Yeah going with 4 corners was always my plan - though I have read in more than one spot that 80/20 rigs are so stiff, you lose the ability to tell which corner is buzzing. Regardless of which corner is buzzing, the whole rig just buzzes. Since mine is a beefy SimLab P1 (all 80/20), I've held off on going beyond a single shaker.

 

Our rig is pretty stiff also, so we mounted the four shakers directly under the left and right sides of the front and rear cross members that support the seat . You can definitely differentiate left and right, front versus rear is harder to discern. Buttkickers are pretty tall, so they may not fit under the cross members, but the Auras are only about 2 1/2" tall. We've always been curious whether there would be more differentiation mounted at the corners of the rig versus on the seat supports, but have only tried the seat location.

 

Sim is the largest contributing factor to my in real life driving. Where I live, tracks are closed 6 months of the year due to weather, so my sim was originally intended help keep my skills sharp while I can't be out on track. To give you some background, I started time trials some 20 years ago to now where I instruct for various groups such as the PCA. During this time, I've dabbled in other things like karting, which brought some success at the grassroots level. I got my first sim about 6 years ago, and now I am a sim coach with many of my drivers winging sim leagues and championships, as well as many of them racing in real life (club racing, WRL, etc).

The biggest benefit of the sim is it's availability. Once you have it, you can jump on it anytime. You don't have to wait for a track/race day, you don't have to get your car ready, you don't have spend hours getting to and from. You can literally have dinner, go do a race, then go do the dishes (that's a real thing). I remember in one off-season, I logged something like 10,000 laps. I hear a lot of people can't find benefit out of it, but I can't help but think some part of that is due to how they practice on a sim. Like others have said, going from in real life to sim was a challenge; the senses I relied on were no longer available. The skills needed to drive in a sim were not required in real life, and the techniques most use in real life are not available in the sim. I had to develop new skills to be able to drive proficiently in the sim. None of these skills are meant to replace what we already use in real life, it should be added to them. Many of the techniques I developed in the sim, were not exclusively applicable for sim only, but it's just I spent so much more time on a sim than on a track, that was where I had developed them. And when I took those techniques to the track, it was so crystal clear where and how I could go faster.

I would use the sim as a warm up tool as well. In AC, I modded a car to be an exact replica of my real life car. The telemetry generated from my best lap in AC, compared to the telemetry from my real car, had only a few tenths of a difference and the traces looked near identical, with slight differences due to pedal stiffness etc. For a long time, I would spend an hour on the sim the night before I am going to the track, just to refamiliarize myself, especially the first day after an off-season. Since the sim, every year on the very first day back at the track, after 6 months of winter, I would set a new personal best time. The very first day - with the exception of this year, which was a rain day. That's after 6 months of sim, and a car that sat through winter with nothing done aside from a brake flush. The conditions in spring are not generally any more or less favorable than fall. In fact, I often set new times in the fall as well. Aside from the sim, there's not much I can think of that is contributing to this.

And then there's the racing aspect. The sheer amount of wheel to wheel racing you're exposed to is irreplaceable. You have to race against great drivers to outright dangerous drivers, and the awareness, decision making, and risk/reward assessment you develop by being subjected to that amount of racing (not just being in a race), will take a LOT of real life races to achieve. Granted, some people don't learn, but that's up to the driver. The tools are there, it just needs to be used the right way, imo.

Sim has been an invaluable tool to help me perform better in real life. The one thing that it can't help is self-preservation. Fear is still the biggest performance detractor between real life and sim, for me. The zero-consequence of a sim allows me to find the limits and repeatedly get to them a lot sooner and with no worry or hesitation. That's generally not what I would recommend in real life though.

 

When my son was a senior in high school, he gave an hour-long sim racing presentation to the track guys in our PCA region. His presentation included a "hot lap" video around Mosport. After the presentation, he and a very seasoned track person with years of experience at Mosport were talking about the fast line around the track, turn-by-turn and bump by bump (though I think I recall that iRacing might have an older scan of the track). From the conversation, you could swear they were battling side-by-side on track, but it was a sim guy who had never been on track (save for kart racing), and a track veteran who had never been in a sim. It was a very interesting discussion to watch.

