Counterpoint:
In 2013, TopGear took a top rated iRacing competitor (Greger Huttu) and put him in a proper race car. Yes, he had to bow out due to the physical stress eventually. However, He did really well while he lasted. I think it's a stretch to say "they are nothing like the real thing".
It's not just those hardcore simulations that translate well. Even standard console games like Forza and GT are good at predicting real world talent. Yeah, the first time these people get behind the wheel of a real race car, they will be sore af and probably puke all over the place. But a workout routine will build physical endurance and most people overcome the nausea eventually.
A dozen or so people have graduated from Sony's GT Academy (online racing competition) and gone on to racing professionally.
The basic finding was that just having played a lot of video games helped immensely because it means practice in careful hand-eye coordination. Also, real surgery is obviously different from virtual surgery, but there is strong skill transfer.[1]
full disclosure: I used to work for Surgical Science, primarily on the development of LapSim, their simulator for laparoscopic surgery.
[1]: https://surgicalscience.com/systems/lapsim/lapsim-validation...
The thing you have to remember is that it takes a demanding and specialized workout routine to get an experienced race car driver to the point where they can hold their head up through a turn in an F1 car. Some of the other demands put on a driver's body during a race are pretty crazy as well, particularly on a hot day.
That was 260 hp car that weighed 607 kg. Power to weight ratio is key here, and trust me, this is nothing like your usual full size car that also sports ~250 hp, but weighs 4 times as much. It might not be F1, but it is a real deal.
Means you can't continue I'd you're slowed down for a yellow flag or someone threw you off your line.
The physics works, it just doesn't add to the race other than spectacle.
The problem, of course, is that the testing for this is expensive, so it's all theoretical.
Heres the Netflix link: https://www.netflix.com/title/80204890
https://www.amazon.com/GRAND-PRIX-Driver-Season-1/dp/B078WFL...
The question is whether you can keep that level of focus and consistency for 2 hours of a real race under all that physical strain. And most people just can’t. That’s what’s impressive about real racers, doing all this stuff at 6 lateral G.
They really are like fighter pilots.
But if you don’t go full speed over a blind crest, you won’t be in even the top 10.
Takes a special kind of person.
In this instance the cars were less than a second apart. A HUD won’t help, human reaction times just aren’t fast enough. Doubt even automatic braking would stop in time.
A personal anecdote, my bouldering skills (no rope technical rock climbing) improved tremendously once I started top-roping (climbing much higher walls with a safety rope), as the rope gave me the confidence to try moves I never would have without the safety rope.
I used to race my modified turbo 500hp and I can tell you that game racing is nada to real life racing. Even knowing that taking a risk can cost you $$$ or your life is stressful enough.
With other cars on the track it’s many more variables to calculate and consider.
So let’s not kid ourselves. The delta is larger than one can anticipate without even factoring the physical stresses.
There are people out there who use simulators and very detailed data logging in their track cars to try and experiment with things like braking habits.
Saying it’s “nothing alike” honestly feels like gate keeping.
Obviously a video game played from your couch is not going to feel like hurtling thousands of pounds of metal around a track, but if you can’t drive in a sim, you’re probably not going to make it around the track.
And before you scoff at such a low bar, there are plenty of people who enter a realistic sim, try and go full throttle with 0 counter steering, and immediately lose control
Likewise, if you’re one of the best players in the world on a sim, you can probably hack it at commonly accessible levels of racing
After all, why is everyone in this thread acting like F1 is the only kind of racing? There’s stuff like SCCA Road Racing series that won’t require you to withstand 5gs of braking force...
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This is kind of like saying “nothing from a flight sim translates to flying” because the risk of dropping out of the sky to a horrible death isn’t there
But yes if you have a stock car and you take it on a race track you'll most likely be ok as long as you follow the rules.
Bone stock vs track prepped literally makes no difference (for the record my car is as track prepped as it really needs to be for the events I run and my goals on consumables, coilovers, roll bar, upgraded intercooler, fuel injectors for E85, ultralight brake kit)
I mean subie bros are out there running race clutches in street cars for no reason other than to say they do (even if they’ll never admit that).
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None of this has anything at all to do with the fact simulators let you practice _a lot_ of very important lessons.
Saying “nothing transfers” is 100% an ego play, because you’re really saying “oh yeah racing lines and all that textbook stuff is meaningless it’s all about if you can push it with the nerves of steel when you’ve got tens of thousands on the line in damages and possible injury”
... I mean there are people who unironically think that, but having those fundamentals that a sim can and will leapfrog you over someone starting from scratch.
