There are some who would say karting is not “real” racing too. Not to mention people who take the position that rental karting isn’t really racing either.
As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter wether Sim racing is considered real or not. It’s here and it’s prevalent.
Seeing it as a threat, or an opportunity for karting is a personal choice.
I see it as an opportunity.
I’m not sure what the UK is like, but there isn’t much of a bridge from rental to race karts near me. I’m not even sure the tracks have incentive to push people to race karts from rentals, much less sim to race karts. Maybe the onus is on the racers or the kart distributors to do this.
I’m not in a position to own a kart right now but I’d love to be able to rent an lo206 or ka100 here and there, but the only options to do that seem to be reserved for people who are many tax brackets higher than I am.
This is on them. It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential for longer term sales in owner karts.
I think places like NJMP make a choice to not develop a comprehensive program that includes a rental ladder that leads to access to their owner kart program. Some places even have in between stuff like OKC speedy karts or club 100 or what have you.
There is probably a good reason for this and it’s probably money.
Though part of that may be perception. I get it that a fleet of karts is 250k spend. But, they lease, buyback, etc. Tanguy was telling me his place in France replaced 1/3 of fleet every 2 years and had a set maintenance schedule. Birel would buy back the old karts to facilitate the replacement. So while there’s a steep intital hill to climb, it might be more manageable than it appears.
half every 3 years, maintenance every 6 months
I feel like sim racing and real racing are already beginning to become interconnected. F1 teams use simulations to prepare for races for instance and now the GT World Challenge has a sim racing portion of the competition that counts towards championship points. I just hope that they don’t try to replace real racing with sim racing, I don’t mind seeing sim racing being used in real racing, as long as it doesn’t replace the real thing
Maybe nascar rain days!
More on the sim vs IRL stuff that I realize is really only tangentially related to this topic…
I personally don’t view sim as a replacement for the real thing, but that’s just my opinion - at least not as much as it would seem some other people do. And I’m not saying that anybody who feels like they get a lot of benefit in treating iRacing as a training tool for real life is wrong or anything like that. I’m just saying I’ve personally not found that much benefit in sim racing as it relates to karting, and that’s both in the amount of fun I have and in the skills that translate specifically from sim to IRL. I do have fun in iRacing, but I’ve noticed that the amount of time I spend on it decreases drastically in the weeks immediately preceding and following a karting weekend, simply because it just makes me think about how much I’d rather be racing IRL.
And regarding the skills translation, I definitely do agree with @Robaracing52 in that good IRL drivers probably have an easier time stepping into a sim vs the other way around. Anecdotally, I had a good friend of mine come out to a track one time last year and spend a weekday running around in my KA100. He’s a very solid iRacer - around 3k IR - but was still around 5-6 seconds off the pace in the kart at the end of the day. I have no doubts that he’d get there with a little more time, but I think there’s a whole lot of “feel” that goes into the real thing that sim just isn’t capable of capturing. Again, this might be very different for others and they’d certainly be valid in thinking that way, but that’s just my view.
I dont agree, mainly because when going from sim to IRL, you gain a new way to feel the car that is natural. From IRL to Simracing, you lose that feeling, and it requires a lot of time to compensate for that lost “butt feeling”.
I saw that happen with friends driving in GT4, struggling a lot driving in the sim.
3k isn’t great considering how inflated iRating is now.
I could see that happening for some people. Still, others might not rely as much on that “butt feeling”. I guess it might just be hard to generalize for everyone. Some may have an easier time going from one to the other and not as much the other way around, entirely depends on the person.
I never said it was great, just solid. IR is definitely inflated now with the influx of people, but still looking at the iRating distributions over the last several seasons 3k still sits around top 5-10% of people.
Your bro went from zero to ka100 in one day and because he isn’t as fast as you, who has how many hours logged, you’ve written it off completely?
He’s learning a new track, a new car, rear mount brakes all at once. The takeaway should be that if he mostly kept it pointed straight he’s way ahead of where most people would be.
That definitely wasn’t the point I was trying to make here. I thought he did really well given those circumstances, and certainly could get up there relatively quickly if given more seat time. It’s just the closest example I have of plugging someone with a decent amount of sim racing experience into a kart for the first time and seeing what happened, since the topic shifted to more about how analogous were the skills between the two domains. The same experiment the other way around would be to drop someone with lots of hours racing IRL into iRacing for the first time - how long would it take for them to get up to speed? My original guess would’ve been that the IRL driver would get up to speed quicker in the sim when compared to a sim driver to IRL, but I suppose it could simply vary depending on the person.
Again, 100% agree with this.
I can relate. After my most recent race I went 5 whole days without sim. I get a weird feeling where I’m almost scared to go back. Not sure why. But when I eventually do, all my anxieties fall away. I think it’s a sort of performance anxiety related to different mediums. I only feel it coming to sim from kart, not vice-versa. And, it’s an odd anxiety because I know it to be irrational because I know I will immediately adapt. I always do.
