IZOD IndyCar Series competitors are currently poised to begin testing brand new cars for the 2012 season. It goes without saying it will be a painful process for team owners, who have to purchase new equipment after running essentially the same cars for the best part of a decade. But it will also be painful for drivers, engineers and mechanics, at least in the sense they will be operating outside the comfort zone they developed working with the old Dallara.

It’s a process with which the Formula One teams are quite familiar, not just because they design and develop new cars every season, but they had to adjust to Pirelli tires in 2011 after three seasons with Bridgestone as F1’s sole tire supplier.

Initial reaction to NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow was mixed -- at best.

NASCAR? Just this season the Nationwide Series switched over to its version of the Car of Tomorrow. And speaking of the COT, who can forget the COT’s – at times – rocky introduction in the 2007? Or Kyle Busch’s immortal words after winning the COT’s debut race at Bristol: “I can’t stand to drive them. They suck.”

Others were a lot more measured in their comments.

“The cars still drive the same,” said Tony Stewart at the time. “They’re either tight or they’re loose or you’re working with grip. It’s those three things all the time. It’s just a matter of the crews figuring out what the cars like and what they don’t like. After that, it’s back to those three basics.”

iRacing is currently experiencing its own version of No Pain, No Gain with the release of the New Tire Model to seven additional cars in the Season 4 build. Not surprisingly, more than a few iRacers are focusing on the “pain” element of the equation . . . and are not shy about expressing their opinions in the iRacing forums.

“iRacing should be ashamed about this new tire model adjustment. It is bad. It takes all the fun out of it!!!!!”

“I drove the street stock and the Late Model and also the trucks. They have missed it bad on the LM.”

“The new tire model is consistently inconsistent . . . I can’t get a 10 lap run in without spinning-out no matter what I do to my setup; car is very wishy-washy and not stable. At least before if you were sideways you could recover the car and now if you are sideways it’s around you go!”

Or to be concise:

“Garbage, plain and simple.”

In the interest of equal time (or, if you prefer, fair and balanced news), it should be noted there are plenty of members posting positive comments on the iRacing forums, opining that, after some adjustments in chassis set-ups and driving style, the new virtual new rubber is a step forward.

“It’s just a matter of the crews figuring out what the cars like and what they don’t like.” — Tony Stewart

“I just have a feeling the driving styles haven’t adapted. Good to hear that you have to be on top of the wheel and really drive the car rather than fling it in and mash it out.”

“The real problem is that people don’t realize that they have to completely relearn the car. Everything changes — your steering inputs may need to slow down (or speed up), your braking points will change, you may have to be smoother getting on the gas, etc, etc.

“The people that are having problems are those that haven’t taken time to reset their driving style and learn the car as it is now. And it’s especially hard for the MX5 people since the OTM MX5 would let you get away with murder.”

It’s also worth noting that iRacing has been very “up-front” in conceding the NTM is a work in progress. The build notes for Season 4 specifically note that fact, along with ongoing issues related to lack of lateral stiffness, tire behavior at slow speed and the fact that some car values “may fluctuate in the garage.”

“The Season 4 New Tire Model is an ‘in progress’ update, so there are ‘issues,’” explains iRacing software engineer Grant Reeve. “Some people are fixating on what is not yet working as they expect (tire pressures, camber, etc) or is simply buggy (unpredictable behavior of tires in garage). We shouldn’t – and we don’t — pretend these things don’t exist. But members need to know that if they can look past these work in progress issues they can have a fantastic driving experience, and that is what we’re trying to share with them, and that the other issues will keep getting better as the tire model improves over time.”

“. . . the other issues will keep getting better as the tire model improves over time.” — Grant Reeve

The key phrase there is “as the tire model improves over time.” Just as the IndyCar chassis that Dallara ultimately delivers to its customers in 2012 will differ in a hundred different ways from the original prototype, just as Pirelli’s Formula One R&D program is ongoing and just as today’s Sprint Cup car is very different from the COT of 2007, so the NTM will continue to evolve. It’s not as if iRacing released the Season 4 build and simply cast the NTM and baseline chassis setups in concrete. Working in collaboration with their real world racing counterparts, iRacing engineers are continuing development on the NTM, chassis setups and a host of other issues – including, most assuredly, the superspeedway drafting model. Indeed, updates of the Late Model and the Mazda MX-5 are on the fast-track (most likely they’ll be released within the next couple of weeks), with the speedway drafting model updated well in advance of the 2012 Season 1 build.

On the other hand, just as competitors in IndyCar, F1 and NASCAR Sprint Cup have upped their games to meet the challenges posed by new cars and tires, so iRacers need to adapt to the challenges posed by the NTM . . . challenges that, in the end, are little different from those posed by the old tire model.

So while development continues apace on the NTM at iRacing.com, iRacers would do well to remember that, old school Sprint Cup car or COT, Dallara IR05 or Dallara DW001, Bridgestones or Pirellis, OTM or NTM, it all still comes down to who best figures out “what the cars like and what they don’t like.” After all, it’s an approach that seems to be working well for Tony Stewart these days.

iRacing.com is the world’s leading online racing service, with digital versions of more than two dozen types of cars (including the Ford Falcon FG) and nearly fifty of the world’s great race tracks – from Indianapolis and Daytona to Spa, Silverstone and Phillip Island.   All you need is a computer, gaming steering wheel and pedals and high speed Internet and you can be racing against top sim racers from all over the world, not to mention guys like Dale Earnhardt Jr, Will Power and Simon Pagenaud who use the service.

For those of you in Australia and New Zealand, checking out www.hyperstimulator.co.nz is a great place to start. These guys will hook you up with some awesome sim parts to get you started.

When my “day job” permits, I compete in iRacing’s version of the V8 Supercar championship.  Although I’ve enjoyed some success, believe me, racing against the top sim racers in Australia and New Zealand – there’s a few of them who can pretty consistently dust me! And I take it pretty seriously.

When my “day job” permits, I compete in iRacing’s version of the V8 Supercar championship.

Most of the front runners in the iRacing V8 series are young guys and any of them could have a shot at a professional career if they got that opportunity I reckon. There’s some great potential there and you can see guys like Madison Down and Mitch McLeod already have great race-craft and great car skills.  That’s all thanks to the sim racing they’ve done and how accurate the simulation is. I’ve seen where another iRacing champion named Greger Huttu got the chance to drive a real race car and he did pretty well, so maybe one day for these guys . . .

Speaking of accuracy, one of the features iRacing recently added is McLaren Electronics’ ATLAS Express data acquisition system.  You read that right: Sim racers now have access to the same telemetry data as F1 drivers.  I’ve been using ATLAS Express quite a bit in my efforts to improve car setup and driving style in the iRacing V8s. As with the MoTeC system we use in the V8 Supercar Series, you try different things and overlay the traces versus your previous laps and see was it good or not. You can teach yourself with the system and it certainly makes you a better driver.

In any form of racing, your most direct competition is your teammate.  And just as I do in the V8 Supercar Championship Series with my SBR teammates Tim Slade and Alex Davison, on iRacing I compare my data with Scotty McLaughlin and a couple of others for a look-see at how our different driving styles work, where what you’re doing is a little quicker than your teammates and vice versa, then make some changes where it’s necessary and – ideally – blend the best of both.  
From an engineering point of view, if you have access to all your teammates’ setups and driving styles, you can learn what people are doing to help their car – or maybe you’re doing something better that they can learn from.