Sim has definitely helped my son be fast in real-world kart racing, even though you'd expect less of a parallel with karts.

 

Love my sim, as someone who went from controller for years, to sim racing, I think sims are most beneficial getting off the ground when it comes to motorsport or competitive driving. Put someone who has never had track time or sim practice in a sim.... it is a disaster, vs put someone who is confident in a sim, in a real environment and the learning curve is a session or two... sure you're not going to set a track record straight out of a sim, but you're talking specifics about braking distances, pressures, slip angles, throttle control rather than the basics like preferred racing line or where to be looking down the road.

Here is a link to my sim build: https://rennlist.com/forums/e-sim-ra...sim-setup.html

 

Squeaky,

Your experience is very interesting, considering it could be more opposite from mine. Like you, the sim was my only option for practicing between races, since I live in Austin, TX, and the race series takes place near Atlanta. I dived into the sim with both feet, setting up a very nice rig (triple monitors, direct drive wheel, high end pedals, etc.), and spent literally hundreds of hours on the sim, turning thousands of laps, both during the off-season, as well as during the season, often doing a session right before catching my flight to Atlanta. But as I said in my first post, all this time on the sim translated to ZERO improvement in the real cars. I think it may have something to do with the types of cars I was racing - Radical SR1's. Very light, crazy fast, very high, neck-straining downforce, etc. If I had to choose one word to describe the Radical, it would be "violent". You mentioned the fear factor - yes I would have to say the fear factor was the main thing holding me back, as I never got enough consistent seat time to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. It always felt like the car was driving me more than I was driving the car; I was just hanging on for dear life. Dramatically different from my track 968, and 100% polar opposite of the sim experience.

What kinds of cars do you and your students primarily drive? Are they mostly production-based, or purpose built race cars? I wonder if driving a more "gentle" production based car would translate better between the sim and the car. As I mentioned earlier, the translation did work in the opposite direction - I could apply tips I got from the instructors in the real car to the sim, and see a measurable improvement in my sim times. It just NEVER worked the other way. Maybe I'm just wired wrong for this stuff. It's been a very frustrating experience, as I had such high hopes for the sim as a training tool, but it's been a huge disappointment. I'm not sure I'm even going to keep it, as it's honestly been utterly worthless to me.

 

In real life, I mostly drive my production based car. My students typically have production based or converted race cars. I've driven a purpose built race car before, not a radical though, and it was a long a long time ago so I don't know how much that applies. It sounds like its very hard for you to take the radical close to the limit, comfortably - aero does really weird things to what people perceive the car can and cannot do. I think that's likely inhibit your progress. I can kinda relate though. Even though I've been setting new PB's on the first day, I remember that often in the mornings, the speed felt a bit overwhelming but I look at the lap times and they're not that fast - and it isn't even race car speeds. There's a huge gap in the sense of speed between sim and irl, which leads to the fear factor. For you, it'll be a much bigger problem for me.

From a practice perspective, stepping down to an easier car may help. Also, what were the tips you got from the instructor like? Brake here, turn-in here, apex here, type of advice? Do you have a process to definitively determine if the car is above or below it's limits, in real-time?

Now, regarding seat time in the sim, what do you do when you're in the sim? how do you practice? Assuming you've not hired a coach before, so how do you self-diagnose your problem areas? How do you set goals?

 

Wow .. every single thing you said rings true. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I've been on the fence about sinking a lot of money into a Sim but everything you said is exactly why I'm going to make the decision to build one. I thank you, my wallet does not.

 

No problem! But before you sink a ton of dough into it, I just want to say that's my personal experience, and there are many, as you've seen, that don't share that no matter how hard they tried. And FWIW my wallet hated me as well, and this winter, it's going to hate me because of my real car... lol.