With a Little Help from Our Friends

by David Phillips on December 4th, 2009

The good news?  You just received the green light to develop a virtual version of the fastest open wheel car in American racing for the world’s leading online race simulation service.  The bad news?  You’re staring at a blank computer screen.

Where to begin?

If you’re Eric Hudec, vehicle dynamicist for iRacing.com, it’s your lucky day.  For Dallara Automobili, designer/manufacturer of the Dallara Indy car, not only has the blueprints and specifications for every wishbone, upright, winglet and dzus fastener on the Dallara IR 03/05, they have reams of data on their cars’ performance on speedways, short ovals, road courses, temporary circuits and, of course, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

What’s more, Dallara is eager to help make iRacing.com’s virtual Indy car as authentic as possible.

“We got a lot of support from Dallara, including the aero(dynamics) data,” says Hudec, who worked as a race engineer for Dodge Motorsports and, more recently, Petty Enterprises’ (aka Richard Petty Motorsports) Sprint Cup team before joining  iRacing.  “This is a pretty mature design.  It’s been around for a few years, so they have not only have the design information but tons of data on how the car should behave in a wide range of environments.  Everything I needed was there.  It was just a case of going through the information and picking-out what I needed to make it work for our application.”

What a beautiful sight: an inRacingNews-liveried Dallara at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

If anything, Hudec had too much information during the process of creating the virtual Dallara.

“Dallara was really enthusiastic about the project,” he says.  “With what they made available we literally could have built our own Indy car.  But we don’t need to know everything.  For example, we don’t have to worry about our cars passing FIA crash tests, the gearbox tolerances or the brake line fitting specs.  We just need to know the dimensions that matter to us.”

In reality, there’s more to building an authentic virtual Dallara Indy car than just knowing the precise dimensions.  Just as a paint-by-number Mona Lisa would pale in comparison to the real thing, so simply creating a virtual Dallara IR03/05 with exactly the same proportions as the real thing was only the start of Hudec’s work.  That’s where the art comes in to Hudec’s work.

There’s a whole other dimension that involves the empirical feel of the car, how the chassis is setup and how it responds to the changes you make,” Hudec says.  “Getting the right feel represents 10% of the work on the actual design, but about 90% of the time.  You can have all the data in the world, but it doesn’t automatically give you the gross balance of the car.  It doesn’t necessarily tell you how the car ‘feels.’”

Enter the beta testers, the people with real world experience like Justin Wilson and Barry Waddell who logged countless laps in the virtual prototypes, suggesting tweaks here and major adjustments there in order to give just the right seat-of-the-pants feeling to the driving experience.  And, as he did when he worked with the likes of Kyle Petty, Bobby and Terry Labonte, Chad McCumbee, John Andretti and Boris Said at Petty, Hudec then tried to translate that feedback and apply it to his race car.

But there was yet another dimension, actually four more dimensions, to Hudec’s Dallara that distinguish it from the other virtual cars he’s built for iRacing.com.

Those dimensions?  Road courses, high downforce speedways, low downforce speedways and the unique Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  For, just like the physical Dallara, iRacing’s virtual Dallara has to be equally at home, equally authentic, on the wide variety of tracks that make-up the IndyCar Series.

“We not only had to make it look and feel like the real car, we had to make it look and feel like the real car does at Indy, Infineon, Texas and Homestead,” Hudec says.  “The physics start-off close but there’s a world of difference between Indy and Infineon.  The suspension setup isn’t all that different but the aerodynamics are worlds apart.  So we wound-up with four distinct cars that just happen to look the same.”

With help from Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, iRacing built a clay model of the Dallara.

In addition to Dallara and the beta testers, Hudec had help from other experts, including Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, which made one of their Dallaras available to iRacing for modeling purposes.  As well, Dale Coyne and Andretti Green Racing provided assistance on the chassis and aerodynamic setups.  Vision and Target Chip Ganassi Racing’s Dario Franchitti helped on the vital “sound” part of the driving experience, the wheels for much of that high horsepower assistance having been greased by Tony George, Jr. and IZOD IndyCar Series coordinator of media relations, Arni Sribhen.

Helpful as the teams may have been, their ultimate objectives are fundamentally different than Hudec’s.

“The teams are all focused on pushing the envelope, to make their cars that little bit faster every weekend,” he says.  “I don’t need to do that.  I can easily make the car faster.  But that’s not a simulation, that’s a cartoon.  My objective is to make the car feel and behave like a Dallara.”

In that, Hudec succeeded.  Just ask his friend Justin Wilson.

Wilson takes the Dallara out for a run at IMS during a charity event in Miami. " I don't know what I'd do to make it better," he says.

“The car is really good, really fun to drive,” says the winner of the 2009 Watkins Glen IndyCar Series race.  “The set-up is complicated and difficult to get right, which is as it should be.  I’m racing in a league with Tony George, Jr. and we’re going to be at Phoenix International Raceway this week.  I’m going to give my race engineer Bill Pappas a call to get some ideas on the set-up.

“Really the iRacing Dallara is to the point where I don’t know what I would suggest to make it better . . . and I would think that’s exactly what iRacing and Dallara wanted to achieve.”