You can’t just take a skilled simmer and put him in a kart and expect to see anything other than someone who is going to learn faster than a non-sim noob.
Maybe it more analogous to driving overall is language, but what you drive requires you to learn that dialect. You have to do the laps and get the accent right.
Exactly. I wouldn’t have expected anything different. But on the other end, could you expect a skilled IRL driver to hop into a sim for the first time and look competent in a relatively short amount of time?
I agree 100% with Tanguy’s point here.
My background was IRL FF1600, where I, set lap records and won many races while racing with the fastest drivers in North America. After resisting SIM for many years (because “it’s not real”), I tried iRacing and got up to OK pace very quickly (0.3 - 2% off the quickest guys depending on the track), but the lack of feel still hinders me. Even after two years of actively work on it, I still feel like I’m driving with a blind spot… guessing what I should be ‘feeling’ instead of actually feeling it… and therefore, I’m still that tick behind.
I find it highly unlikely that you could find any really competitive IRL drivers who do not drive by feel.
Ultimately I view driving as a process:
This process exists in both SIM and IRL, so if approached with intention, SIM can be used to improve each step, and especially to expand one’s knowledge matrix, which is equally applicable to IRL and SIM.
Drivers going from SIM to IRL, will initially struggle with step one, because the perception of sensory information is just different IRL… there are now consequences. As Mike Tyson said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Well, driving IRL for the first time is like getting punched in the face with sensory information. 
This beautifully sums up my experience with sim vs IRL so far. Part of what I was trying to say was that there is a “feel” aspect that sim racing lacks, but I was trying to apply it the other way around in that you miss that “feel” component in sim and it makes it difficult to train that part up and apply it to IRL driving. I know I personally find it critical when racing IRL, and that’s part of what made trying to treat sim as a training device for karting challenging for me personally. That same lack of feeling in sim also factored into my own personal theory of why you can’t really expect a competent sim racer to step into a kart and expect them to be competent while flipping that script isn’t as outlandish - but you’ve definitely given me more to consider here…
I really like this process summarization and your explanation for why drivers can tend to struggle going from sim to IRL. It definitely gives me more to think about that I probably wasn’t considering before. Thanks for sharing this.
Not really. The first time sim driver will likely overdrive braking zones. They will need time to learn how to “feel” the sim. The sim communicates with you differently and less completely. But, once you adapt to it, there is more than enough there to drive as completely as you do IRL.
Admittedly me and Warren have put some serious coin and effort into our “karts”, chasing that sense of feel.
When I got my fanatec and I gave my old tx to Warren, he almost immediately switched to something better, seeking feel.
So clearly he recognized that there was something interesting to explore here and that it had limitations.
Glad to help Jake!
In SIM I find high-speed, and most mid-speed turns feel essentially the same as IRL (perhaps because the loads build more slowly), but I tend to struggle getting a feel for ‘the limit’ in hard braking zones, and in achieving/maintaining optimal tire loads when turning into tight turns following a hard braking zone.
Anyway, in addition to the high-level ‘information management’ driving process I mentions above, each ‘step’ in that process has multiple cause-effect sub-processes. For example, a very slight alteration in line, can impact how loads build in your tires, which can influence how quickly rotational forces build, which can influence when/where/and how hard you can/must get on the gas to control the rotation and begin the exit phase of the turn. And of course, all of the preceding influences where and how quickly you exit the turn.
I call the understanding of these cause/effect relationships your driving knowledge matrix, and SIM can be very effective for building and integrating the explicit and implicit information in your knowledge matrix because you can ask (and investigate) questions like “Why is the car behaving like this” “How can I get the car to rotate more (or less) aggressively, but still apex at the spot I want” “How can I adjust my line/loading/rotation to compensate for the transition to off-camber mid way through this turn”. In SIM, you can try anything you want, replay it from multiple camera angles, and analyze the cause/effect relationships in data. However, IRL, there are potential consequences to experimenting with your driving technique, so only the supremely confident (or foolhardy) experiment at the edge; the rest tend to be a bit more restrained in their experimentation.
This little booklet might give you some ideas about where to dig for speed (or questions to ask yourself) when training in SIM.
Good Luck!
Word. I drifted the entire penultimate corner at lime rock last night. There is no damn way It would occur to me IRL to even try.
There are plenty of times I will intentionally shock the system to achieve a different rotational point, to see if it works. These are dicey moves that we can experiment with at our pleasure in sim.
Irl it is harder to overcome the self-protection impulse.
Your view on sim racing is a bit the same as my view.
But I think the aspect where a sim really helps, is your decision making on track. Because, racing is a bit like chess on high speed.