank white for a moment at the start of a session, then pop into their full paint after a few seconds while the app catches up.
- Check the Downloader is actually running before you join the session. If it launched after iRacing, restart it.
- In a crowded field, give it time. A full grid means a lot of paints to fetch. A short delay at the loading screen is normal; later sessions load faster because paints are cached locally.
Step 3: Create your own iRacing livery
Racing someone else's paint is fine to start. Building your own is where it gets personal — a team scheme, your sponsors, your colours. Here's how the paint pipeline works.
Get the template. Download the official PSD template for your car, either from the Trading Paints templates page or inside iRacing under My Content → Car Manager → Download Template. The template maps flat artwork onto the 3D car correctly, so your design lands where you expect it.
Design on the template. Open the PSD in an image editor that handles layers — Photoshop, GIMP, or the free browser-based Photopea all work. Trading Paints Pro members can also use Paint Builder to design directly in the browser.
Export the paint file. Save your finished design as a TGA or PNG at either 1024×1024 or 2048×2048. For TGA, export 24-bit (no alpha, the most common) or 32-bit if you need transparency, with RLE compression enabled for best results.
Name and place it right. Save it as car_yourCustomerID.tga for a sim-stamped number, or car_num_yourCustomerID.tga for a custom number (Pro only). Drop it into Documents/iRacing/paint/[vehicle]/.
Preview it in the sim. Open the iRacing 3D Car Viewer under My Content → Cars to see your work on the actual car. Re-save the file and the viewer updates.
Share it. Upload the finished file to My Paints (your personal cars) or the Showroom (the community showcase). Next time you race, it appears for you and everyone else in the session.
Want more control over how it catches the light? iRacing supports spec maps — a separate greyscale file that controls how metallic, glossy, or flat each part of the car reads. They're optional, but they're what separates a flat sticker from a paint that shines down the main straight.
The hard part isn't the software. It's the design.
Here's the honest bottleneck: the Trading Paints pipeline is easy. Opening a blank 2048×2048 template and turning it into a livery that actually looks fast is not. Most drivers either race someone else's paint forever or spend hours fighting layers in Photoshop.
That's exactly why we built AI Livery. You describe the car you want — team colours, style, sponsors, the mood you're after — and it generates a livery design you can build on. You still bring it into the iRacing template and export your TGA, but you skip the blank-canvas problem entirely and start from a real concept.
See how to design a livery with AI →
Frequently asked questions
Is Trading Paints free?
Yes. The free version handles downloading, displaying, and racing custom liveries. Pro adds features like custom-numbered paints.
Why are cars showing up blank white?
The Downloader is either not running or still fetching paints. Open it, wait a few seconds, and the liveries load in.
What size and format does an iRacing paint file need to be?
A 1024×1024 or 2048×2048 TGA or PNG. For TGA, use 24-bit (or 32-bit with alpha) and enable RLE compression.
Do I need Photoshop to make a livery?
No. GIMP and the free browser tool Photopea both open the PSD templates. Or start from an AI-generated design to skip the blank canvas.
Can everyone see my custom livery?
Yes, as long as they're also running Trading Paints in the same session. Your paint syncs to their sim automatically.
Ready to put your own car on the grid?
Design a custom iRacing livery from a description — no blank canvas, no layer wrangling. Try it free.