The safety net for your liveries. It does NOT replace Trading Paints: it works alongside it and covers its back when it fails. 100% local, no account or password, it doesn't touch anybody's servers and sends nothing to the internet. Free.
When you enter a session, iRacing reads the cars' paints in the FIRST SECOND. Trading Paints doesn't deliver them until close to a minute later. By then the simulator has already painted everything white and it does NOT look at the disk again. That's why you have to leave and come back in.
Your paints are NOT failing: they ARRIVE LATE.
Real measurement from one session (24 Jul 2026):
· second 0-59 → iRacing loads the cars: WHITE · second 60 → Trading Paints starts downloading · second 61-77 → installs 52 paints, correctly · paints deleted: 0
So the download works. It's the RACE AGAINST THE CLOCK that is lost.
WHY IT FAILS MORE ON THE BIG DAY It's proportional to the number of cars:
· Practice with 5 rivals → 5 paints → arrives in time
· Race with 40 rivals → 40 paints, nearly all from people you've never
seen, and their servers are loaded because everyone joins at once.
That's why "in normal practice it's fine, but the big race fails". It isn't bad luck: it's arithmetic.
1 · RELOADS BY ITSELF (the main one)
It watches the paint folder. The moment a late one arrives, it asks
iRacing to re-read it. It is EXACTLY the same command you can put on
a wheel button — but fired automatically at the right moment. There
is no stutter, so it can repeat it as often as needed.
If many arrive at once (normal in a race), it waits until they stop
coming and does ONE single reload, not one per paint.
2 · KEEPS A COPY
Every paint that arrives is stored in its own cache. Next time you
come across that driver, their car is painted from second zero,
depending on nobody. Over time your cache covers the regulars and
you'll hardly ever see a white car again.
3 · CLEANS UP THE LEFTOVERS
Trading Paints abandons empty files in its temporary folder (there
were 602 at the first check). PL GUARDIÁN removes them.There is nothing to do. Open it before racing and leave it in the background. When it says "Watching — iRacing connected", it's working.
BUTTONS
· AUTOMATIC Turns the automatic work on and off. Leave it on. · Reload now Forces a manual reload, just in case. · Clean leftovers Removes the abandoned empty files. · ? How it's going These same instructions, inside the app.
LANGUAGES
The house's 6 (ES · EN · DE · FR · IT · ZH), instructions included. Switch with the buttons at the top; your choice is remembered.
THE FOUR NUMBERS
· CACHED Paints stored for next time. · RESTORED Paints we put back from the cache. · RELOADS Times we asked iRacing to re-read. · LEFTOVERS Empty files we cleaned up.
THE LOG ("WHAT'S HAPPENING")
In plain language, with the time. A real example from the first test:
02:10:59 2 paints arrived late
02:11:00 4 paints arrived late
02:11:02 5 paints arrived late
02:11:03 3 paints arrived late
02:11:06 All textures reloaded
14 late paints, in four batches, and ONE single reload three seconds
after the last one. Trading Paints tells you none of this: its own log
records not a single error.· It does NOT replace Trading Paints. Keep using it: they are the
repository, we are the insurance.
· It NEVER deletes or overwrites a paint that isn't theirs. If you
painted a car by hand, it is left untouched.
· It doesn't touch their servers, your account or your password. There
is nothing to configure and nothing to register.
· When cleaning it only removes EMPTY and OLD files (more than an hour),
so it never cuts off a download in progress.
· It does NOT modify or patch the simulator. The reload command is an
official iRacing one, the same you can bind to a key.
Paint cache %APPDATA%\PushLift\paints_cache
Chosen language %APPDATA%\PushLift\paints_config.json
Your paints Documents\iRacing\paint (this one is NOT ours:
it's iRacing's, and we only add what's missing)· It says "Waiting for you to open iRacing" → the simulator isn't
running, or you haven't joined a session yet. Normal before racing.
· No number moves in a small practice session → you may already have had
all those paints. It shows most in races with new people.
· You still see a white car → press "Reload now". If that paints it,
tell us: it means one got past us and we want to know why.
· You forgot to open it before the race → no problem, open it and press
"Reload now". What it can't do is recover the lost time if you already joined the session without it.
Nothing. PL GUARDIÁN is free and needs no account or licence.
It sends nothing to the internet: the cache is yours and lives on your PC. It doesn't touch Trading Paints' servers or your credentials.