The Endurance of Vision

by Patrick Atherton on April 12th, 2011

Jon Crooke, designer of the first sim rig.

I admire engineers. Not just inventors, who clang and bash metal in workshops with welders and grinders- but those who find the shortest way between point A and B. I admire them because they are everything I’m not.

Likewise, those with forward vision. I’m the guy who invests in something as it starts to dive, or predicts greatness only to see it dissolve into mediocrity. I am inspired by those who see potential, long before it is obvious to anyone else.

Australia’s Jon Crooke is one of those visionary types. Almost annoyingly so.

When you meet the 1986 Australian Formula Two Champion, you could mistake him for a librarian or, as Australian Motor Racing Yearbook 1986-87 put it, a “medical student.”  Back in the 1980s the bespectacled 30-something year-old had a design company, Big and Little Solar Houses. It specialised in energy-efficient “kit” homes, long before the era of obsession with green issues and energy efficiency. Business was going well, so Crooke embarked on a career in motorsport.

But we need to go back a little further to explore why there was motorsport, as well as vision, in the Crooke DNA.

In 1904 Crooke’s great-grandfather, James Robert, had competed in, and won, the first ever motor car race in Australia. A little over one year later, the entrepreneurial J R Crooke built a motor racing track at his Aspendale horse racing facility, on the outskirts of Melbourne. Described in the day as “state of the art,” this mile-long high speed oval officially opened in January 1906 with motorcycle and car races, in front of over 1000 spectators.

Racing at Aspendale, circa 1920.

Over one year later, the famous Brooklands track in Britain was opened. Their claim that it was “the world’s first purpose-built racing track” Crooke tries to shrug off. “There’s a lesson- never let the British write history…”

Crooke’s great-grandfather… won the first ever motor car race in Australia

After Aspendale’s light faded, Crooke’s father Peter was a successful rally driver in the 1950’s. He became a highly innovative senior medical officer with Australia’s governing motorsport body. At a 1971 FIA conference, recommendations in safety improvements, involving helmet design, fireproof suits and seats, proposed by Peter Crooke were widely adopted by the FIA…things which, nowadays, we take for granted.

Crooke storming his way to one of seven victories, here at Adelaide Raceway.

The 1980s Formula Two cars were wings-and-slicks ground-effects open-wheelers, nervous, perilously fast beasts and a handful to drive at the limit. Jon Crooke dominated the 1986 season, winning seven of the nine rounds. The following year he drove for the works Touring Car team of folkloric Aussie  hero Peter Brock. Crooke came fourth at the Sandown 500. At the famous Bathurst 1000 in 1987, Crooke’s car was commandeered by the team boss after Brock’s own car failed. It won, but Crooke’s name was not on the winner’s list, having not been able to turn a lap in the race.

Now with a roof over his head, Crooke crests the rise at Skyline on a bittersweet Bathurst weekend.

And that was it. After 1987, the name of Jon Crooke, a man once dubbed “our Ayrton” by the Australian motoring press, had disappeared from the motorsport landscape. It was a brief, but prolific career. If you’re into statistics, he won 87% of the races he competed in at a national level.

Millions still talk of the late Peter Brock’s last-of-nine Bathurst wins, yet few know of Jon Crooke. The irony of that. Many know of Brooklands, yet few know of Aspendale. Many know that Sir Jackie Stewart lobbied hard for safety in the sport, but few know it was Peter Crooke’s recommendations which Stewart promoted in Europe. Perhaps undeserved obscurity is also in the Crooke DNA.

It might also explain why Crooke has what is seen by some as a confrontational personality. His association with motorsport, either as a driver or stakeholder, brought its share of detractors. But engage Crooke at a personal level, find what drives him, and it’s compelling.

In the early 1990′s, with that brief motorsport chapter seemingly closed, Crooke was back in the design business, but couldn’t shake a captivation which had infected him way back in the 1960s- motorsport simulation.

Then in his teens, he saw a “simulator” at a Melbourne department store: a Lotus 31 chassis connected to a screen, projecting images generated by a camera which sped through a scale model of the Brands Hatch circuit. “The car controls changed the direction and speed of the camera. It was quite clever for its day, the model of the circuit was like a train set. But the what really set it off was sitting in the seat of a real racing car,” Crooke recalls. “I lined up for hours to drive it”.

“It’s not right unless you are sitting in a racing cockpit..”

That very sim cockpit was used in an episode of the British spy series The Avengers, driven by the Emma Peel character (as fondly recounted on iRacing.com by David Phillips). Crooke saw that episode in 1967. “One sexy woman that Emma Peel…” he grins. Perhaps that was a contributing factor to his developing sim racing addiction – he had driven her car.

In the 90s Jon and his brother Terry were able to revisit that captivation, with early sim racing titles such as Microprose Grand Prix, on an Amiga. They had even dismantled one of the earliest sim “desk” steering wheels, and decided they could do better. “I was convinced that PC simulations were going to be serious toys in the near future,” said Jon. “But it’s not right unless you’re sitting in a racing cockpit.” He had just defined the importance of immersion in the sim racing experience.

