Can Virtual Coaching Turn Into Real-World Winning?

At 38, racer Patrick Long is the only American Porsche factory driver, still has plenty of years left as a sports car racer. After all, his mentor, fellow Porsche shoe Hurley Haywood, scored a podium finish in the 2012 Rolex 24 At Daytona at age 64. But Long has seen a quantum shift in professional racing since he began his top-level …

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I know that sim racing greatly accelerated my learning in real life. I might be lucky to get 15-20hrs of seat time a year on track. In the sim I can easily do 5-10x that amount over a year and that's not a super dedicated program either. Just a casual league night or two. I went from not having had done any performance driving  in 20 years to winning my class in autox in under 2 years. At track days I rapidly went up groups. I got to experience working on racecraft and driving close in a way that you wouldn't be exposed to for years in a more traditional  program. The biggest thing missing is the pucker factor. I'm still quite a bit faster in sim just because I'm not willing to take risks in real life that are just at reset in game. 

In reply to theruleslawyer :

Your last sentence makes complete sense to me; you and the car are not easily "reset" in the real world.  The gains to be made from SIM training appear to be huge.  Plus, the price has come down on a lot of the equipment for home use to learn tracks, etc.  I despise a lot of technology, but this is actually stuff I like.

theruleslawyer said:

 I'm still quite a bit faster in sim just because I'm not willing to take risks in real life that are just at reset in game. 

And another great example for why real race cars actually run on money. If you're rich enough, EVERYTHING has a reset button. They say you should never track anything you can't afford to crash and walk away from, but there's folks out there who could crash their car into the factory that built it then careen through a field of Fabergé Eggs on the way back to the pits, only to say "Fix 'er up I think I can get another tenth."

I'm completely convinced that Sim skills translate well to real cars but they don't always go the other way.  I'm a competent race car driver but a terrible Sim racer.  It's possible that with enough seat time I could get past the missing feedback but it hasn't come close to happening so far and frankly, I'm not convinced that's the best use of my limited racing and race prep time.  I think that I'm better off watching videos, exercising and tweaking the car(s).

In reply to APEowner :

Yah, i hear that a lot. You are driving half blind in terms of feedback.  Some F1 drivers say they don't like it because of the difference in feedback.
 

Fwiw you've probably spent years to get fast in car. Expecting to perform the same off the bat in sim isn't a good assumption. You'll have a leg up on someone with no motorsport experience, but you won't be at the same level either.

In reply to APEowner :

Yah, i hear that a lot. You are driving half blind in terms of feedback.  Some F1 drivers say they don't like it because of the difference in feedback.
 

Fwiw you've probably spent years to get fast in car. Expecting to perform the same off the bat in sim isn't a good assumption. You'll have a leg up on someone with no motorsport experience, but you won't be at the same level either.

APEowner said:

I'm completely convinced that Sim skills translate well to real cars but they don't always go the other way.  I'm a competent race car driver but a terrible Sim racer.  It's possible that with enough seat time I could get past the missing feedback but it hasn't come close to happening so far and frankly, I'm not convinced that's the best use of my limited racing and race prep time.  I think that I'm better off watching videos, exercising and tweaking the car(s).

This is absolutely true. You see it with the pro drivers all the time. The guys who grew up sim racing (like Max in F1 or William Byron in Nascar) are brutally fast on the sim and in real life. The guys who never did sim really suck at it (you saw a lot of this in the 2020 pandemic racing that was done with iRacing). 

This makes sense; everything from a good sim still applies in real life and additional feedback from the car doesn't hurt. So if you learned on the sim you're good to go. If you learned to race IRL and you go to the sim, suddenly some of the things you rely on to drive aren't there anymore and you're f-ed. You need to re-learn to drive without some of those sensations. 

I think there's a second factor too. When you start simracing at 8, 10, or 12 years old or whatever you have a lot of free time to throw at it. When I was in middle school I enjoyed coming home and spending hours with NR2003 and GPL, even if I binned it every 5 laps. Most adults don't have enough free time to enjoy sucking at something for 500+ hours as they're getting the hang of it. 

