-
Austin LindbergESPN FC
“Practice makes perfect.” That’s what you tell yourself when you’re throwing spirals through an old tire, dreaming of the NFL, or shooting pucks at the garage door and imagining yourself hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup.
How do you get perfect, though, when you have to practice turning a 3,300-pound stock car to your liking? After all, there’s no easy (or legal) way to climb into a NASCAR Cup Series car and race around the neighborhood with your friends.
Well, there wasn’t. However, with the advent of simulator racing, that is changing — and fast.
As anyone who has played with the latest PlayStation or Xbox can attest, video games are more realistic, lifelike and immersive than ever. Today’s gaming hardware is so advanced that famous titles like Forza and Gran Turismo can accurately replicate the experience of racing real cars on real tracks.
– Watch Formula 1 and W Series on ESPN all season long
– Don’t have ESPN? Get instant access
If those console franchises open the doors of sim racing to the everyday gamer, only PC offerings like iRacing and rFactor 2 take it one step further.
“I just discovered iRacing through a simple Google search,” Anthony Alfredo, driver of the Our Motorsports No. 23 Xfinity Series submission, to ESPN. “Eventually I got one of those Logitech handlebar-and-pedal sets to play at my desk, and it was that simple, for a few hundred bucks I was sim racing.”
iRacing is arguably the biggest name in the ever expanding world of sim racing. It is said to have 225,000 active subscribers, including drivers from virtually every major racing series in the world: NASCAR, Formula One, IndyCar, and several others. McLaren driver Lando Norris has long been hanging out in iRacing lobbies, and 2021 F1 champion Max Verstappen, as well as 2005 and 2006 champion Fernando Alonso have also been spotted in his races.
Rajah Caruth is another with significant sim experience. The 20-year-old will compete in the ARCA Menards Series with Rev Racing in 2022, and he will compete in select Camping World Truck Series events with Spire Motorsports and a limited Xfinity Series schedule with Alpha Prime Racing.
And thanks to iRacing, he came here.
“NASCAR is where I wanted to race, and I just wanted to race in real life since I was a little kid, and so the only way to do that, I thought, was to race online,” Caruth told ESPN. “It was never about racing online because that was never my goal to start iRacing, but I knew it was a gateway to start racing.”
However, it is more than a gateway. iRacing is so realistic that the company has partnered with NASCAR to develop new tracks, such as the quarter-mile track used at the LA Coliseum in February and the Chicago road course that will debut in July. Sim racing has become an invaluable development tool – for drivers, teams and the sport as a whole.
The trend in motorsports around the world over the past two decades has been a steady decrease in test time and practice sessions. This keeps costs down – in theory at least – and ensures that the public is treated to more track action with something at stake, whether that be extra heat races or more extended qualifying sessions.
“I’m a NASCAR Cup Series driver, one of 40 in the world, and since I only ran half the season in Xfinity in 2020, I still wouldn’t have been to many of these tracks,” said Alfredo. “I think back to one of them, Sonoma, it’s a road course, and I take the green flag and I had never even seen the place. So there the simulator was more affordable than ever before. I’ve never seen it like this” play a big part in my career.”
During our conversation, Caruth opened Virtual Racing School, an online tool that catalogs your every move in iRacing and provides detailed telemetry (which he says he often compares to real-life teammates for additional insights) and driver coaching, and begins to reduce the amount of time sum up what he has spent the past few days in different cars and driven on different tracks.
“I did an hour and a half last day at Watkins Glen… because we are going there in a few weeks,” said Caruth, “and I have an hour and a half in Michigan the last two days because that is my next race in ARCA .”
Alfredo said most drivers in NASCAR will work on average about 10 hours a week in the simulator. Some, especially in large teams equipped with custom sim rigs developed by automakers such as Ford, Chevrolet or Toyota, will spend even more time behind the virtual wheel.
What the biggest teams in NASCAR have to offer are multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment, the result of years of research and development paid for by some of the largest automakers in the world. And while there’s no doubt about the unprecedented precision and finesse of those simulators, at their core they offer the same thrills you’ll find in the setups that cost tens of thousands of dollars in various driver’s houses and the entry-level $300 wheel-and-pedal kits available at every electronics shop.
And that’s a continuous line, from video game to prime time, that you won’t find anywhere else in the sport.
“I think just coming from sim racing and becoming a real driver is pretty cool to say that I built my first computer when I was 12 years old, and that was the first computer I started sim racing on And from racing on my computer, I entered the Daytona 500 a few years later,” said Alfredo. “That’s pretty crazy because you don’t hear someone play Madden and then quarterback on a Super Bowl team.”
.
0 Comments