Even just learning the track layout and markers is an incredible advantage that you can find in a realistic sim (and the friend I mentioned who treats racing much more like a science project than I have the time or funds to does this)
I mean, otherwise in what universe would someone be able to be compete in Spec Miata as their first door-to-door racing experience ever and not make a mess of literally everything:
https://www.mazdamotorsports.com/2018/02/21/john-allen-trans...
Given say 3 years to prepare I suspect many could make the jump, but it’s likely well below half.
The jump to F1 and even NASCAR is ridiculous...
Again, SCCA is a 50,000 member organization. NASA is another large racing org.
You should imagine that most NASCAR racers are not racing for the first time when they first enter a stock car, things like Spec Miata and even competitive go-karting are not any less “real” racing, to say otherwise is gatekeeping.
Physical abilities can be improved within a range, but once the competition gets good enough you need a baseline genetic competence to be competitive. As in you don’t need to be 6’10” to play in the NBA but you can’t be 3’2”. Further, being extremely tall reduces the difficulty in competing in the NBA.
On example not mentioned, is professional F1/Indycar/NASCAR drivers benefit from being able to rapidly change visual focus in ways that video game players looking at flat screens don’t need to. On it’s own not a big deal, but that’s just one difference among many.
Realistic racing sims will give you skills that transfer to racing. Period.
They will not give you _all_ the skills you need, they will not train your neck muscles to withstand 6gs, but they will let you understand the concept of a racing line, they will help you understand how shifting mid turn can unsettle a car even if they can’t replicate realistic shifting and a host of other useful lessons.
What this thread seems hellbent on doing is pointing out the sim won’t give you all the skills needed to race.
Well duh?
Especially if you set the bar at skills needed to race at a level .000001% of people who even race will ever be exposed to.
The average driver in any sort of competitive driving event (read: race) is probably doing something closer to a HPDE than an Indycar race...
Aka 30% of the population could do either, but only 10% could do both. (Percentages picked from thin air.)
Flying is extremely skilled focused, but you also need to pass an eye exam. The bar for airline pilots is low enough most people could do either, but with fighter pilots it’s less useful. With them people fail out of high g training before setting foot in a fighter, or have hay fever, or are to short or to tall, or etc etc.
Here’s a guy who went to Spec Miata as his first exposure to racing other cars from a sim:
https://www.mazdamotorsports.com/2018/02/21/john-allen-trans...
To put into perspective how insane that is, at High Performance Driving events (non competitive events where you get to drive around a track), you might expect someone to move to the advanced group where you’re still not allowed to pass in turns, and have to be pointed by after multiple years!
Some places would actually require you to take a year's worth of events just to get into a group where passing is allowed at all without an instructor in the car
This guy went straight into full on Spec Miata with purpose built cars and full on passing for his first event!
That would be like someone playing baseball for the first time in Minor League Baseball, it takes some extremely real and difficult to develop skill to do so even if it isn’t MLB...
My only question is what percentage could make the jump if given time and training. And if we’re already giving people time and training as a basic assumption then the skills they already had are irrelevant for that question.
The forces are just a lot for a normal person.
And they compare his speeds to pro speeds, what you’re missing is the average person would kill themselves entering corners at 100 mph.
There's still a big difference between the two, but "almost nothing in common" is not an accurate description. And there's a reason the top guys on either discipline can switch over and still be quite competent–if not world-beating–on the other side.
All of the top teams use simulators based on commercially-available simulation engines to develop the car and solicit feedback.
The skills are largely transferable for many drivers. There are a few odd cases–Michael Schumacher famously became too motion sick in the simulator to use it–but those are exceptions. Maybe you're one of them (and if so, you're in very good company!)
What I will say is that maintaining full situational awareness and keeping my racecraft sharp is more difficult in a sim, because the quantity and quality of the inputs just aren't as good as the real world.
Sims obviously aren't nearly as physically demanding (though a full-length grand prix will still leave me in a sweat by the end from concentration), but I find I have significantly more mental overhead in the real world as it's far more intuitive. And if the physical risk is a persistent stressor that takes attentional overhead while racing, then congrats, you're wired like a functioning human, not a racing driver!
Games can also get immersive and your adrenaline pumping. Now I'm not a racing pilot, and have very little track experience, but I know a few people who have, and have a nice setup for iracing at home, which according to them allows them to hone their reaction speed and try out moves and train moves. Yes you remove the physical part, but you do get immersed in the situation.
Point in case, Max Verstappen trained a specific overtake move on the Spa circuit at the Blanchimont corner on iracing with his teammates there [1]. And then he pulled off exactly that same move in a real race [2], which was one ballsy move to pull off irl.