Atlas Express is a feature of the second generation of the iRacing system – iRacing 2.0 – which is being introduced in its entirety in August. Along with Atlas Express, iRacing 2.0 includes a whole range of major improvements including new cars, new tracks and enhancements to the system.

I’ve been pretty heavily involved in the development of one of those enhancements – iRacing’s revolutionary new tire model — as it applies to the Ford Falcon FG.  Up until now, race simulations have based their tires on a sort of “reverse engineering” process, where they take the performance numbers of real tires and try to mimic them as closely as possible.  Instead, the iRacing people have made a massive effort to understand the fundamental physics of tire performance in order to create virtual tires that inherently behave like “real” tires rather than as the result of “artificially” tinkering with their performance to make them match-up with a set of arbitrary numbers.

As you can imagine, the ATLAS Express data acquisition system is a critical part of the testing process, as I can actually overlay the data from the iRacing V8 compared to my real V8 at Phillip Island.  Unbelievable! The effects of changes in tire pressures and temperatures, camber, toe, ride height, dampers and springs; aerodynamics; different driving styles . . . it’s all there.  The notes I’ve made comparing the sim car vs the real car are all backed-up by the data, which really helps develop the accuracy of the new tires.

The new tire model has such huge potential and is already a massive step forward.  There’s a bit of work to do yet, but it’s definitely more realistic already.  You can feel the tire and the road, the gripping and when it slips away . . . the feeling is definitely more positive.  We need to make it better and make the car a little better as well, but it’s definitely going to be awesome when it’s finished. I can’t wait!

The new tire model is currently only available on iRacing’s equivalent of the NASCAR Nationwide Series car.   Myself and a few development drivers are working with the Ford Falcon FG.  A few of the guys from the iRacing V8 Supercar series are in the process of getting into it and all the iRacing cars will be equipped with the new tires in August. Also, a few of the other Championship Series drivers are in the process of signing up — so come on, join in the fun and take us on!

Note: After several seasons as an emerging star of Australia’s V8 Supercar Series, Shane van Gisbergen is enjoying a breakout season in 2011. Driving the Stone Brothers Racing SP Tools Ford Falcon FG, the 22 year old New Zealander scored his first V8 Supercar Series win at the Hamilton street race in April and backed that up with another win at Darwin’s Hidden Valley Raceway in June. “The Giz” currently occupies third place in the overall series standings.

My first time out on the new tire model was in the Sprint Cup COT; at that point the Nationwide car had not been released for testing yet. The most obvious difference was how much more solid the force feedback (FFB) effects were. It was a much deeper feeling compared to simply increasing the force of the effects. I could tell from the FFB feel how loaded the front tires were in the corner compared to the straight. It was really noticeable at highly-banked super speedways. The very next thing I tried was tossing the car down onto the apron, as many of us know “dewedging” many of the iRacing cars on an apron, curb or otherwise sharply angled surface is viciously unsettling. A large smile crossed my face when I took the Sprint cup COT down onto the apron in the middle of turns 1 and 2 at Charlotte and didn’t immediately spinout.

As concepts were added into the tires (eg how wear affects heating) I got to feel how the cars performance changes over a run. Overdriving the tires in the Nationwide COT now has a subtle but compounding effect on handling. Pushing the car deep into the corners at a short track such as Richmond begins to build heat and pressure into the RF in addition to increasing wear .Those changes pile-up and make a much bigger impact on handling relative to the old tire model. Put yourself into a comfortable rhythm at a short track and you’ll be able to run 10 lap segments with consistent times within a tenth where falloff is manageable. Constantly overdrive the car into the turns and you’ll quickly see how that abuse tightens the car as the RF loses significant amounts of grip and lap times increase several tenths of a second. But backoff and run conservatively for a short stint and the heat and pressures will bleed off. While the handling won’t be as good as on fresh tires, you can recover from overdriving.

Whether you’re coming from the oval or road course world of sim racing, the new tire model (NTM) –even in its early state — is going to be a game-changer.

The DWC drivers have all been wondering if they’ll still be running as slipped-out and sideways as they currently do. Thus far the answer to that is “no”. It’s a concern on several testers minds and something we’ve been paying attention to, hoping that we don’t suddenly find ourselves running on as sharp an edge as possible turning right constantly. The amount of yaw the Nationwide COT currently tolerates is significantly lower than everyone is used to running, so much so that many testers are having trouble visually recognizing when the car is getting out from under them. It’s taken some tweaking but also some relearning as a driver how to deal with a loose car. The first problem with a loose car is how early you need to recognize that the rear end is getting away from you. As you increase your slip angle, heat builds faster in the rears in addition to aerodynamic side-force. These all act together to compound the situation much faster than we see in the old tire. An early reaction usually takes the form of reducing the amount of steering input, along with a slight lift as one would expect. Too late a reaction (when the car begins to exceed as little as 8-10 degrees of slip) will see you full-on countersteer combined with throttle modulation. Once you’ve made a successful save, you still have to deal with the built up heat in the rear tires. On a speedway like Charlotte you’ll definitely notice the car will be looser in the following corner after heating-up the rears. The quicker onset of a slide and effects of heat buildup have made having a comfortable setup much more important.

The group races we’ve done testing the Nationwide COT are some of the most true to reality replays I’ve seen. We recently ran at Michigan and, looking back, all the cars appear to be running with the appropriate amount of crab angle through the corners. The cars ride over bumps and slip and slide in the corners when overdriven at one end or the other much the way I see on TV every weekend. It’s a subtle but impressive difference when you have the chance to compare testing replays on the NTM with actual iRacing replays on the old tires. But more than that is the feeling you get driving the car in traffic at a place where you can take advantage of multiple lines. I’ve always been more of a tactician style driver.I’m really enjoying trying to push people into overdriving their cars and then taking advantage as they go into a corner too hot and push into the grey or have to chase the rear end up the hill. The effect of trying to run a race purely as a series of hotlaps is so detrimental that I’ve seen cases where you can kill your times by over a half second at both large and small tracks inside of 5 laps of overdriving. The way your particular setup is built will also have a big impact on how it handles over a run; in many cases the fastest setup I’ve found does not do nearly so well over a long run due to uneven tire wear.

For the road course cars many of the same improvements apply. Driving over curbs is a different experience in the new tire model — which for me is huge. I’ve always hated having to avoid what appear to be relatively benign curbs at the edge of the road because of how quickly it upsets the car. Overdriving the new tires builds heat and increases wear in much the same way it does for the oval cars. A loose setup is also slower at this point as the cars don’t tolerate abusing the rear tires for long: Slide a few corners heavily in a row and you’ll be babying it through the remainder of the lap in order to keep it under control.

