Good read

[jrfan381]

In NASCAR, simulators aren't just toys anymore
By David Caraviello, NASCAR.COM
December 30, 2008
12:24 PM EST

They communicate just as they would on the race track, depressing a button on the steering wheel as they barrel into a corner at 160 mph. Except they're not at the race track. They're at home, in jeans or T-shirts or pajamas, connected via the Internet, looking not out of windshields but into computer screens.

Some have spent thousands of dollars to build cockpits accurate to the tiniest detail, with pedals and gearshifts and seats that perform just like the real thing. On any given Wednesday night, Michael McDowell or Brad Coleman or A.J. Allmendinger might be there. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Martin Truex Jr. have made appearances. It's all part of an invitation-only simulation league featuring NASCAR drivers who battle just like they're at Michigan or Kansas. No, it's not real. Asphalt and tire dust are replaced by pixels and code. But it performs very much like the genuine article, a fact that's drawing more in the NASCAR community to simulators, once dismissed as just toys for kids.

They're not toys anymore. The cars, programmed with data supplied by crewmen from actual NASCAR teams, perform like real cars. The tracks, built off satellite imagery and input from actual drivers, perform like real tracks. These aren't video games, but serious performance tools that more and more drivers are using to try and gain an edge on the competition.

"What I like about it is, just being familiar with the race track when you get there," said Mike Dillon, director of competition for Richard Childress Racing and whose sons Austin and Ty use simulators to help further their racing careers. "Looking out the windshield, seeing the bumps on the track, most of them are pretty accurate. Heck, it's tough enough to get out of the garage and get on and off the track for a rookie at a track you're not familiar with. With some of these tracks on the game -- and I really shouldn't call it a game -- you start in the garage and you even learn what gates to go through. You get to learn the race track before you get there, and it's pretty accurate."

The industry has benefited from a generation of drivers that grew up around video games, and in general are more computer-savvy than their predecessors. People took notice when Denny Hamlin credited simulation training with helping him win at Pocono his rookie season on the Cup Series tour. Michael McDowell, who trains in a full-scale cockpit with a 52-inch plasma monitor meant to mimic a windshield, opened eyes when simulation work helped him win four races in ARCA in 2007. Before Clint Bowyer started this past season's Nationwide event at Montreal -- an event he began without a single lap of practice, because of the concurrent Sprint Cup weekend in Pocono -- Dillon asked Sim Factory, a company that makes a title popular in the NASCAR industry and hosts the invitation-only Wednesday night series, to put together a simulated Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Bowyer finished ninth, despite never seeing the track before the day of the race.


Kyle Busch spoke on behalf of Sim Factory at a conference earlier this year in San Jose, Calif. Drivers like Allmendinger, Coleman, Colin Braun, Brandon Whitt and Willie Allen train in simulators regularly. Before open-wheel driver Tony Kanaan tested a Formula One car in Juarez, Mexico, he had Sim Factory put together a custom simulation of the road course. Austin Dillon prepped on a simulator before a test at Iowa Speedway, and had developed such a base of knowledge before getting to the race track that his team was able to trim a full day off the schedule. Ryan Newman estimates that drivers can achieve on a simulator 60 percent of what they'd get out of a live practice session on the race track.

Accounts like that are helping simulators become more established within the NASCAR industry, where even people who aren't professed "game guys" are seeing the results. Robert Coulter, one of the founders of Mishawka, Ind., based Sim Factory, sees a parallel to engineering, which a decade ago was still struggling for acceptance in a sport full of drivers and crew chiefs who drove and set up cars solely by feel. Now, engineering is standard practice.

"We have tons of people who come in here. Allmendinger, that kid is in here every day, and he does it to get his skill set up. You're around 40 other people, real people, and you learn to get to the front," said Coulter, who has a background in military flight simulation. "I think it will get to the point where it is in the military and in general aviation, where you don't fly until you have hours and hours in the simulator. If you're going off on a sortie, you'll go over the entire mission in a simulator, right down to the bomb run. That's where we're going."

Racing simulators are nothing new; there was even a NASCAR-licensed racing sim on the market from 1999 through 2003, and the developers of that title recently formed a new company, iRacing, that launched a broad-based simulator last August. Sim Factory has been around since 2006, but its first attempts to get NASCAR teams to share data about how the race cars handle were met with closed doors. That kind of information was considered secret, and organizations weren't giving it out. That began to change once NASCAR introduced its new Cup car. Suddenly there was a treasure trove of information on the old car that teams didn't need anymore, and Coulter was successful in getting some organizations to part with it. The result was the vehicle in Sim Factory's popular ARCA title, a car that experts say performs very much like the real thing.