But it's a very good example of the sims allowing them to fail without much risk gives them the possibility to experiment at will, and at least partially train their brains to handle such a situation.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y5-DZNjBOg
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=788IiRsxMqM (sadly potato quality)
FIFA is a game.
The difference is simulator's main focus is reality, games' main focus is fun.
If FIFA was for reality it would be closer to first person QWOP than isometric view of half of field where you have perfect information and you press a key and your player does whatever trick the key was designated to perform.
The substance of the game is lost and only visuals are left.
Soccer seems like it's on the other corner of the "implementation difficulty" matrix from racing.
It's pretty easy to hook up a ffb steering wheel and pedals to a computer, actually simulating the cars and track is the hard bit.
In soccer the actual simulation would be pretty simple - it's an elastic sphere bouncing around a fairly uniform surface and being hit by mostly solid body parts/boots without too many interacting parts. But putting the user into the world in a way that they get the necessary physical feedback is much harder.
MS FS was the engine for some military sims in the early 2000's, and Qantas pilots did IFR currency practice on it when I was flying in NZ.
Although the terrain was pretty good, what made MS FS acceptable for pro use were the excellent instrument panels.
I guess it's not the market leader for a reason
Not that I would consider FIFA a sim, but I have to assume that, like racing, at least some knowledge of the strategy carries over.
The reason why the question is interesting is because I love the notion that you can train in a less expensive context and then perform in a higher stakes one. I'm interested why some domains allow that and others do not. Flight simulators are another interesting case where mechanical skills transfer, but that's only a small part of what real world flying really is. On the other hand, by all accounts, drone racing sims are quite good for learning how to fly the real thing, since it's almost all mechanics.
Do you mean for combat flight simulation? Because flight simulation for commercial flight can pretty accurately replicate the whole experience, not just the mechanical skills, when you include people playing the role of ATC etc.
that feeling of the center of rotation shifting is extremely helpful when loading the car, and sure you can just go by track memory on sims, but it's not the same thing.
But when I'm driving in VR in iRacing or Assetto Corsa I can tell when the rear is about to step out. It can't be track-based memory because I can tell on tracks I've never driven on before. I don't think it's through the wheel, but rather some sort of visual cue about how the car is moving.
I would assume that visual cue is there in a real car as well, but isn't needed because you have the physical feeling.
ah well that's something I never tried; do you have the same sensation of control while driving on a standard monitor?
This actually had a fair effect on my race performance, too. I was typically around the middle of ACRL's second split in performance for GT3. You can see the effect VR had on my results (split 2 unless noted otherwise):
* Imola: 18th
* Red Bull Ring: 19th
* Monza: 6th (split 3)
* Spa: 16th
* Paul Ricard: 10th
* Bathurst: 4th (got VR the week of this race)
* Silverstone: 2nd (my first podium)
And then from the season 3 months later:
* Mugello: 8th
* Donington: 3rd
* Zandvoort: 8th
* Nurburgring GP: 5th
* Interlagos: 21st (got into split 1 for the first time)
Other drivers which mostly take their information visually, they tend to do much better and have less issue adapting.
Obviously the feel is not the same, but many drivers use it for training and find it quite enjoyable and useful. To dismiss it because you don't smell fuel and tyres or get g-loads in the corners is too simplistic.
A flight simulator without a good instructor is a great way to learn dangerous fundamental habits you'll spend many dollars in an airplane to correct. (Ask me how I know.) Some people can never fully correct those habits.
You'll also be significantly out of pocket. Still, it's being done.
(I'm an iRacer, not a very good one, but I've also been on racetracks in a modded road car on V8 ute supercar training days doing ok to mingle / being traffic with the fast guys and can say 100% that the skills transfer).
The last 5% will cost 95% of the money, as with anything.
Yes the feeling and even smell of the race track, that's beyond emulation. Had a GSXR600 a long time ago, after a CBR250RR. went to the track a number of times.. Scraping my knee on Philip Island doing 180km/h, starting to have the rear slide out and catching it by only gently rolling off (#1) the throttle ... the sheer thrill of the realisation that I mastered my fear of death... Impossible to put into words, and definitely impossible simulate.
Yet, this is all we have for the time being. A number of high profile drivers were already using the laser scanned tracks and iRacing to practice their race craft prior to races. They've spent a lot of time customising their rigs and settings to their exact preferences, I'm sure this also becomes a factor.