Without direct access to engineering infrastructure, Crooke turned to his one-time Formula Two race car engineer Mike Borland to help build the F1 cockpits, wheels and pedals, while talented software engineer Jim Robertson worked on the interface between controllers and the (IBM) PC. Hyper Stimulator was born.

After a flurry of corporate orders and some punishing deadlines, the team started work on the original vision – a home unit for the consumer. It was completed and launched in 1995. The design was unique. It only loosely attempted to emulate the appearance of a real race car, oozing its own unique appeal. With its switchblade lines, it looked good in a corporate setting, or a living room.

This design is still appealing after more than fifteen years. Perhaps another legacy of the true visionary- what they design rarely dates.

Just as his great grandfather had built the word’s first race track, the Hyper Stimulator was the world’s first sim rig. These cockpits have been sampled or owned by countless top-level racing drivers the world over. This is not just empty spin- there are former F1 world champions who have, amongst their many lavish worldly possessions, a Hyper Stimulator. If we named them, we’d have to pay royalties (seriously). The Hyper Stimulator has also been repeatedly copied.

After the business expanded through the 90s and early 00s, Hyper Stimulator successfully opened a number of LAN race centres in Australia and internationally, yet another world first for Crooke. It brought the concept of sim racing to the masses in a way that had never been done before.

But Crooke baulks at being labelled “the Father of Aussie Sim racing.”

“I wouldn’t say that. When you talk of ‘simulation,’ it’s the software you’re talking about. The software programmer is where the genius is. I just designed a cockpit, with serious controls, and saw the demand early on,” he says. We discuss the concept of online racing, and how amazing graphics and driver inputs are being fired instantaneously through global internet connections.  He concurs. “It’s breathtaking, isn’t it? I’m a luddite, I have no idea how they do it. But it’s incredible”.

David Kaemmer and Randy Cassidy deep in conversation, and checking out a Hyper Stimulator at the 2000 E3 Expo in LA. (Inset- Tony West, Chris West, Jon Crooke)

He was described by Australian Motor Racing Yearbook 1986-87 as “egotistical,” yet Crooke gushes at having fraternised with sim racing design greats over the years, such as Geoff Crammond and iRacing’s David Kaemmer.

“I knew years ago that the future of online racing would be a controlled and centrally-sanctioned system, to stop individuals tampering with the code to gain an advantage,” says Crooke.  In other words, something like iRacing. “It’s the fairest form of racing in the world,” he says. In fact, Crooke makes the bold claim that he was, at least, a cog in the machine which brought the iRacing vision to the feet of Kaemmer. It was at a gaming expo in the US in 2000. “I introduced guys like Chris and Tony West, to Randy Cassidy and Dave Kaemmer.” He says, adding that the subsequent conversation about those very concepts of online racing was long and spirited. He shows me a photo (above) and ponders, somewhat rhetorically “Could that be the moment iRacing was born?” You get the feeling he believes he already knows.

His real world racing experience in both tin tops and open wheelers makes him very tough judge when it comes to the physics model within the simulation. “In my own race centre, and until iRacing appeared, I only ran Nascar 2003” he says, which would be no great surprise to serious sim racers. He stuck with it until he sold the business in 2008. Interestingly, that race centre regularly attracted current real-world drivers.

The Hyper Simulator Race centres boasted high standards and attracted all kinds of racers.

Surely, I ask, with both virtual and real world experience, he had a consultative role with the development of some sim titles? “Not by invitation, no,” he grins. “Once I sent a list of recommended physics improvements to (a well known developer). They ignored it.” That developer has not been seen much, since.

He had a brief reunion with real-world racing in 2006, 20 years after his national F2 title, to join his son Dean in superkarts. Neck problems and the inherent violence of the rigid superkart ride cut it short. Speed, consistency and results, however, were not an issue because “I never left the sport. I was always driving throughout that 20 years. Simulations teach you discipline, hitting your marks, concentrating, and withstanding pressure. I was right about the potential back then, I’m still right about it now.” Even with the simulator rig business behind him, he never discounts the value of virtual reality.

On this, a news portal specialising in sim racing, it would be fitting to write of Crooke’s virtual motorsport vision as his sole defining factor, but that would be untrue. He is now embarking on another visionary journey. It was scribbled on a napkin back in 1998: a small, hybrid motorcycle-powered race car with kart components and price tag, but long-track car suspension, safety and speed, a niche which is not currently filled, at least not in an everday affordable price range. “The idea was floating around my head back in the eighties…” he says, sounding eerily familiar.

Jon’s son Dean, himself a gifted and highly decorated engineer and racer, has completed the prototype. The Hyper Pro Racer has already spawned orders here and overseas, and is being courted by major investors. Perhaps that long-standing and somewhat unwarranted obscurity in the Crooke DNA will end, with this machine.

Vision one day, then the next big thing. The Hyper Pro Racer goes through its first paces.

Will his latest vision lure him back to the drivers’ seat? “You bet it will,” Crooke says, or unprintable words to that effect.

It may be a cliché to ask a visionary what makes them tick, but I ask anyway. Crooke simply rattles off his favourite quote. “There are three types of people: Those who watch it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what the hell happened…”

Jon Crooke is many things. But he most definitely isn’t the third one.