"The timing was ideal. All the spoiler stuff became outdated just as the game came out," said Mike Logan, a veteran in specialty fabrication who's worked for top Cup teams for a decade, and provides Sim Factory with much of the technical information it uses to build its race cars. "Teams are opening up to them. We converted the suspension, chassis, everything. They did a full body scan so they can run the 'twisted sister.' It's a real car, an actual car that raced in 2006. All setups actually matched. It behaves the way it should behave. All that stuff translates perfectly."

The result is a simulated car that's set up very much like the real thing, down to the smallest detail -- from shocks and suspension, to engine telemetry, to tire integration data. Programmers have even been able to mimic the car's aerodynamic handling characteristics "within 90 percent of real life," Coulter said. Very little of that would have been possible without input from teams. Time was, programmers had to build sims off driver recollections -- which are notoriously unreliable, as it turned out -- and their own assumptions. The degree of reality suffered greatly as a result. Not anymore.

"Teams bring everything to the table," Coulter said. "It's almost like sim racing has been locked in a cage, been a seed that hasn't been given water to grow. As NASCAR moves away from testing, and as more kids come up who are more used to games, it's only going to improve."

Simulating a race track is painstaking work that takes three or four months to complete. While some companies use laser-scanning methods, Sim Factory's preferred practice at the moment is to schedule flyovers of high-resolution satellites, and augment that information with blueprints, interviews with contractors who built the facility, and monitoring cars on the track for real-life data. They interview drivers, who might remember a certain dip or bump, or whether they drop down into a corner or swoop in. The goal as always is to make the finished product as realistic as possible, so drivers can prepare for the real thing without actually having to be there.

That certainly helped Bowyer this year at Montreal. Mike Dillon, aware that his RCR driver was going to hit the road course with no practice, and seeing the progress his sons were making on a simulator, approached Coulter at Gateway International Raceway and asked for help. Sim Factory found a version of the Montreal track, and fine-tuned it. Bowyer went to Dillon's house and drilled on the simulator, making lap after lap on Circuit Gilles Montreal. During a caution in the actual race, Bowyer radioed in that he felt like he already knew the race track.

"This driving thing, for somebody who has already raced some, a lot of it's about confidence, of having a lot of confidence once you get to the place," Dillon said. "Everybody has certain tracks they're really good at, and a lot of that is due to confidence. If you've never been to a race track, you're not going to have it until after you've made your first laps around the track, and you've wasted some practice time trying to get there."

If there's a knock against simulators, it's that they might produce drivers who are a touch too aggressive, and carry that mind-set onto the race track. It's easy to see why; Coulter said the Sim Factory cars have a tremendous amount of grip, almost inviting a three-wide pass in the corner. They're driven "down to speed," which means as fast as a driver can take them until he hits something, and the exact opposite of how cars are driven on a real race track. And many of the drivers who prefer sims are young, relatively fearless, and more willing to take chances on an actual or virtual track.

"Drivers drive in a sim pretty much how they do in real life," Coulter said. "The lack of patience is definitely there in every young driver. I think that's a product of their generation. Whenever they can get experience, it leads to their heads growing. Drivers are very cocky people, and they need to be. If they go into a sim and they find that comfort level to where they can push it this way or that, then when they get onto the race track, they may take more chances. You've got to transfer that to the real thing, where you face fear and the possibility of injury."

The simulation industry may have received a boost from the recent NASCAR ban on testing. "I think more next year than any time, they're going to be used," Hamlin said. "The more realistic they can make these games, the better it's going to be for these race teams and drivers."

Dillon agreed. "Now that we're not going to be testing anymore," he said, "it's going to be an ever bigger tool."

Sim Factory has seen a small increase in sales since the testing ban was announced, and more top drivers like Carl Edwards have inquired about custom setups. It's another step forward for an industry that for years has tried to make inroads in NASCAR, and appears finally on the verge of becoming mainstream.

"I don't think you can make a race car driver in a sim," Coulter said. "But I think you can make one better. By far, you can make one better. I come from military sims, and you don't put a pilot in a sim and make him an F-18 pilot. But you can make an F-18 pilot better. You can help him learn to make better decisions, decisions that help pilots get home, and keep race cars from getting wrecked."

[BlackKnight]

That was some very interresting reading,very informing....It's not hard to see more and more Nascar teams using simulators to get better results from their drivers the military's been using them for years for alsorts of training :