professional driver or racer + timepiece

But those days of easy money are a thing of the past. That's great when budgets are fat the fatter the budget, the bigger the test program (and invariably, the better the test program, the better the race results). But testing isn't cheap-little in racing is, after all. Testing gives drivers extra miles behind the wheel to hone their craft and engineers extra hours to perfect car setups. Instead of practice, racers call it testing. Plus, if I was really lucky, I might even get to have a go myself… Testing, testing, one two three…įurther Reading Audi’s legendary Le Mans program to end in 2016In racing, as with any other sport, practice makes perfect. Suddenly I had a chance to see what pro drivers and engineers actually got from spending time in a sim, and to gauge how the whole endeavor differs from even really, really hard racing games. Two of their four drivers were new to the series this year, and they'd be spending a couple of days getting up to speed with a track they'd never been to before. In fact, they invited me to see it in action as the team prepared for an upcoming race in the IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship. DIL sims are few and far between, and they tend to be in heavy use doing actual work.Īs luck would have it, the nice people at Mazda North America didn't laugh when I recently asked them if I could visit their sim.

No, I'm talking about the driver-in-the-loop (DIL) simulators used by professional racing teams-these proprietary setups that move and shake and carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

If being a faithful simulation is the be-all and end-all of it, then how do consumer games compare to the real thing? Not racing an actual car on an actual track- I answered that one years ago. Further Reading Can you really learn to race by playing racing games? Ars takes to the trackIt's not an argument I buy into, but it is one I've thought about through the years.

Professional driver or racer + timepiece