“Training makes perfect.” That’s what you tell yourself when you’re throwing in an old tire, with NFL dreams, or shooting through the garage door and envisioning hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup.
How can you get a perfect one, though, if all you need to practice is turning a 3,300-pound stock car at will? After all, there’s no easy (or legal) way to get into a NASCAR Cup Series car and race your friends around the neighborhood.
Well, there wasn’t. With the advent of simulator racing, though, that’s changing — and fast.
As anyone who has played with the latest PlayStation or Xbox can attest, video games are more realistic, more lifelike and more immersive than ever. Today’s gaming hardware is so advanced that popular titles such as Forza and Gran Turismo can accurately recreate the experience of real car racing.
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If consoles are opening the doors to sim racing for the everyday gamer, PC-only offerings like iRacing and rFactor 2 are one step ahead.
“I found out about iRacing with a simple Google search,” said Anthony Alfredo, driver of the No. 23 Xfinity Series entry, told ESPN. “I ended up getting one of those Logitech wheel-and-pedal sets to play on my desk, and just like that, for a few hundred dollars, I was a racing sim.”
iRacing is arguably the biggest name in the ever-expanding world of sim racing. It is said to boast 225,000 active customers, including drivers from every major racing series in the world: NASCAR, Formula One, IndyCar and many others. McLaren driver Lando Norris has long been found roaming the iRacing lobbies, and 2021 F1 champion Max Verstappen as well as 2005 and 2006 champion Fernando Alonso have also been spotted racing.
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 will compete in the World Series of Auto Racing for Spire Motorsports and the Limited Xfinity Series schedule for Alpha Prime Racing.
And it is iRacing that has arrived here.
“NASCAR is where I wanted to race, and I’ve only wanted to race in real life since I was little, so the only way to do that, I thought, was to race online,” Caruth said. told ESPN. “It was never for the sake of online racing, so it was never my goal to start iRacing, but I knew it was a gateway to racing.”
It’s more than a gateway, though. iRacing is realistic that the company has worked with NASCAR to develop new circuits such as the quarter-mile track used at the LA Coliseum in February and the Chicago road course that will appear next July. Sim Racing has become an invaluable development tool — for drivers, teams and the sport as a whole.
A general trend in the motoring world over the last two decades has been a steady reduction in the time for tests and training sessions. This keeps costs down — in theory, at least — and ensures that the audience is treated to more action-packed content, whether that includes warm-ups or detailed qualifying sessions.
“I’m a driver in the NASCAR Cup Series, one of 40 in the world, and since I ran half of the 2020 Xfinity season, I still haven‘t been to many of these,” Alfredo said. “I think one of them, Sonoma, is a road course, and I take the green flag, I didn’t even see the place. So that’s where the actor was more useful than before. I’ve never seen it. A big role in play my game.”
During our conversation, Caruth opened up Virtual Racing School, an online tool that summarizes every move you make in iRacing and provides detailed telemetry (which he says he often compares to friends). real world additional ideas) and driver training, starting. to list the time spent in the various vehicles he drives on several different rounds in the last few days.
“I drove an hour and a half the other day to Watkins Glen, Michigan, because that’s my next ARCA race.”
Alfredo said that, on average, most NASCAR drivers will do about 10 hours of simulator work each week. Some, especially the big teams equipped with classic rigs made by manufacturers such as Ford, Chevrolet or Toyota, will spend even more time behind the wheel of technology.
What the major NASCAR teams can offer is multi-million dollar equipment, the result of years of research and development by some of the world’s largest car manufacturers. While there’s no doubting the accuracy and understated finesse of those characters, at their core, what they offer is the same feel you’ll find in sets costing tens of thousands of dollars in multi-driver housing and entry-level $300 rings. Replacements are available at any electronics retailer.
And that’s the line between, from video game to prime time, you won’t find it anywhere else in the game.
