One serious sim. Six figures-worth of mechanical F1 computer fakery

F1 SimulatOr

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war of the wor lds

The virtual world is catching up with the real one, says Dan Read. Meet the ultimate F1 racing simulator

In a cold and mIsty warehouse in the dead of night, a strange machine shifts before me, lunging and shuddering like a monstrous wounded alien.

six bug-like legs support a skeletal pod, and in it there sits a figure dressed in black. the pod holds the bare essentials of a Formula one cockpit – sculpted carbon-fibre seat, steering wheel and pedal set. the figure reaches out and grips the wheel. three wraparound screens in front of him glow with an image of a racetrack. the image rushes towards him, the machine dipping and swerving as he cuts from one sweeping corner to the next.

this smouldering UFo is the world’s ultimate driving simulator. But although it may look like a game, it is absolutely not. stealing heavily from the aviation and defence industries, this is what F1 teams are using to get around the FIa’s in-season track testing ban.

simulators are nothing new in F1 but until recently they’ve been static, unable to give the driver a realistic

feel for all-round grip. this machine, made by a company called cruden in the netherlands, takes things to the next level, with full-motion tech usually reserved for apache gunship and jumbo jet pilots.

But to understand its importance, we must first know how it works. the most obvious assumption is that those legs are hydraulic. they’re not. the system is electromechanical and uses motors, bolts and threads inside the legs to squeeze or stretch them and shift the platform through its peculiar range of movement. It’s much more like a stiffly sprung F1 car, giving a crisper action, where as hydraulic systems tend to ‘bounce’ as the fluid compresses.

the other assumption is that it uses the kind of gaming software you get in a Playstation. It doesn’t. this simulator uses a complex physics ‘engine’ that tells those legs precisely when and how to move. the engine knows every parameter of a car and has thousands of channels into which engineers input every minute set-up detail – from the

gearshift speed to the grab of the differential to the downforce rating of each wing. that makes it sound simple, but those engineers are gifted mathematicians, the inputs are complicated algorithms and getting it right is something of a black art. they can even test new components – like brakes – by writing diameters, thicknesses and temperature thresholds into the code. this machine has as much in common with an arcade game as a Eurofighter does with a paper plane.

If you want the ultimate driving sim in your living room, you’ll need to dig deep. cruden charges £100,000 for an off-the-shelf pack with a pre-loaded physics engine. the computing power isn’t that enormous (seven £1,000-ish Pcs like the one you have at home) so it’s relatively cheap. But teams spend thousands more honing the machine – screens cost up to £10,000 each, steering systems £30,000 – and attach full racecar bodies for added realism, inspired by some military

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But despite the dodgy tummy, dom has put in a quite remarkable performance. “It really lets you feel the grip”, he tells me. “If the rear end starts to break loose, you feel it twitch right up your spine, so you can catch the slide as soon as it happens. It has a violent judder over curbs too.”

He’s gone a long way to proving that an experienced simulator driver can breathe down the neck of an experienced racer after just a few hours of practice. Give him a few days with a pack of seasickness pills and he’d be right on the pace. so could he be the future of F1 testing and development?

not quite. the difficulty is that, if you’ve not driven a modern F1 car, you can’t tell if the simulator feels wrong. Right now, test drivers are tuning the sims to match reality... and only then can the machine be fully trusted. twenty years ago, wind tunnels were in the same phase of infancy and some people believed they would never be as effective as a real prototype at a real circuit with some real wind. twenty years from now, with a decade of data sets and variables and techno development,

simulators could be equally as integral to the design of the car. and that’s when the specialist sim driver could take his seat in a test team.

of course, you will never replace real races, real racecraft and real risk. the simulator can’t ultimately recreate the bodybending forces the drivers face, nor unleash the surge of adrenalin they get from brushing a wall at monaco. But even they are reliant on the sims, especially when it comes to learning a new track – tracks like the virginal yas marina circuit in abu dhabi, which has been laser-scanned and loaded into simulators so the drivers can learn its characteristics. some teams are already working on the next level of realism and even have helmet tethers that tug the driver’s neck to simulate high-g forces.

and if the technology continues at this rate, imagine how, in the near future, you could press the red button on your remote, plug your simulator into a live race and experience an onboard lap just like a real driver does. according to rumours, this is already happening inside some F1 factories. But really, think about it. there you are, sat in your garage, strapped into your alien spacecraft as it receives reams of code from the real car at the real circuit, then replicates it in full and magnificent motion.

Every bump, every curb, every crash. now that’s entertainment.

versions that have neat things like gun turrets welded on.

all of which means that instead of spending squillions on flying big test crews and their copious kit around the world, F1 teams can develop their cars virtually, at a fraction of the cost. and that leads us to a big question. How do test drivers fit in to all this? If artificial intelligence takes over, do we need them at all? or will the F1 cars of the future be developed by specialist sim drivers? We were keen to find out, so we brought one along.

let us introduce domino duhan, one of the top virtual racers on the planet. He competes in iRacing, a web-based Pc sim that lets you race

against other drivers from all over the world, in anything from a stock car to a lotus 79 (we’ve reviewed iRacing in the magazine once or twice over the last year). If you were expecting a zit-riddled teen in nHs specs with grey slacks nipping his ankles, you’d be wrong. sims like iRacing are about the love of racing and are fiendishly accurate – dom’s fellow iRacers include dale Earnhardt Jnr and Jacques Villeneuve. It’s a way for purebred petrolheads to indulge themselves in all sorts of cars and circuits while mastering some proper racecraft and car control. It uses a physics engine similar but less complex than the one in the cruden sim.

to make things really interesting we’re also joined by a genuine racing driver, aston martin le mans racer darren turner, who knows his way around an F1 car after years of testing for mclaren.

dom and darren immediately click. they share the same favourite corners. they talk about lines and left-foot braking and their favourite cars, even though dom has never driven a real racecar in anger. then dom straps himself into the sim and slots his slimline boots into the cradles below the thin pedals. He’ll be driving at Barcelona in a 2008-spec F1 car with a high-downforce set-up, geared for 190mph on soft-compound, grooved tyres.

Dom manages a superb 1:21.6 before his eyes puff out like

baseballs. He’s experiencing a dose of motion sickness

F1 SimulatOr

turner reckons a 1:21 is a good lap here, so that’s the target.

It takes just half a lap for dom to find a groove and after 15 minutes he’s lapping at 1:24.2. Eyebrows are raised and cheeks are puffed. this guy has only had a driving licence for three years yet with the skills he’s honed on the Pc, he’s within three seconds of a genuinely quick time. He has a natural feel for the grip and intuitively slots the car into the sweet spot where the aero and tyres work at their best.

Remember, this thing isn’t a point-and-squirt video game. dom’s inputs must be like those of a real F1 driver and the car responds just like the real thing. a fraction too much throttle and it will shoot you off.

turner goes next and, as expected, sets a great time of 1:20.5. dom manages to retaliate with a superb 1:21.6 before his face turns red and his eyes puff out like baseballs. What he’s experiencing is a light dose of motion sickness. Frankly, he looks like he could use a sit down.

Steering perfectly weighted – the graphics shown are only low-res

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Dom Duhan: probably more useful than luca Badoer