VR is also getting better, although FOV is a limiting factor we're only just starting to improve on. (I've only tried Lenovo Explorer, immersion is amazing but struggle to see the other guys.)
With the increased attention, this is a huge opportunity for growth in the sector. One thing is for sure: ESports will never be the same.
#1) the more natural untrained instinct to chop it would have caused a high side which at that speed would very likely have killed me
Pro Gran Turismo players have been banned from competing as gentlemen drivers because they're too good.
For folks not familiar with the concept of a "gentleman driver", there are plenty of racing series that pair amateur drivers with pro drivers to compete in teams. Historically, the gentleman driver provided the funding for the team. These were wealthy enthusiasts who were often quite good, but not good enough to be professional.
However, it's not actually required that the gentlemen driver fund the team. This encouraged teams to seek out the best non-pro drivers possible, which in this case, happened to be some pro Gran Turismo players.
https://jalopnik.com/expert-gran-turismo-drivers-cant-race-i...
I will acknowledge that Formula One (and similar like IndyCar) are on a whole other level compared to most other 4 wheeled motorsport though.
I was a winner at Playscape Racing
This brings to mind, when Jeremy Clarkson did this segment on Top Gear, where he "practiced" going around a certain turn in a certain car on a Sony Playstation (forget which model, maybe a 3?) and then tried to do it in real life.
Totally different! IIRC, the biggest thing was, that he knew he didn't have his life on the line on the game, and he totally knew that in real life.
I've had the experience of having a rifle pointed at me during a street robbery. (I was the victim.) There's something very visceral, something operating at a level way below verbal consciousness, where you KNOW your life is on the line.
A good simulation obviously only lets you see from the eye position of the driver, so the complaint is usually that you see less than in a race car because you only have a small screen and a poor sense of depth. Today I hope anyone serious about “pro” level simulation just uses VR. It gives stereo depth, you can look out side windows etc.
Obviously if you run a racing sim in an office chair with a cheap pair of pedals and a cheap steering wheel then it’s not going to be close to the real thing.
Real life engineer made a data analysis between a virtual F3 car vs real F3 car, keep in mind rfactor is an old sim from 2005, sure you can't (Yet) replicate the g-forces of the real thing but everything else is pretty close.
https://drracing.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/how-close-is-close...
"From lap time simulation to driver-in-the-loop: a simple introduction to simulation in racing"
https://f1esports.com/news/esports-star-enzo-bonito-defeats-...
[Apple II] Olympic Decathlon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slm2oHqD1ik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Decathlon
[begin marketing bullshit]
>Reception: Decathlon received the Creative Computing Game of the Year Award at the 1980 West Coast Computer Faire.[4] BYTE in 1981 called Decathlon "a great party game"[5] and "a remarkable simulation ... challenging and entertaining", praising the adherence to the real decathlon's rules and the TRS-80 and Apple II versions' graphics.[4] Computer Gaming World stated in 1982 that Decathlon "has all the characteristics that are required of a long-lasting, quality game". It described the game as having "superb graphics and sound", and concluded that "it is an important contribution to the computer gaming hobby".
>Former decathlete Douglas Cobb wrote in PC Magazine in 1983 that "this impressive, realistic game brings back vivid memories and provides exciting entertainment through all ten events. The jumping and throwing events are particularly authentic, applying theories used in actual competition. Strategies combining speed, timing, and direction are authentic enough to help an Olympic hopeful train on the basic principles behind the individual events". In 1984 InfoWorld stated that "no one's topped it yet. If I were Microsoft, I'd market the heck out of [Decathlon] this summer."
[end marketing bullshit]
>Legacy: Olympic Decathlon preceded Konami's Track & Field and The Activision Decathlon, both of which were released in 1983 and have similar gameplay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement_(gameplay)
>Twitch vs trick: Some forms of micromanagement involve continuous input of a large number of commands over a short period of time. This is known as twitch micromanagement. For example, a micromanagement technique known as kiting requires continuous input from the player in order to keep their character at an optimum distance from a target. Another example of twitch micromanagement can be found in racing games whereby a player is required to keep making split second adjustments to the position of their vehicle.
>In contrast to twitch micromanagement, some game elements need only occasional input from the player in order to exploit tricks in their behavior. In these situations, quick thinking is rewarded over continuous, quick reaction. This is known as trick micromanagement.
>Other types of games are based entirely on micromanagement, such as pet-raising simulations and games like Cake Mania, where the player's ability to micromanage is often the only skill being tested by the game.
Game Helpin' Squad does spot-on parodies of actual games (and entire genres)! The chat messages and menu trees and popup texts that fly by are hilarious and worth pausing and reading!
