SIM RACING – A NEW WORLD

Sim Racing – A New World

At the very basis of the BP All Stars Eseries is the iRacing online racing platform. It’s been around for years and is widely regarded as the best simulated depiction of real-world motorsport.

iRacing offers a plethora of accurately rendered global circuits, as well as many different racing cars. Happily, it added the Holden Commodore ZB and Ford Mustang Supercar to its garage last November.

To adapt the iRacing platform to Supercars’ racing requirements, contracted gaming expert James Cowan provided the level of computing power that allows these races to be run and a broadcast-quality image outputted. Cowan also worked with Supercars on last year’s iRacing-based GFinity series.

Another iRacing expert has been responsible for translating the real-world warpaint of each car into the digital realm. That realism has been critical in helping Supercars simulate a real-world Supercars telecast.

DRIVER’S VIEW

Mark Winterbottom has an enviable Supercars pedigree; 501 starts since 2003, 38 race wins including the 2013 Bathurst 1000 and overall victory in the 2015 driver’s championship.

And yet for all his experience and undoubted talent, the 38-year has no qualms admitting he’s got a lot to learn when it comes to being a competitive sim racer.

Winterbottom didn’t even have a simulator in the house until the BP All Stars Eseries became a thing. So this is by far the most immersive experience he’s ever had into iRacing or any other digital form of motorsport.

He’s quickly learned it’s not the same as the real thing.

“In terms of driving the car I find it’s all visual, there is not a lot of feel to it. It’s more visual and repetition,” Winterbottom said.

By “visual”, the Irwin Racing Holden Commodore ZB driver means he’s seeing the car’s behaviour rather than feeling through all his senses, as he would in the real-world.

ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS

If you’re an iRacing newby wondering what the hell engineers do for the Supercars drivers during rounds of the BP All Stars Eseries, let Tim White explain.

White is Supercheap Ford Mustang driver Jack Le Brocq’s engineer. The New Zealander is in his second year at Tickford Racing, after spending several seasons involved in sportscar programs in Europe and the USA.

That brought him in to regular contact with simulator programs, something Tickford has yet to dabble in here. It made him the obvious candidate to lead Tickford’s sim-racing project when the Eseries was announced.

“They are definitely not the same job,” he says of engineering in the real-world versus the virtual world. “We are all kind of finding our feet a bit and what it means to be an engineer in the virtual space.

“Whether it’s the tools we are using or our knowledge about it, it is evolving really quickly.”

Read more on about the Eseries and iRacing in the latest issue of Auto Action.

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