Most of my testing has been done in the Spec Racer Ford. My opinion of the road cars on the old tire model isn’t nearly as critical as it was of the oval cars. The old tire model handles light cars much better than heavy ones, especially the lower powered cars that don’t see as wide a variety of speeds and loads. But the differences are clearly noticeable, particularly more stability over curbing. The new tire model is more sensitive to loading, so a car with a very rearward weight distribution like the Spec Racer Ford has a much higher intolerance now towards abusive trail-braking. Since we don’t feel the effects of g-forces in the sim it was very hard for me to get used to that at first. But going back and looking over my replays, many of my initial spins in the car were due to driving it hard into the corner and putting a ton of weight on the front tires and then proceeding to turn-in. With that much momentum in the rear of the car and no loading on the rear tires, it comes around quite quickly. On exit sliding the rear out under power doesn’t translate to forward acceleration the way it currently does on the old tire model. You really feel the diff working differently with these tires particularly through a cambered corner such as the keyhole at Mid-Ohio. You can quickly spin-up the inside wheel, get loose and correct the wheelspin but still be sliding too much to get proper forward traction. That, combined with the fact that you build up so much heat in the rears that by the time you get to the esses you have to brake much earlier to deal with cornering the car, really reflects on how much differently you need to approach driving it fast..

I hope this will give everyone a taste of some of the differences we’re experiencing in the new tire model from a drivers perspective. I’m sure there are a ton of questions left unanswered. But they will have to wait until the release. For certain many of us who are testing are hugely excited to see this released into the wild: It’s really going to make a big splash when that first practice session gets joined!

I recall seeing Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines in a jam-packed cinema as a youth and, along with the rest of the audience, laughing myself silly. Curiously, whenever I’ve seen the movie again on television it’s not the same. Amusing? Sure. Funny? Occasionally. Side-splittingly hilarious? Not so much.

One of my most memorable concert experiences occurred while I was living in Toronto and attended a double bill featuring Ry Cooder and Randy Newman at Massey Hall. Believe me, being an American surrounded by Canadians certainly colored my appreciation of Cooder’s American “roots” music to say nothing of Newman’s multi-faceted lyrical ironies, particularly Political Science.

Last week I had a rare opportunity to attend a preview (in the USA at least) of Senna, a documentary on three time World Champion Ayrton Senna. It was rare enough to see the film before it is released in the USA. But what made the experience utterly unique was viewing the film at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the hospitality unit of APEX Brazil, surrounded by an audience whose livelihood is racing, including IndyCar champions Tony Kanaan and Jimmy Vasser.

The event kicked-off with a brief cocktail party but quickly moved into the film portion of the evening, introduced first by Senna director Asif Kapadia and then Kanaan. My colleague Gordon Kirby and I happened to be sitting at a table with Vasser who quietly told us to be prepared for something special, having seen the movie himself a few nights earlier.

Senna began with the audience in, if not exactly a festive mood, a chatty, talkative spirit, decompressing from the events of Carburetion Day and anticipating all the hoopla attendant with the first and only Centennial Edition of the Indianapolis 500. That mood continued throughout much of the movie which, without giving too much away, focuses almost exclusively on Senna’s Formula One career with a particular emphasis on what developed into a bitter rivalry with Alain Prost. Senna is also noteworthy in that there is no narrator per sae moving the story line forward; instead the movie progresses in chronological fashion based on archival footage of racing action and interviews with Senna, his parents, Prost, Ron Dennis, Frank Williams and various journalists.

It’s all there – or at least most of it — from the moment Senna announced he was a future world champion with his sensational performance in the 1984 Monaco GP in the Toleman to his equally brilliant first win the following season with Lotus in the Grand Prix of Portugal and on into the victorious McLaren years, his battles with Prost and, finally, his move to Williams.

Given that the audience was largely comprised of motorsports insiders – many of of whom hailed from Brazil – there couldn’t have been anyone who wasn’t keenly aware of the film’s ultimate conclusion. In those circumstances, watching Senna was akin to attending a performance of Antigone or King Lear and, in the final ten or fifteen minutes, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Vasser, for one, left the hospitality tent before the events of that terrible weekend in 1994 began to unfold on film and, when the movie concluded, it was a somber crowd indeed exiting the APEX Brazil tent.

“Watching ‘Senna’ was akin to attending a performance of ‘Antigone’ or ‘King Lear.’”

Senna is not without its quirks, even shortcomings. Another colleague (doubtless a Prost fan) termed it “a masterpiece of propaganda.” Incomplete is another word that comes to mind. Gerhard Berger, who succeeded Prost at McLaren, is not even mentioned, let alone interviewed to provide a semblance of perspective on what Senna was like as a teammate. And there’s nary a hint of the nascent rapprochement between Senna and Prost that was so cruelly cut short, only a baffling (at least to those unaware of the thaw in their icy relationship) line in the credits mentioning the Frenchman is a trustee of the Ayrton Senna Foundation.

That said, Senna is one of those rare movies that treats auto racing in a thoughtful, dignified manner with none of the clichés, melodrama or, at worst, sheer fantasy that characterize the vast majority of the motorsports cinema “genre.” Senna is scheduled for release in the United States on August 13.  By all means see it at your first opportunity, no matter the audience or circumstances. And take a spouse, sibling, parent or friend along – they’ll be afforded a rare insight into what, despite its growing mainstream acceptance, remains a widely misunderstood sport.

When my iRacing colleague Otto Szebini e-mailed me a series of photos from the NVIDIA home office showing, among other things, a Jim Clark tribute Lotus/sim racing chassis, it triggered a complex series of memories . . . not least of which (thanks to a timely reminder from David Malsher at Racer magazine) are those associated with this day – 43 years ago — when the man many believe to have been history’s greatest race driver lost his life in an accident during a Formula 2 race.

The image of Clark’s car perched in front of NVIDIA’s giant monitor jogged some happy memories as well, including those associated with one of history’s earliest sim racers: Mrs. Emma Peel. For those deprived souls for whom the name “Emma Peel” does not ring any bells, allow me to explain. When Clark was winning races from Spa and Kyalami to Indianapolis and Milwaukee, Mrs. Peel was the female lead in a BBC television show called The Avengers, a suave, smart, witty send-up of the spy/secret agent genre. The role of Mrs. Peel was played by Diana Rigg (now Dame Diana Rigg) whose sparkling, flirtatious chemistry with Patrick McNee (in the role of John Steed) made the show a delight . . . and whose regular appearance in an assortment of Carnaby Street-inspired cat suits captured the, er, imagination of adolescent males of all ages around the world.

As agents of an MI5-like organization, Steed and Mrs. Peel (Mr. Peel was mysteriously MIA) saved England from a succession of devious villains, Soviet-esque saboteurs and demented psychopaths. One memorable episode found Mrs. Peel at the wheel of one of the world’s first sim racing machines: a Lotus 31 “magically” connected to an endless film loop of a lap of the Brands Hatch club circuit.

When Otto Szebini e-mailed me a series of photos from the NVIDIA home office showing, among other things, a Jim Clark tribute Lotus/sim racing chassis, it triggered a complex series of memories

Sure it was cheesey, even for 1967. The speed of the film was controlled by a separate console featuring a massive dial marked “0 – 160 mph” with a manually adjustable needle. Best of all, the chassis delivered an electric shock (of variable intensity) to the driver when he/she put a wheel off track, spun or crashed. So much simpler than iRatings and Safety ratings, don’t you think? Steady Nim and Shannon!

Anyway, after kidnapping Mrs. Peel, sticking her in the race car and handcuffing her to the steering wheel, the bad guy speeds-up the film and increases the voltage “penalty” to lethal levels in the hopes of extracting top secret information from her. Ultimately, Mrs. Peel is lapping Brands Hatch at upwards of 160 mph (!) before Steed arrives to save the day . . . but not before a ditzy bystander unwittingly puts the video in reverse, forcing our talented heroine to lap Brands Hatch in reverse without putting a wheel wrong. At 160 mph. Worthy of a Class B license at the very least.

