How SimStew works
SimStew is a tool for reviewing on-track incidents in sim racing leagues. A driver submits a clip of an incident — a collision, a track-limits call, contact under braking — from YouTube, Instagram, or a short native upload. Other drivers, or the stewards a league appoints, watch the clip and vote on what happened: which driver was at fault, whether it was a race incident, or inconclusive. Votes are anonymous and count once per person. When enough votes land on one outcome, the verdict locks and publishes with the reasoning attached — instead of one admin's private call.
The four-step loop
Submit
A driver pastes a YouTube or Instagram link, or uploads a short clip directly (up to 45 seconds, 200MB), and tags the drivers and cars involved. That's the whole form — no mandatory fields beyond the clip and who was in it.
Review & vote
For a league incident, it routes to the stewards the Race Director has appointed. A clip outside a league opens to the public feed instead, where anyone can watch and vote. Either way, voting is anonymous and one vote per person per incident — nobody sees who voted for what.
Verdict
Once enough votes land on one outcome to clear the required threshold (a league’s Race Director sets this — 25/50/75/100%, 75% by default), the verdict locks and the vote breakdown publishes alongside it. A league running its own stewards gets a second, steward-only verdict shown next to the general community one. The clip’s submitter can appeal a locked verdict to reopen voting.
Communicate
The incident becomes a shareable Debate Card: an editable headline framing what’s being judged, the clip, and the live verdict. Leagues running the Discord bot get incidents and verdicts posted straight to their channel, and stewards can vote from inside Discord too.
Why a vote, not a ruling
Most leagues handle protests with whatever's on hand — Discord threads, DMs, a spreadsheet someone forgot to update. The decision gets posted; the reasoning usually doesn't, and drivers assume bias. Or a league leans on a sim's own protest system, which tends to work as a black box: a ruling appears with no visible process behind it.
SimStew's mechanism is built to be hard to fake: anonymous one-vote-per-user voting that aggregates into a locked, threshold-based verdict, purpose-built around incident clips rather than general discussion. The verdict belongs to the crowd — or the stewards you appoint — not to one admin's private call.
Who does what
Driver
Submits a clip they were involved in, can edit the driver tags and the debate question, and can appeal a locked verdict.
Steward
A league member appointed to vote and comment on incidents. A steward's vote also feeds a separate, steward-only league verdict shown alongside the general community one.
Race Director
Owns and manages the league: appoints stewards, sets which incident types and penalties apply, configures the voting threshold, and runs seasons and rounds.
Casual fan
Doesn't need an account or a league membership to browse the public feed and vote on fault as a spectator. Logged out, a pick just reveals the live breakdown instead of counting toward it.
What SimStew doesn't do
SimStew doesn't auto-score incidents or use AI to decide fault. Every verdict is a vote, cast by people, every time — that's not going to change. SimStew is also still in beta: the stewarding flow works, but it hasn't yet survived a full championship, and the polish is still catching up.