"Time Travel Understander" is a parody of Braid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_(video_game)
"World Quester 2" is a parody of all D&D/RTS/RPG games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns
"Pretend Gas Station" is a parody of SimCity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMeWas4kXM
"Solitaire Party" is a parody of all card games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBbMb3X2R8A
"Burgers and Guns" is a parody of GTA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2VaHd29DEc
"Chronochores" is a parody of I have no idea what, some kind of housecleaning simulator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vu5MrYzVbY
They also did "A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave":
But in the context of sports-as-trillion-dollar-entertainment-businesses, what is interesting here is not whether simulated racing is the same as racing IRL for competitors, but the degree to which it is the same for spectators.
Your comment still stands, though!
Once again, random person on HackerNews, or the words of someone who has successfully made the leap:
"Of course you feel the G-force which you don't in the game, but you're so tightly strapped into the seat, that it's not really an issue."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/apr/07...
Here's another eSports star on the track:
https://futurism.com/sim-racing-virtual-motorsport-beat-form...
https://f1esports.com/news/esports-star-enzo-bonito-defeats-...
These guys are not down at the local track on the weekend, lapping grandpa; they are racing competitively at a high level. Obviously sitting in your living isn't the same as the track, but stating "almost nothing in common" is certainly not the case.
(What did you race?)
It isn’t so much a question of realism, but usefulness as preparation and working out a plan and a rythm.
Max is competing all the time in more serious sims like IRacing, rFactor2 or the like.
Lando is taking it a bit more casually so he is racing in F1 2019 as well, but he participates in iRacing races as well.
Of course, playing Kriegspiel is nothing like actually standing on the battlefield in the era of Bismark, but nevertheless, the generation of officers who were trained in the simulation were better prepared for their first battle than those who weren’t.
The Discovery channel had an episode of "On The Inside" where they profiled the Benetton F1 team. There was a lot of talk about how going into a turn and pressing the brake was like doing a one legged weight press while going side ways at multiple Gs. They showed all the conditioning that went into preparing for this etc etc
Then, they interviewed the team doctor who described how he got a chance to sit in the cockpit during a wind tunnel test. His recollection: "Everyone talks about the side to side Gs but honestly, after just a few minutes sitting in the cockpit with race condition wind speed, I could barely hold up my head. These guys really are super men."
https://twitter.com/RaceOfChampions/status/10870836895221555...
I have beaten a seasoned champion in a Rally competition a couple of times (means I arrived before him), but he won the championship that year, I was in the lower 20% of the rankings at the end of the season
Being a champion is not about the single performance, is about consistency over the years
What was the cause of that? You mention "no motivation whatsoever" but I know nothing about the racing world or what kind of preparation-mental or otherwise-goes into being a competitive driver; what does that mean here in terms of how it affected the results so disparately for the two of you at the end of your season (not sure if "season" is the proper word for your sport, apologies if there's a more correct term), and how would you compare it to Enzo Bonito's two victories?
I know very little about the racing world other than having an appreciation for the mechanics and engineers who create such marvelous machines, but otherwise I know absolutely nothing about what it means to be a racer, if that makes sense.
Well in my case it's quite easy to explain: I'm not a professional driver, but I've been competing in the same races over and over, there are tracks were I have good runs, because I know the place since when I was a kid and I remember every curve and know every trick, others I just try to get to the end safe and am generally terrible with regards to timing.
The other thing is experience in difficult conditions: if my gearbox get stuck in fourth gear I just retire, I don't have the skills to drive in those conditions and still enjoy it, professional drivers know how to handle it to get to the end of the special stage without losing too much time, get the car fixed and keep going.
Every single point counts when you're racing for the lead.
Another aspect is the kind of risks you're willing to take.
In rally competitions in Italy, especially the smaller ones, local drivers usually get out on top after the nightly stages, but when the sun comes up the real pro start climbing the rankings and fight for the victory.
They don't wanna risk anything when it's dark and are simply so much above the average that their "night strolls" allow them to be in the first ten positions, without too much hassles.
Having dealt with pro drivers as a technician on the field and as an hobbyist pilot, the real difference is the attitude.
A professional driver can make mistakes, like everybody else, but won't get easily distracted or get down by them and consistently race at the best of their abilities even when it's not the best day.
That's why they win championships while I simply try to look good when I race in my hometown in front of my friends :)
Thinly veiled attempt to use online comment forum as a personal blog.
Simulator racing is pretty different from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. There's so much shit that you can buy to get you closer to the real deal. Not really so much the case with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.