The years went by with a succession of increasingly high quality racing videos (including Lap of the Gods and In Car 956 among others) the best the average race fan could do in terms of experiencing an authentic racing experience. Then came Night Driver, Pole Position, Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, Nascar Racing and Grand Prix Legends as ingenious folks like Dave Kaemmer turned that “magic” missing link between Mrs. Peel’s Lotus and the Brands Hatch film into virtual reality.

Coupled with 3D, surround sound and multiple plasma screens, today’s racing sims – iRacing, rFactor, Gran Tourismo and a score more — provide a sense of realism that would have blown the mind of Mrs. Peel (or Jim Clark). Indeed, even using the phrase “sense of realism” may rightly raise the hackles of those who view sim racing as a legitimate sport in its own right, independent of its origins in “real-world” racing. And while one episode of The Avengers hardly counts as the birth of that sport, I hope you’ll humor me if I suggest that Mrs. Peel is the Mother of Sim Racing.

Needless to say having the racing season kick off is a welcome sight around here even if it is just a tease of warmer temperatures heading our way. It has been an exciting NASCAR season already with a terrific showing by our fellow iRacers in Daytona, and in particular Dale Jr and Landon Cassill in the Nationwide race and Trevor Bayne and Bobby Labonte in the cup race. You have to be happy for AJ Allmendinger now as well sitting 4th in the points after Phoenix in the Sprint Cup series after the turmoil that team went through last year.

Our virtual Championship seasons are off to an exciting start as well. I am a Greger Huttu fan but I have to admit I was thrilled to see Jesse Nieminen capture the win at Spa, not to mention all of the new names in the top 10. I shudder to think how much preparation Mr. Huttu will put in for round 2 after legitimately losing his first race from his home cockpit. It was also nice to see some new faces up at the front of the field in the NASCAR Daytona race as well. It appears the new drivers in both series are bringing something to the battle!

One exciting footnote to the start of our Championship seasons is that our broadcasts have set back-to-back records for the number of viewers. The PSRTV guys continue to put on great broadcasts and really have done a terrific job in helping to legitimize these series and allow us mere mortals a chance to enjoy them.

By this time I am sure most of you have seen the two new Premier Series we have launched with INDYCAR and GRAND AM. This is an exciting development for the community not only because this gives more members a chance to compete in a “Pro” level series but it also speaks to how far iRacing has come in the real racing world. It is becoming easier and easier to convince partners that what we are doing is relevant to them and the iRacing brand is starting to become a recognized name in the garages and shops across the world. I expect we will have more of these partnerships to announce in the future as well. You would be amazed at how many phone calls or emails I get now from tracks in particular who want to be included in our service. Trust me when I say that this is a complete change from when we started this process seven years ago when we had to pretty much beg people to work with us.

On the production side of things we will be releasing Okayama International in the next build with Suzuka to follow in a month or two after that. Okayama will be a FREE track included in the base package that every iRacing member receives. We plan on scanning Iowa as soon as the snow melts and have slotted that into the production queue to hopefully be completed before the August Nationwide race. We will be scanning Interlagos at the end of March so I expect it will be released by the end of the year. We are also already chipping away at Oulton Park and Mosport Oval with their release dates TBD. When we build the Mosport Oval you will get it FREE if you own the road course and they will be bundled together for new purchases.

I tell you all of this knowing full well that some of you will go to bed tonight cursing my name because Zolder, NJMP, Oran, Kentucky, etc are not listed for the near future. We are working as quickly as we can to produce these tracks and there are a lot of factors that go into when and why tracks get built when they do.

The next build will include the new JR Motorsports Nationwide car which we scanned last winter. This car will be FREE for those of you who currently own the Class B Impala and will be packaged with the old car for those that have yet to buy it. We have an exciting contest with this car planned for its release if everything comes together like we plan. The next car that will be completed after the Nationwide car is the Ford GT to be followed by the HPD LMP2 car.

I don’t have a time table for either car but I would make a guess that they’ll both be ready in time for Season 3.

Moving on to some of the ongoing engineering projects we are working on… I will remind everyone that just because I write about it in this blog does not mean it will be done anytime soon. Case in point, the first pass at damage repair… It was our intention to have this completed for the COT and FW31 for the start of the season but we obviously missed that. Testing and tuning took much longer then we anticipated and we also decided to do the damage for the rest of the “Premier” series vehicles. The first pass of damage repair for these vehicles will be released hopefully before this blog goes live or in the next week.

Our Mostly Evil Kiwi will continue to work on damage repair over the season for the remaining cars and on the communication systems for the damage repair process.

Eric and Ian have been busy at work applying the still unfinished tire model to a handful of our existing cars to get more feedback to Dave from the testers. The cars in testing right now are the class A Impala and Silverado and the new Nationwide car will go into testing this week. We have the new model on many more cars internally right now to test as new code is implemented by Dave and so far things look pretty good. There are still no guarantees that we will be able to have any of these cars in the next build but we are working hard on them. Dave has done a brief interview on the tire model development in the latest iRacing TV episode so you should make sure to watch it.

The cars in testing right now are the class A Impala and Silverado and the new Nationwide car will go into testing this week.

David Tucker has been hard at work on our telemetry API for an exciting project to integrate our data into a to-be-announced 3rd party telemetry application. We are going to be storing telemetry data in our replay files now which can then be loaded into this telemetry application. As of right now it looks like we won’t be able to sync the actual replay video with the application but we are working on that. There are some community projects out there though that look likely to be able to do this. At any rate it’s a pretty robust application which will allow you to see wheel speeds, corner ride heights, shock deflections, longitudinal and lateral G’s, and potentially much more.

David has also done work with the API to now allow you to have multiple connections simultaneously so those guys looking to have working gauges on the motion cockpits should be happy!

Our FMod development has also made some great strides. Our sound engineer just this week finally has a custom build that will allow him to start creating sound sets using the Fmod design tools for use in our sound engine. I am excited to see how this starts transforming what we hear in the sim. He will likely start with the tire samples and then move on to the cars’ engine sets. Aussie Greg Hill is relentless so he will be badgering us daily to give him more things to play with in the sound engine.

We have an exciting project started to add Heat Racing to our hosted racing functionality. The quick explanation of this is that an administrator of a “tournament” will be able to link multiple sessions together to be able to advance drivers to a new session based on the results from the previous sessions. These competitions can happen in a straight shot or over a matter of weeks if the administrator likes. The administrator will also have the flexibility to determine how many drivers advance and how they are gridded in the later rounds of the tournament.

Shawn has continued to plug away on graphics optimizations for our engine and also just completed a project that will allow us to build the tunnel/bridge at Suzuka. The next big project he is going to tackle is how to light the tracks with headlights from the cars. This will allow the art and production guys to work on a night track for road racing, most likely starting with Sebring. We have also begun work on animating the driver in remote cars and may have this implemented in a car or two by next season. Full in-cockpit animated arms being the next logical step in this process.

