Sim Racing Vs Real Life Karting! Is Simulation Racing the New Grassroots? Page 2

“Live for Speed has helped me 1000% in my racing. I have raced 5 or 6 times in the last 2 years and I'm battling against drivers racing 30 times a year. I genuinely believe that Live For Speed is a substitute for real seat time, and is a great training tool to work on weaknesses, such as race craft or coping under pressure! I even find myself driving in real life similar to I do in a simulator, the same racing lines and even the same steering wheel movements on the exit of corners.

Obviously a good sim racer can’t turn up at a race track and annihilate the competition on their 1st time in a kart/car, but it does help. An example of this would be the Live For Speed karting event held a few years ago. The fastest 2 drivers were real kart racers and sim players, but the rest of the simmers who hadn’t karted before were only a second off the lap record. A non simmer would be happy to be within 3 seconds of the lap record. Of course nothing can substitute for karting race craft, so I believe a karter who plays sims is at an advantage to a karter who races twice a month even.

If you are able to self analyse what is wrong with your driving or mentality, and try to fix this in a simulator a few days after a race next time you arrive at the track the problem will be completely solved.

If people recognized simulators as offering a genuine alternative to real seat time (costing money/time) then sims such as Live For Speed really could be the new grass roots of motorsport and even go hand in hand with real races as training tools for drivers at any level.

As regards the feel of simulators compared to real life, obviously nothing compares to the G forces and noise etc of real life, but I'm sure that your brain treats sims and real life similarly.“

It's not as if simming is an 'underground thing' either. It has it's own fully fledged online publication - Autosimsport! It is a monthly publication that focuses on sim racing. It's extensive articles each month show how big the interest is in sim racing. Alex Martini, chief editor had this to say about the growth of simming and it's effect on real life racing and karting.

“ Sim-racing has been a training tool since its inception - the first 'real' simulator was created by Colin Chapman's Lotus concern, back in the early 1960s (though it was very primitive by today's standards), and Jim Russell (who went on to create the Formula Ford category single-handedly, as well as one of the world's most specialised racing-schools {Scott Speed being the latest in a four-decade-long procession of world-class racing drivers to have been trained at the school) used the Lotus sims to assess whether a driver was good enough to get into the real cars ... it saved him both money and broken chassis/engines.

Sims have certainly become far more specialised since those days, of course, but their function - as training kits for real-world drivers - has remained pretty much the same. Look around the F1 grid, and you'll find most drivers are training with simulators: From Massa to Lewis and beyond (rumour has it that Lewis is faster than Alonso in McLaren's purpose-built simulator, and Mika Hakkinen trained on the simulator for weeks during the will-he/won't-he return to F1 episode a year or so ago), simulators have become a vital part of a racing driver's preparation. The difference, of course, is that the simulators employed by racing teams are generally purpose-built, and are rarely seen in the commercial sector (that is, the home-user).

Having said that, the last five years or so have seen simulators - available to the home user - become so exacting that they have actually changed the course of real-world races: Denny Hamlin won at Pocono in NASCAR and attributed the win to the time he'd spent training on Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 2003 simulator (Dale Earnhardt Jnr. said the same after his storming drive at the Glen some years ago), while Earnhardt Jnr.'s now infamous "BR" move at Talladega (BR being Brian Ring, a sim-racer who had created an outside groove at Talladega in a simulator which had convinced Earnhardt Jnr. that the line could be used in real-life) has become legend in sim-racing circles. (Jnr. runs his own league races on Tuesday nights).

As simulators get more exacting (and the hardware becomes more exacting - clutch pedals, g-force simulation {like the 301-Motion Platform}), and the tracks become more exacting (the laser scanned tracks which will, rumour has it, be seen in iRacing.com's upcoming product - as well as BRD's netKarPro (which is, for many, the most authentic simulator currently available commercially), sim-racing is indeed poised to become an entry-level series into motor-racing. The same skills are required - if a driver is quick in a simulator (and here we are talking simulators, not Need For Speed or 'games'), he will, in all probability, be quick in real-life (Alx Danielsson, World Series by Renault Champion 2006, has been a sim-racer for many years, and he is as quick in sims as he is in reality). The only thing that is missing, of course - and the thing that will never be replicated by sim-racing - is the 'cohones' factor: That is, while a sim-racer's speed in cyberspace will, in theory, be replicated in reality, this won't necessarily be the case should he find himself lacking the courage - or physical stamina/strength - to replicate his talent in the physical (in all senses of that word) world.

So, all said and done, sim-racing remains a training tool at best: It will not, in my opinion, ever supplant real-world racing because part of what makes real-world motor-sports is the tight-rope factor, where a driver risks injury and worse in pursuit of speed. Sim-racers do not need to cope with this - nor with the physicality of motor-racing. So, we can experience exactly what it is like to drive an F1 car around Suzuka - including how to set the car up, how to drive it, the lines, the mental alertness, the adrenaline of fighting for position with skilled drivers the world over, the competition, etc - but we will never be able to replicate the fear-factor. For many, though, this is a positive thing!

Will sim-racing ever surpass karting as an entry to motor-sports? As it is now, no - whilst sim-racers have managed to translate their form into the real-world, I think we are years away from real-world teams scouting sim-racers in search of talent. But one thing is for sure: If a racer is slow in a sim, he will be slow in real-life, though not necessarily vice-versa.

Sim-racing, as it is now, is a relatively small grassroots motor-sports series; it will grow, I think, as people discover that they can emulate their real-world heroes in the safety of their own homes (that is, simulating the real-world motor-sport of their choice down to the final little detail and spring setting, and bump on the track), but it will not replace karting as an entry-level into real-world motor-sports, since the physicality of motor-racing (which can be simulated, but at a cost that is probably higher than running a full season of karts) remains as crucial to a racer's ability as his outright, raw speed. This will happen as sim-racing breaks with its stigma of 'computer-game' (to call sim-racing games is like calling chess a game and thinking of monopoly), and we are already well on the way to seeing that happen. ”

With more games on the horizon promising even more realistic driving, most notably KartSim, it clear sim racing is going to continue growing. Karting needs to embrace these new technologies and try to harness them to introduce people to the sport otherwise we could be left far behind!