Nizer

A shame Aryton left this world before the advent of sim racing. Would've been interesting to see how his skills transferred.

ProCoach

If Senna had been into it, he would have been awesome.

Nizer

Kinda puts the kibosh on those that say sim racing has no value.

Zhao

I think that was proven over a decade ago. When iracing started they often had real life pros on there competing in pro only races. Often a number of the ones in those race were not sim racers and just invited to try it out. They were all instantly competitive and very similar to the other pros with sim experience. Ya, there were ones who clearly had an slight edge, but they were quite good in real life too. I don't remember one pro ever having a problem keeping up in those races.

I remember the first time I tried R factor too. It was at a sim racing business who ran 1 car and one track per week for competition. Some track I never drove before in some car I wasn't familiar with and after an hour of playing I was 2nd on their leaderboard out of hundreds of people. Then I found out that you could change the tires and setup and the owner had it set to hard tires by default and some wonky setup so you'd spend more money to have to figure out setup and waste time swapping tires in the pits every session. He also said the first place guy spent thousands there and was there all the time practicing. Clearly real life experience translated directly to that game and thus sim racing has to translate to real life.

No doubt senna would be top tier at it.

ParadiseGT3

Been a track enthusiast for well over a decade, but just got into sim in the last 1-2 years. I'm on it some (too many) hours most weeks.

Think it's about the equivalent to having your own driving range if you were a pro golfer, except you not only have access to a driving range, but also the pending course in granular detail, if that makes sense.

You'd be as prepped for a car & track combination without sim practice as you would be showing up "cold" for a golf tournament having never played the course or gotten range reps in ahead of time. It's that relatable, I don't see how any competitive racing driver could forego the technology at this point.

I see Max's adaptability and seemingly constant maximum pace throughout stints. When is the last time he appeared slow? Just last weekend, think it was about laps 20-40 on the hards where his pace was off the charts -- as in, wait dude, why are you setting consistent fastest laps right now??

Believe there's a very direct link to his sim practice. Driving a wide variety of cars as covered in the video, to their limit pace, under changing ambient, track, fuel load, tire wear, etc. conditions. He is pre-programmed for so much...

ProCoach

Actually, rFactor had a pretty good pro racer following immediately after it came out almost two decades ago in 2005, something that drove Tim Wheatley and the folks at ISI to develop rFactor Pro. RFP was picked up by teams, custom sim builders like CXC and formed the basis for Multimatic and other sports car and formula car team sims beginning with it's release in 2008.

I tested iRacing when it was in beta in late 2007 through the spring of 2008. Justin Wilson, Dale Earnhardt Jr, Tony Stewart, HCN and a couple guys racing Daytona Prototypes at the time were on the regular Wednesday night races. They didn't always win, mostly it was the original alien, Greg Hutto, but it was very entertaining and they all took it seriously. Felt good to be mid-pack. Great stuff!

LuigiVampa

I have a decent sim rig but I really only find myself using it to learn new tracks. I don't have motion, so with my "butt dyno" engaged, I always find a hard time knowing where the grip limit is.

My thought is that most people who are successful at sim racing are memorizing everything instead of driving by feel. Either that, or that have a really expensive motion control rig that provides feedback.

MSR Racer

This is not true. Motion is not necessary. Vibration is an excellent substitute. On a decent sim, brakes, throttle and steering input can be well replicated. Lot of it is transferable to real life. That’s what F1 drivers like Max are demonstrating. They use their Sims a lot for car set up

winders

Correlation is not causation. The neighborhood kid might be great on a flight simulator but that doesn’t mean he can fly a jet well with no real flight training in a real jet. I am not a Hamilton fan but he finds simulators completely different to real racing.

ProCoach

There have been development and veteran drivers hired by the F1 teams for years to generate sim data used to correlate and validate aero data and setups. While not as valuable for some drivers as for others, nearly all spend regular time in the team simulators.

Agree on the motion not being the be all, end all. I prefer LFA’s and D-Box, but have been using mainly static sims pretty effectively for two decades. The first good sim was the FIA GT sim. It even had a MoTeC Interpreter data export that correlated well to the actual cars.

ParadiseGT3

Proper rig motion & physics work to both accurately communicate feel and limit the vehicle and lap time potential to (right about) real world, i.e., not alien performance, but pro IMSA, WEC. Some rigs are developed and calibrated to train real world drivers, others are developed -- to some extent, manipulated -- to maximize sim outcomes. I have the former.

It's the lack of motion that can facilitate better than real world results. For example, if I venture over some high curbing as a little shortcut attempt, my rig responds as violently as if I was in whichever stiffly sprung racecar. Vision, pedal and wheel inputs are affected accordingly. (Because my visual horizon is fixed/synced with the motion of the rig, the track scenery even appears blurry as my head is bouncing.) The time to recover from that sort of an adventure about matches what I'd have sort out real world. Without motion, you can unrealistically power over that curb without any violent feedback that upsets your full body, vision, pedal & wheel inputs.

Or, recovering after contact with another vehicle during racing -- harder to control and measure inputs when your entire body is jarred vs. exclusively managing wheel feedback.

Properly calibrated motion is a performance advantage because it allows seasoned real world drivers to drive by feel, but then you can't feel your way to much better than pro performance in the rig any more than you'd be able to real world.

ParadiseGT3

Last time I connected with my manufacturer they shared some pics of an IMSA team setup. 3 drivers involved, believe 2 pros and 1 am, might have been a rookie. Alongside the sim they had a full telemetry suite. The am was working to match the telemetry of the pros with real-time feedback. Expectation, of course, was that the sim practicing would translate to immediate real world results for the am, help them substantially close the delta.

LuigiVampa

So you are saying that sitting in a static sim, or even a sim where there is vibration, is the same as driving an actual car where you get feedback from your senses? Are you out of your mind? If drivers aren't memorizing where to brake, turn and accelerate than what other feedback is there in a static sim? Also, I have the rumble thing on my sim setup, and sure it gives some feedback, but I don't feel the G loading of the car through my a$$. That is what helps me drive.

Unlike many, but not all drivers, I don't necessarily have markers for my braking and turn-in points. I don't "brake at the broken tree" and "turn where the armco ends." I take it all in at once, and there are plenty of others, including pro drivers who do the same. There is a reason I can do a 0:54 lap at Lime Rock but can't get anywhere close with the exact same car on iRacing.

You can summon Niki Lauda with a Ouiji board and he will tell you the same thing. Or maybe I need to spend $50k on a sim because I only spent about $10k

ParadiseGT3

I presume that's in a Cup? Drive that by feel more than any other car in iRacing. Almost certainly would not be as quick over one lap without the motion, ability to sense yaw in that car.

Let alone throughout a sim race as the tires are going off. Requires every bit of the rig feedback I have to keep it on the track.

ProCoach

And THAT is the purpose of the team sim training, for me. The telelmetry, real-time output of the information and capable of being overlaid on both sim-generated and real data, shows immediately where and what the driver looking to improve needs to work on. It's SUPERB for that. There's been MoTeC export for most of the good simulator programs (iRacing, rFactor, rFactor2, rFactor Pro, Assetto Corsa) for more than a decade.

With the great modeling of pro cars (GT4, GT3, LMP3, LMP2) and a decent tire model, this saves the teams a ton of time and helps the drivers no end.