The web team has some interesting projects there are working on as well. We will finally have the first pass at an achievement system go live in the next build. This will reward members for things like, the “Hard Charger” award which will be awarded by starting in the bottom 10% of a race field and finish in the top 10%. Also a reward called “Classy” which is awarded if you participate in all car classes for 8 weeks each in a multi-class series. Another fun one is the “iLet You Win” award which you receive if you beat an iRacing employee in a race. Another award group is called the “Safe Driver” award which has three levels. Level one is for a single incident free race, level 2 is for 3 consecutive incident free races and level 3 is for 8 consecutive incident free races. There are many more on the list but the intention is to create some challenges for everyone in the service, not just the elite drivers.

One longer term project the web team is working on is an integrated chat system on the member site. This functionality will be very much like the system that Facebook uses on their site. We think this will be another exciting way for the community to interact with each other on the website and to further ruin work productivity around the world.

Another way we plan on trying to “open” up the service is to allow everyone to participate in practice sessions for official series regardless of license class. This will be something we can set by series so I don’t see us allowing this to happen in the Premier and World Championship level series.

This is just a sample of what we are working on at this time and as always things can move on and off this list over the next few months. I think all-in-all the next two seasons of builds are really going to add some terrific functionality to the sim and website.

And to sign off I want to thank all of our loyal customers for their continued support. You guys are the ones that allow us to do this for a living and we are thrilled to come to work every day to try and build a product that you are excited about and feel is worth your hard earned money.

Who is this man and what does he have to do with qualifying at Talladega? (Hint: he’s the greatest mathematician of all time)

One of the strangest story lines in the history of iRacing is the Q circle phenomenon. It is an eerie tale, and if words like quaternion and eigenvalue send shivers up your spine, then you might do well to stop reading, toss some salt over your shoulder, and just walk away.



Our story begins many years ago, during the development of Grand Prix Legends, when unbeknownst to anyone, an insidious, barely perceptible flaw was introduced into the physics code. It lay dormant for several years until the release of Nascar 4. Sometime after that, astute oval racers discovered something very odd: laptimes at Talladega and Daytona had a strange tendency to bounce up and down every other lap, even though the car was being driven nearly identically. The time variation was small, mere hundredths of a second. When I first heard about it, I was skeptical. Surely these drivers were just seeing patterns where there weren’t any; superstition was slowly growing into urban legend. I figured the non-issue would soon go away, unreproducible in true, scientific, back to back tests. After all, what on earth could explain such a bizarre claim?



William Rowan Hamilton, the guy pretty much responsible for Q circles.

And yet, the issue didn’t go away. iRacing competition director Shannon Whitmore showed me one day how it worked, and sure enough, his laptimes fluctuated up and down, every other lap, by a few hundredths. Even more worrisome was the fact that this could be used to advantage in qualifying. Apparently, simply pretending to do a lap, by driving in a circle in pitlane before qualifying, would shift the good laptime/bad laptime fluctuation from odd/even laps to even/odd! This was key in qualifying at the superspeedways, since the best laptime is usually obtained on the second flying lap, after the car has had a longer time to reach top speed. By shifting the bizarre good laptime to the second qualifying lap, you could gain an advantage of a few hundredths, which is a pretty significant time difference, especially at the top levels of simracing.



And so the “Q circle” was born. Racers being racers, constantly on the lookout for a competitive advantage of any kind, we began to see the ritual of driving in a circle before qualifying at the superspeedways. It became downright embarrassing. People took sides, and argued vehemently for or against the practice. Was it a legitimate competitive advantage, or an unsporting cheat that should be banned? In the Nascar World Championship Races, the Q circle issue exploded into a contentious debate, with the solution being to have the drivers all send in a replay of their qualifying laps so we could insure that nobody was Q circling!



How could this be addressed? How could we even detect that it was being done? If someone happened to spin on their outlap, thereby gaining the Q circle advantage, how could we legitimately disqualify them? We needed to solve the mystery of the Q circles. We had quite a few discussions amongst the engineers, but to no avail. We couldn’t figure out how it could be happening. Theories abounded, but none, when researched, could explain it. Subtle differences in lap timing and scoring? Couldn’t find anything. Some fluctuation in air density or some other calculations every minute or so? Nope. How could the millions of calculations that were being done every second lead to behavior that was so predictable based on the mere number of laps completed—or actually the mere number of circles completed? It was a complete and utter mystery, and a very bizarre one at that.



Apparently, simply pretending to do a lap, by driving in a circle in pitlane before qualifying, would shift the good laptime/bad laptime fluctuation from odd/even laps to even/odd!

One day iRacing president Tony Gardner and Shannon came into my office and said we needed to establish a ruling on the Q circles. Should we allow them or not? Things were coming to a head. Tempers were rising. The legitimacy of iRacing as a fair arbiter of competition was being called into question. Things looked bad. I envisioned my career in a shambles, derailed by the Q circle conundrum. What could they be? What could be causing them?



Eeeeek!!! It’s a quaternion!

It was at this very moment that a flash of realization came to me. It had to do with quaternions, I was almost sure of it! I said so to Tony and Shannon, but this did not seem to register with them. Shannon gave me a look that said, “stop joking around,” and Tony muttered, “what the heck is a Q-bonian?” While they continued to talk about how we should address the Q circle “exploit” I fired up the sim in the debugger and set a breakpoint (a way to stop the sim in mid-computation) where I knew I could get a look at the player car’s quaternion.



Of course, I should explain what a quaternion is. It is a mathematical entity (invented by the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, famous for the Hamiltonian matrix) that provides a very useful way to represent the 3D orientation of an object. You are more likely to have heard about Euler angles, the well known yaw, pitch, and roll. These were invented by Leonhard Euler, the greatest mathematician of all time, who probably did more to change the modern world than any other human you can think of. If you’ve heard about race cars being pitch-sensitive, or having too much body roll in the turns, you know about Euler angles. Euler angles work for representing the rotation of an object in 3D, but they have some serious shortcomings. It’s difficult to take an object’s angular velocity (how fast it’s spinning) and update the object’s orientation using Euler angles. Also, there are orientations (the dreaded gimbal lock) where Euler angles suddenly change direction in a very non-linear way. A better way to represent orientations lies in a theorem that was proved by none other than…Euler. He showed how any rotation of an object in 3D can be accomplished by picking some axis through the object, and rotating it by some angle around that axis. Euler had discovered the basic idea behind quaternions, but it would take more than sixty years after Euler’s death for William Hamilton to turn this idea into something useful (in 1843).

A quaternion is made up of four numbers. Three of them specify the axis (a vector) about which an object is rotated, and one specifies the single angle of rotation about that axis, basically. They work very nicely for representing rotations, since they can be easily rotated by an object’s angular velocity, plus they don’t have a gimbal lock orientation. Quaternions are actually a little more complicated than that, and the reason I’m going on about this is that you need to know more to understand Q circles. The single angle number is actually the cosine of half the angle of rotation. The vector part representing the axis is scaled by the sine of half the angle of rotation. How Hamilton dreamed all this up, I have no idea. But the key thing is that it takes 720 degrees of rotation of an object, or two full circles, to take the cosine and sine parts through a complete cycle. Quaternions are not unique, that is, there are two quaternions representing any given rotation. Think about it: if you rotate an object by some angle around some axis, then that’s the same as rotating the object around the axis pointing exactly in the opposite direction by the negative of the same angle. So for a given orientation of your race car, there are two ways to specify it: with the positive or negative version of some quaternion.

