Interesting read this thread, managed to miss it being in the woods playing war games.
Anyways, I can't help thinking if the iRacing team is trying to ride with their name and résumé a bit. No trial version smells like over confidence, they have trust to their fans and fanboys, a lot of trust if they are selling trial versions for 20 bucks a piece, that's hardly anything in real money but still.
It really has to be the holy grail of sims if I'm going to pay monthly fees. Because for something like WoW, the payments go (at least partially) support the massive server farms they need to maintain, so it's understandable you have to pay to play. It's unlikely iRacing needs money for servers. It also will feel more expensive than WoW because at least personally, I can't play racing games 8 hours a day, anything else yes, but racing is much more intense and you get tired faster so you can't have all the time for you money you liked.
A bit different business plan, don't actually understand why they had to spend that much money (which is obvious they did because they are asking a lot). Why ordinary track modeling and a group of race car drivers to tell where the bumps are couldn't cut it? It's not cool enough I guess.