The Way I See It

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. My father Neil raced motor cycles since I was born, and so, I spent a lot of my childhood at race tracks providing him with moral support, and whatever other help I could. It was not until the age of 10 that l finally got my own chance to try my hand at motorsports competition. It was a tough development for my mother to accept, but eventually she succumbed to the pressure and allowed my dad to buy me my first motocross bike, a PW80. Motocross became my game for the next four years until, at the age of 14 and a bit, I was denied a competition license for National motor cross because I was “too young.”

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.