So this is what I was looking for in the debugger. I wanted to see if the player car’s quaternion was the positive or negative version. The sim stopped at my breakpoint and I looked at the values. Quaternion was positive. Then I restarted the sim, and drove in a circle. Sure enough, my quaternion had become negative, just as I suspected, since I hadn’t gone through 720 degrees of rotation! Another circle and it was positive again. So at last it seemed I had found something that could potentially be related to the Q circles.

But the hunt wasn’t over yet. This was certainly something that varied every other lap, and could be affected by driving a Q circle. But the quaternions aren’t used for much except generating a rotation matrix (more math for handling rotations), and the positive and negative version of a quaternion both generate identical rotation matrices, according to the math. It shouldn’t matter whether your quaternion is positive or negative, the formulas give the same matrix, and that matrix is used everywhere else to actually rotate all the vectors used by the physics. Aerodynamic drag and downforce, tire forces, and even gravity are all manipulated using this identical rotation matrix. But maybe there was a bug—a mistake in the formulas coded in the simulation that would give a slightly different matrix for the positive and negative quaternion. With any luck, there might be a bug, and I could fix it!

A quaternion is made up of four numbers. Three of them specify the axis (a vector) about which an object is rotated, and one specifies the single angle of rotation about that axis, basically.

Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be a bug. I pored over the matrix from quaternion routines and they were just what they were supposed to be. Still, I needed to check by running the code. I set another breakpoint, and stopped the code just at the instant the player’s car was placed on track. I wrote down all nine numbers from the rotation matrix, and all four numbers from the quaternion. I changed the code so that the negative quaternion was generated first, instead of the positive, when the car was first placed on track. It occurred to me that I could “fix” the problem by randomly assigning each driver a positive or negative quaternion, so that nobody would know whether they should drive a Q circle or not! I had to laugh, knowing the controversy that would erupt. No, I would have to fix this the right way. If it turned out to be some difference between the positive and negative quaternion, then I could easily force the code to always use only the positive one. But if there was no difference, the Q circles would return to their legendary status as eerie mystery. I digress. So here I was, now looking at the rotation matrix generated by the negative quaternion. The numbers weren’t all exactly the same as those from the positive case, but they were so close that it couldn’t really matter. Less than one part in four million difference for the numbers that were different, and some of the numbers were exactly the same.

Even half a cent added up for an entire lap is real money!

Some of you may be wondering why the numbers were different at all. Some of you may be wondering why you’re still reading this. Some of you aren’t still reading this. For the first group, I’ll tell you: round-off error. Arithmetic on a computer is almost always done with a limited amount of precision, and the precision used in iRacing is generally the twenty three bits of mantissa in an IEEE format floating point number. That jargon is pretty much demanding an explanation, but time is too short for that. The only important thing to know is that one part in four million is a difference of plus or minus one bit of precision in a floating point number. Round-off error is just what you get when you’re trying to split the bill for $25.85 at a restaurant two ways, and you get $12.92 and a half cent. There is no such thing as a half cent, just as there is no such thing as a twenty fourth bit of precision in an IEEE float. Someone’s going to have to pay $12.93, and someone gets a better deal at $12.92. In restaurant bill terms, the negative quaternion was getting stuck with $40,000.01, and the positive quaternion was getting off with $40,000.00. Round-off error just doesn’t matter, for the most part, since it tends to be random and cancel itself out. Split a million restaurant bills, and you’re not going to save a ton of money on the round-off . . . unless you always get to save the half cent. But here is the interesting thing: the negative quaternion was always getting the larger restaurant bill!

The reason that’s the case has to do with the computer’s “round-off” mode, which controls which way the half cent (half bit) gets rounded. And it turns out to be significant. Almost all the force vectors, velocity vectors, and acceleration vectors that are used to move the car in the simulation are multiplied by this rotation matrix. That means on average, when the quaternion is negative, all these vectors end up being about one bit of precision (one part in 4 million or so) longer than when the quaternion is positive. When you use all these very slightly longer vectors for an entire lap at Talladega, you get a measurable time difference. That’s because you’d have a teeny amount more downforce, and a teeny amount more cornering force, and a teeny amount more velocity, plus probably other effects that helped you go just a teeny amount faster! So there wasn’t a bug, but just a piling up of round-off error one way or another for an entire lap. Amazingly, the top twenty drivers in the Nascar iRacing Driver’s World Championship field qualified entirely within that accumulated round-off error!

So the mystery is now understood (and fixed with an update scheduled this week), and I can sleep better at night without these eerie Q circles interrupting my dreams. And you can just roll straight out of pitlane, confident that if other drivers are driving in a circle, they’re only making themselves dizzy.

That’s right, I said computer. iRacing is not a video game, it is a simulator. It is designed to replicate the actual racing experience, and I can vouch for its superb replication of the actual racing experience. Don’t get me wrong, Forza and Grand Tursimo are great fun. But for true accuracy, practice, or side-by-side racing action, iRacing is the choice of many racing enthusiasts and professional drivers.

There are a couple of things right out of the gate that make iRacing so accurate. The first is iRacing’s interpretation of the tracks. I would go as far to say that the word “interpretation” is an understatement. I regularly spend time at Summit Point in West Virginia, and I know the track pretty well. When I got behind the wheel of a Mazda MX-5 pro cup car and started my warm up laps, I couldn’t believe what I was feeling. Bump for bump, curb for curb, and flag station for flag station, iRacing’s tracks are dead on. The same visual reference points that I use in real life, I was able to use in the simulator. Following suit, the cars are just as accurate. The Miata was nimble and relied on momentum to get around the track quickly. The Mustang’s solid rear end reminded your right foot to dance softly on the throttle when exiting corners. The Williams Formula One car… Well, that made you develop a whole new respect for Formula One drivers.

Don’t get me wrong, Forza and Grand Tursimo are great fun. But for true accuracy, practice, or side-by-side racing action, iRacing is the choice of many racing enthusiasts and professional drivers.

How do you get started? You’ll need a computer that can run the software, a subscription to iRacing, and a good steering wheel/pedal/shifter set up. It is important to have a steering wheel that provides good feedback; after all, you want to take full advantage of what the software is capable of. Some iRacers get really elaborate with their set ups and include cockpits and hydraulics to simulate motion.

Let’s face it, there is something intriguing about hitting apexes, power-on oversteer, and bump drafting in your basement. For guys and girls like us, it restores some sense of sanity during these cold stubborn months. Try to keep warm, and hopefully some of you find your automotive substitute for the winter. Now, I’m going to go make some hot cocoa and drive a 400 horsepower mustang.

To help those of you who are like me, and to help myself too, I put together a short list of some great gift ideas for your favorite iRacer (or me if you can’t think of anyone else to spend your money on).

