Early Days

The Legends League may well be the oldest still active simracing league in the world. Its origins lie in the SPRTSMS forum of Compuserve, when a group of racing enthusiasts founded F1SA (Formula 1 Simulators Association) - to keep their messages apart from the golf simmers!

That was in 1993, when HTML, email and the world wide web were largely unknown. We raced F1GP (known as World Circuit in the USA and Canada) and GP2 by Microprose, and Indycar Racing 2 by Papyrus. Mostly with keyboard or joystick, wheels and pedals being rare in those days. Consequently very few people managed to race without driving aids, those that did were called Water Walkers. And oh yes, the racing was done offline exclusively. Multiplayer didn’t exist. It was basically a hot lapping competition, as well as full length off-line racing against the AI and then comparing authenticated race times to decide the league's human (and alien even then!) winners.

Grand Prix Legends

All that changed on October 9, 1998, when simracing took a giant leap: Papyrus introduced Grand Prix Legends. This sim featured a sophisticated physics model and, even more important, multiplayer racing over the internet.

In 1999, one of its beta-testers and distinguished member of F1SA, Joachim Trensz, ported the whole community to e-Goups (now Yahoo groups) and re-baptized it to Legends League. We no longer use GPL, but the name will remain. It doesn’t reflect the quality of our driving but our origins.
Here's an early website that we used circa 1999. See what we looked like when in our online infancy and before we had quite so many grey hairs (or for some of us - when we had hair!).

rFactor

Grand Prix Legends was succeeded, after a few years of low league activity, by the Trans-Am mod for Papyrus’ Nascar Racing 2003. The physics and the racing were good, but the tin-topped cars didn’t spark much enthusiasm. After a brief spell of frantic racing the league turned dormant once again.

In September 2005 ISI sent a wake-up call: rFactor turned out to be another step up in realism. When the F3 Euroseries mod was added, we were wide awake. These were easily the best simulated open wheelers we had ever driven! The Legends Trans World Formula 3 championship (or TWF3) was organized. When the GP79 mod for rFactor came out, the Trans World Formula 1 championship (or TWF1) was added. Matters concerning both championships are presented under the TWFR banner, Trans World Formula Racing.