I am an experienced racer looking to get set up in Asetto (it has my home track and i racing doesn't).  Can anyone recommend a good starting point on the web for putting together a moderately priced setup for the home?  I have googled and searched but feel like there are too many choices without some guidance.

In reply to cmargosi :

Just some things to consider and taking your budget and space constraints into consideration may help you decide:

• Think about going with an established brand as you'll find most of the best sims will have default wheel setting for those brands making it easier to start and fine tune your wheel and pedals. Having a manufacturer software that integrates with the common sims allowed me to focus on driving rather than sim setup though some love spending a huge amount of time on equipment set up.
• Load cell brake pedals are mandatory, at least IMO for those who drive on track IRL. my son, who is a ardent gamer, could use non-load cell brakes very effectively, which increase braking per movement, but load cell brakes, which base braking on force applied to the pedal instantly changed my driving and felt night and day in realism to driving IRL.
• Direct drive wheels are so cheap at the entry level that there is no way I would have the belt drive wheel I have now, which feels okay but has a slight bit of latency and lack of feel compared to the direct drive wheels.
• Get the most stable rig that fits into your space. Because the wheel provides the critical feedback in a sim without the other forces IRL, the chosen rig shouldn't flex and dampen the precious feedback from the wheel. I ended having to modify and brace my cheaper rig to get good feedback from the wheel and also to provide a good level of stability for the brakes to assist in getting the most from my braking feel.

I was into Forza, Gran Turismo, gravitating into serious racing sims before i finally started doing HPDEs and i think simming is very complementary especially using the above tips. hopefully this helps some.     

cmargosi said:

I am an experienced racer looking to get set up in Asetto (it has my home track and i racing doesn't).  Can anyone recommend a good starting point on the web for putting together a moderately priced setup for the home?  I have googled and searched but feel like there are too many choices without some guidance.

What does moderately priced mean to you?

JG Pasterjak said:

theruleslawyer said:

 I'm still quite a bit faster in sim just because I'm not willing to take risks in real life that are just at reset in game. 

And another great example for why real race cars actually run on money. If you're rich enough, EVERYTHING has a reset button. They say you should never track anything you can't afford to crash and walk away from, but there's folks out there who could crash their car into the factory that built it then careen through a field of Fabergé Eggs on the way back to the pits, only to say "Fix 'er up I think I can get another tenth."

On the other end of the spectrum there are people who crash a Challenge-grade car once and can never afford to race again, I've seen that at least once...

theruleslawyer said:

cmargosi said:

I am an experienced racer looking to get set up in Asetto (it has my home track and i racing doesn't).  Can anyone recommend a good starting point on the web for putting together a moderately priced setup for the home?  I have googled and searched but feel like there are too many choices without some guidance.

What does moderately priced mean to you?

Yeah a moderately priced for a home user might mean $300-$800 in controls and a $500-$1k computer, but in the grand scheme of sim options might mean something that costs into the 5-digits.

Assetto Corsa will run on a potato by today's standards so you can start with a used office laptop if you like, you'll just have to turn the graphics down. For a wheel you could start with a new or used Logitech wheel like a G25/G27/G29, these are decent and a brand new one will cost you maybe $400 with a shifter. For a few hundred more you could get some kind of proper stand/seat system to bolt the controls to, or on the bottom of the price range you can clamp them to a table and tie that table to an office chair with a rope. My setup has a folding stand for the sim controls (about $200) that I tie to an ordinary office chair with a rope ($20 for the chair from a thrift store and $10 for the rope and some carabiners for easy detachment), it's very compact and portable and also vastly less finicky than MacGuyvering a setup entirely out of ordinary household furniture (the big disadvantage of which is everything loosening up and creeping out of position with use), so I'd say it's worth it.

Once you're good enough to not be a major hazard (it's OK if you're a minor hazard ) you can join us in the GRM AC league, just check for the latest thread on it in the Simulation Central section.

I have a few friends who sim race and do actual racing. The largest thing they say they transfer from sim to track is layout memorization. Doing track walks is always super important but they have found when walking a track they have done on sim before they focus more on approaching the track rather then memorization. They find it to be a big advantage in terms of creating a game plan in a short period of time.