Logitech G27 – What can I say about the G27? This is by far the most popular wheel to use for iRacing. Clutch pedal, stick shift or paddles, six wheel buttons and great force feedback. ($299.99) http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/wheels/devices/5184

AP Electrix Load Cell Pedal Mod

AP Electrix (Pastore) Load Cell Pedal Mod – This is the best ‘mod’ I have ever installed on my racing rig! Changes the way the brake pedal on a G25 or G27 works. Out of the box a G25/G27 brake pedal is position-based. This mod makes it pressure-based, which is a much better feel for anyone who has ever been on track in a real car. My driving instantly improved due to the much more realistic feeling brake pedal. ($75) http://www.apelectrix.com/index.html

Perfect Pedal – The perfect pedal is another mod that changes the feel of your G25/G27 brake pedal. By using a hydraulic cylinder, this mod replicates the feel of a real world car’s braking system much more accurately than a position-based sensor can.  ($249.99) www.perfectpedal.com

Driving Chassis – prices vary greatly on each of these based on the configuration you choose so check their websites for more information on ordering.

• PlaySeat –one of the most affordable chassis out there, very compact and comfortable www.playseat.com
• Left Lane Industries – nicely designed chassis which really adds to the immersion by giving you the feel you are in a real car – http://www.leftlaneindustries.com/
• Wagner Race Products – custom built chassis made from extruded aluminum and available as a complete system with everything from the PC to the chassis to the controls – http://www.wagnerraceproducts.com/
• Blue Tiger – full motion platform for someone who wants to go for a ride -http://www.bluetiger.com

iRacing Paddock – Beginner’s Guide to Road Racing on iRacing.com by Ray Bryden – this is a great read for anyone new to iRacing. ($19.99) – http://www.amazon.com/iRacing-Paddock-Beginners-Simracing-iRacing-com/dp/145154667X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292599997&sr=1-1

Engineer in your pocket

Carroll Smith’s Engineer in Your Pocket – This pocket-sized guide gives you quick tips on how to make changes to your car setup to ‘fix’ problems. I use it when I am iRacing and when I go to the track or an autocross.  ($19.99) http://www.amazon.com/Carroll-Smiths-Engineer-Your-Pocket/dp/0965160017

Logitech G930 – this is my favorite USB headset, and trust me, I have tried all of them! I got to demo a set at PAX this year and have been hooked ever since. Great sound, really comfortable and the fact that they are wireless just adds to the convenience.($159.99) http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/headsets/devices/7248

Merry Christmas!

Ever since I can remember, motorsport has been a significant factor in my own life, and also the lives of the rest of my family.

Fast forward seven years, and I returned from a year of “exploring” the UK and my two-wheel ambitions had by this stage, changed to four-wheel ambitions. My father had since moved across to sports car racing, and although not quite as exciting and adrenaline filled, it was far safer than his two-wheel exploits in the past.

In January 2002, the time came to enter my first car race at the David Piper International at Zwartkops Raceway, Pretoria, in a Fiat Abarth 131. As the story goes, the rest is history. Eight years later, I look back proudly over my three South African Sports Car Championships, and look forward to whatever 2011 might bring.

But as I sit here, I feel the need to discuss my other motorsport addiction – online sim racing. In 2008, I raced for the Nissan Junior team in South Africa’s Production Car series (touring cars). My race engineer at the time happened to be quite a computer savvy guy. One afternoon, as we waited at the airport for a flight to a round of the championship, the “fool” decided to show me a “game” he had recently discovered. The game was Live for Speed. I was clueless as to the world of sim racing, but nevertheless, became totally addicted from my very first laps with a mouse as a controller on his laptop in the departure lounge.

I slowly started learning the ropes, and in August 2008, I stumbled upon the world of iRacing. Initially I ran a free one month subscription through a promotion offered by Radical Sportscars. My one month came and went. I was hooked and renewed my subscription . . . much to my family and girlfriends disgust!

South Africa is a funny place to race. Our currency is weak, racing is incredibly expensive and finding a sponsor is unbelievably difficult. Further to that, finding time away from work to go testing is tough, but finding a circuit with open track time is even harder. And so, I looked to iRacing to further my skills, not only as a driver but from the “engineering” side of motorsport as well.
I wasn’t fortunate enough to start my career in karting, as many champions have done, but I was always lucky enough to find myself in the hands of some very capable race engineers. And as time went on, I learnt what information they needed, to make the car work the way I wanted. I provided the feedback on what the car was doing; they interpreted it and made the appropriate changes.

iRacing however, was vastly different; it was me on my own, in my room in front of my 40 inch screen with my Logitech G25 wheel. I was the driver, but I was also the engineer . . . and a really bad one at that. After a few months going through the licenses, I started becoming pretty frustrated, not so much that I was getting beaten, but because the car handled abysmally, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

As I look back on the learning experience over the past two years on iRacing, the biggest improvements in my real life racing career have been in the following areas:

1. Race craft
2. Ability to adapt to changing conditions
3. Setup knowledge
4. Heightened senses
5. “Keeps your eye in”

1. Race Craft

Race craft was never a weak point in my career, but ask any race driver: You can never have enough of it. Since August 2008, I have probably competed in no more than 35 real life races. In contrast, I have competed in over 290 online races, almost 10 times more than in real life. I sure haven’t finished all of them. But I can tell you that I have probably learnt something from each and every one of them, both from my mistakes and from the mistakes of my competitors. How does that help in real life racing? Well, our series implemented a reverse grid second heat in 2008, where the top finishers in the first heat, start in reverse order for the second heat. Of the 16 reverse grid races I have competed in since then, I have won 10. I think that speaks for itself. And of the six I didn’t win, I only had one DNF and only twice did I finish off the podium.

How does that help in real life racing? Well, our series implemented a reverse grid second heat in 2008, where the top finishers in the first heat, start in reverse order for the second heat. Of the 16 reverse grid races I have competed in since then, I have won 10.

Real world or online racing, there’s a huge learning curve: I am not the only person on the track, and no matter how good I am, or how entitled to the corner and the line I am, there are still other persons competing. Sometimes, I have to back-out, even if everything points to the corner/line being mine, because ultimately, backing-out may allow me to fight for another lap, instead of ending my race in the sand trap, because “it was my line, he shouldn’t have been there.” Having said that, don’t think for a second that I quite have that mentality nailed down!

2. Adapting to changing conditions

iRacing features a wide range of cars, front and rear-wheel drive, low to high power, single-seater to tin-top; each with vastly different handling characteristics. The great thing about sim racing is that it costs next to nothing to race a Solstice at 2 pm, and then the Williams-Toyota FW31 at 3:30 pm.

Inexperienced race drivers (and I talk from personal experience) generally struggle when moving from one car to another at early stages in their career. iRacing helped me speed-up the learning curve. I hated practicing, but loved racing, so I forced myself to pick-up on small things to help me adapt from one car to the next within a lap or two, sometime three. I can’t pinpoint what things those were exactly, but I guess it boils down to heightened senses.

I believe iRacing has given me the ability to adjust my driving style quickly and efficiently. Driving style is natural, but also borne out of habit.

I believe iRacing has given me the ability to adjust my driving style quickly and efficiently. Driving style is natural, but also borne out of habit. And boy oh boy, those habits are often difficult to break. Why, you may ask, well, probably because we don’t get much opportunity – or aren’t forced — to have to break those habits. We drive one car all season, and develop habits which aid us in that car. Next year, we start over. But what happens when you change cars mid-season, at last minute, with no time for practicing? What then? iRacing gives you the opportunity to exchange the habits for experience, in the sense that experience is the ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions. So not only does it help you from one car to the next, it also helps you from one heat to the next, a dry circuit to a wet circuit and so on. Of course natural born talent has a lot to do with it, but I don’t doubt, not for one second, that it can’t be improved upon.

