Saturday, April 14, 2007

How is the Real Thing Different?


Well, after my race at Kyalami, I thought I would have driven enough to make a few observations between real and sim racing.

There's the poop factor. You are travelling in a race car at some speed, and although you're in a controlled environment, you are always on the limit (wouldn't be much of a race if you weren't) and things can go wayyyy wrong in an instant - you're in control, and you have the responsibility. If you crash, that's it. In rFactor you can throw the car anywhere, flat out anywhere, because there is no consequence. Personally I'm not really that scared of doing harm to my body in a crash, I'm just worried about what it would cost afterwards. I'd like to keep racing thank you, but this mentality makes me slow. I'm sure it does. Where is the balance of putting it all on the line and being 'mature' about it? Patience.....a different patience to what simracing taught me.

The cars are not the same. You're not in the same machinery, this is quite a big factor of course :P But nobody quite realises this when you sit and watch on TV. All those cars out there are all in different condition....so much time to gain in pure maintenance alone, and that only if it's the same model of the car. There are quite a few chassis types and body shapes out there.

When you sit and wonder why you're slow, you can only do it sorta like this:

Just a printout of the timesheets. In rFactor you can exit to the pits, click on the faster guy and watch onboard with him to see where you're going wrong. But that's never enough, you end up asking him for his setup, to which you can compare side by side, and make changes in a few clicks of a mouse button. To change the anti-roll bar in a Formula Vee, you'd have to get it made, strip the entire front end to get to the inside of the front suspension, put it in, and finally when everything is back together again (probably a couple days later) then you have your new anti-roll bar 'setting'. Man you'd better hope you were right about that change....Being in the right gear at the right time is so important. In rFactor I have a habit of staying in a higher gear and keeping the revs low...it's faster. If you do this in real life, or at least in a relatively low powered vehicle like a Formula Vee, you'll be so bloody slow. Have to rev the crap out of it at every opportunity. It's also pretty easy to misjudge your speed entering a corner when you're concentrating on downshifting smoothly - you get the downshifts right, but you're just in the wrong place at the wrong speed in the corner...quite annoying, and you feel like a noob.

Driving the car is different. It's a car. In a game, its a wheel and pedals with basically no feedback. There really isn't much physical consideration of the goings on of changing gear, for example. My mind was well prepared for racing lines, etc, but the thing that got me in the end was the downshifting. You simply can't learn the tricky and evidently important stuff in a game - impossible. Being bashed around the car is kinda distracting too :P Everyone knows this is the main difference, the physical part of racing, so I don't need to go into that much. All I know is that I have to get a lot fitter for the next race :P

So what can you learn from simracing then? Totally useless? Ehhhh I think it taught me a lot....get your ass to the next post lol

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