Some drivers can drive a lousy car fast, and some can’t. Hopping-in and -out of different cars, in my opinion, will give you the experience and ability to adapt your style depending on the situation at hand, and undoubtedly, improve your ability to drive a crap car significantly quicker.

3. Setup Knowledge

For those of you who don’t race in the real world, believe me, there are loads of drivers out there with incredible talent who give great feedback but who haven’t a clue about setup. Take away their race engineer, the one who understands the driver’s debriefs, and that driver is nowhere.

iRacing has forced me to understand the different components of a race car. Understanding the different components allows you to drive the car according to what makes those components work the way they were intended, amongst other things. It also helps you understand what the changes should and shouldn’t do. This can sometimes have a negative effect, because you might form pre-determined ideas and neglect the actual impact, but in most cases, it prepares you for what to expect.

iRacing has forced me to understand the different components of a race car. Understanding the different components allows you to drive the car according to what makes those components work the way they were intended, amongst other things.

One of iRacing’s greatest benefits for me, personally, came when I moved to a new race engineer, someone I hadn’t worked with previously, someone who wasn’t used to spoon-feeding me. I had previously come from a team whose mantra was “Drivers drive. Engineers engineer.” Not the worst idea in the world because it allowed me to focus on my driving, but also not the greatest, because people make mistakes. More often than not, two heads are better than one, particularly in tough times, times when the race engineer might need a fresh idea or direction of thought. We don’t all race in Formula One with the luxury of surrounding ourselves with rocket scientists.

I moved to a new team, with a very different direction of thought, setup wise, but also a very different way of debriefing after a session. How did iRacing help me? Simple: I changed teams and won my first race with the new team, beating the reigning champion in his own team in the process. How? I was able to minimize the gap between my new engineer and myself because I had half a clue what I needed the car to do, but also, because I had half a clue what to adjust to get me what I needed. This is what happens when you run a series like Star Mazda which is ultra competitive, and small setup changes often make the difference between 1st and 5th. In order to be competitive, I forced myself to learn about each setup variable. I raced a single seater, and so, I gained huge amounts of understanding about the different setup aspects, purely from trial an error in iRacing. Did I always give instructions as to what changes I needed? Definitely not, because over time, I developed trust in my engineer, and he was damned good at his job. But it sure helped when he was a tad baffled, or when I couldn’t explain what the car was doing, but still had an idea how to fix it.

Heightened Senses

One of sim racing’s biggest shortcomings in comparison to real life racing is that your ass isn’t attached to a race car. Essentially that takes all feeling away, other than the force feedback from your wheel, which, as good as it can ever be, can never make up for the feeling you get in the seat of your pants, before feeling it in the wheel.

As a result, you learn to rely heavily on other input, senses that are perhaps secondary when driving a real car. When you’re sim racing you use your eyes to pick-up direction and movement and speed. There’s the feedback from your steering wheel, but also the sense of what you expect would be happening without actually feeling it.

When you’re sim racing you use your eyes to pick-up direction and movement and speed.

So how can this help you in real life racing, you might ask. Imagine a blind person. Science has repeatedly proven that those who lack the gift of sight ,compensate with enhanced senses of smell, hearing, taste and touch. I’m no scientist, but what happens if, by some miracle, a blind person regains his or her eyesight? Well, my thinking would tell me that, in addition to being able to see, they retain their heightened “other” senses.

As a sim racer, you’re at a disadvantage in that you lack somewhere in the region of 90% of your sense of “feel” for the car. As a result, naturally, you learn to take as much out of your remaining senses as you can, be they sight and sound or whatever. So when you do get into a real race car, all of a sudden, it’s like you have another sense in addition to those senses that have been heightened by sim racing.

Some may disagree. They’ll say that the sim is not entirely realistic; that the real world sound as well as the sight, does not translate to sim racing. But as I mentioned earlier, you’re also gaining the ability to adapt, and so your mind adjusts to the differences, no matter how big or small you think they are.
A little while back, I sat in my room and had some thoughts running through my mind. I’m putting loads of practice into the sim. I’m competitive in real life, but for some reason, I’m just not as competitive (relative to the best of course) as I expect to be in the sim. Why?

I had a chat to my dad. Surely a guy who is quick in a sim has to be as quick, if not quicker in real life. Or surely not? Simple answer though: he wasn’t born with the talent to be the best in real life racing . . . or maybe he was?!?

To be honest, I haven’t entirely wrapped that thought up yet. But one of the obvious explanations is that sim racing “aliens” may not be able to adapt to the “seat of your pants” feeling, the GForces and probably, most significantly, the risks experienced in real life racing. Naturally, human beings can only handle so much, some people more than others. Sim racers are generally given just about as much information as they can handle through a simulator. In some cases, placing them in a real race car simply extends them too far, in that they can’t process the additional forces/feelings/risks/pressure/nerves accompanying real life racing. They don’t know how to handle these additional experiences and so they are unable to convert them into additional speed. In fact, in some cases, these sensations may contribute negatively.

Having said that, why am I not the fastest sim racer out there? Simple: I wasn’t born with the talent needed to be the best sim racer of all time. Yes, I have talent to drive a car in real life pretty quickly, but I am not born with the talent to drive a sim car as quickly. Some people have both, some people have both in varying levels.

Heck, I get nervous to the point of shakiness, and my heartbeat races when I sit at my G25 whilst sim racing. In comparison, the calmest and most relaxed place on earth for me is when I’m in my race car out on the track.

“Keep your eye in”

This is a phrase used by cricket players around the world. For that matter, I assume it to be relevant to any sportsman involved in a sport involving a ball. Your eyes see something, your brain interprets it and your body adjusts. The faster the ball comes at you, the quicker your brain needs to adjust. The quicker the ball changes direction, the quicker your brain needs to adjust.

Human beings have the ability to learn and be taught. Likewise, you have the ability to train your brain. Just like cricket, where a batsman practices in the nets to “keep his eye in,” so a racing driver is able to “keep his eye in.” However, just as we have the ability to learn, so we are also pretty stupid in that we need to practice certain things in order to continue doing them at the same standard. Sim racing provides a racing driver with the ability to practice when he does not necessarily have the opportunity to do so in the real world. Through a sim, or through a real practice session, your eyes are still taking-in objects coming at speed, still looking for changes in surface, for bumps, for curbs, for racing lines and for apexes. Whether you’re sim’n it up or burning real rubber, your eyes and brain are practicing, no doubt about it!

Human beings have the ability to learn and be taught. Likewise, you have the ability to train your brain. Just like cricket, where a batsman practices in the nets to “keep his eye in,” so a racing driver is able to “keep his eye in.”

As in all spaces of life, people are born with innate talents and abilities. I suppose I was lucky enough to have motor racing in my blood. But regardless of what you have or don’t have, I firmly believe in iRacing and what it has to offer real life racing drivers, motorsport fanatics, fantasy race drivers and even Joe Blog on the street who knows he isn’t the best, but is determined to become better at it.

I hope my thoughts offer a bit of insight into how iRacing has helped me over the past two seasons. I don’t always have it right, but no one ever does. I don’t always have the philosophy correct, but that’s a good thing, because if we all had the same opinions, imagine how boring life would be.