“It’s really hard to reach that 18-to-35 demographic,” said Patrick Daugherty, who manages sponsorships for Valvoline. “Gaming overindexes with young D.I.Y.-ers.”
I wonder about us old farts though. They are the ones with disposable income. I would have thought that covid brought the grey-hair set in.
"Despite being the official grill of NASCAR, Pit Boss Grills couldn’t afford to sponsor a front-running racer, which is reported to cost up to $35 million. That changed with eNASCAR.
“This gave us the opportunity to jump in on a primary sponsorship,” said Carlos Padilla, director of brand partnerships. “It allowed us to be live on a broadcast on a car, if you want to call it that, at a price point viable for a company of our size"
Cool! Wonder what that means. More sponsors out there for racing? Or more smaller sponsors?
Interesting insight just now during Rolex coverage. The commentators were speaking to Joao Barbosa who happens to be a big iRacer as well as a proper good endurance driver who is in an LMP3 for this event. They asked him how comparable iRacing was to the real-life race. Joao said the sim is very good for training focus on the long stints, it’s good for learning new tracks, and it’s good for driving basics, but he said obviously the sim can’t completely replicate the forces and feeling you get through the car. He mentioned how younger drivers who were raised on sim racing are able to pick up what the car is doing based on visual cues better, whereas old school drivers like him rely more on the actual feeling of the physical forces.
In my experience this is soooooo true. I never touched a sim until @Bimodal_Rocket talked me into it about 1.5 years ago. I progressed reasonably quickly, but once I was consistently running in the top split (Skip Barber), I just seemed to hit a silicon ceiling. I do OK (usually run in the top 1/3 - 1/2 of the top split), but I always seem to be 0.5 seconds/lap behind the ‘aliens’. For me, the visual/FFB sensations only go so far, and it feels like I have a huge blind (or blurry) spot that the vestibular sensations occupy in real life.
For me, driving is a process of extracting the pertinent sensory data, translating that sensory data into information (e.g.speed, grip level, rotation rate, etc.), and then interpreting what that information means. It’s like the aliens have developed a vestibular emulator that taps into the visual/FFB data, and spits out reliable (not just approximations of) interpretations of things normally associated with ‘feel’ (speed, grip, etc.) It’s so frustrating for an old fart like myself to be speed-blind.
That said, I have made some small recent strides by actively forcing myself to ignore (or offset) what my eyes are telling me. For example seeing/feeling I’m going as fast as possible into a turn, and mentally overriding that signal and forcing my self to carry more speed. Step-by-step, but it it all feels so weird; like black (or gray ) magic.
This may be Iracing. Comparatively, its hugely numb. I too, struggle finding the sensations of what the car is saying in Iracing. The chassis and tires dont have the same level of information.
I’m curious to know if your new motion rig helps. In kartkraft I felt physical forces. Not the same here.
Be careful to not allow observational bias to dictate a conclusion of what’s going on to fit prior concepts about what simmers do and real life racers do from a cognitive standpoint (research on this is very thin to say the least)
If research is very thin on a subject, then how is one to think about and develop a working theory about that subject other than by using empirical and experiential data? Any conclusion base on that can easily be modified or discarded once real science is finally brought to bear, no?
As long as the thinker owns the theory, instead of the other way around, then there is room to learn and grow.
Also, I’m sticking with old age as my excuse for why I’m slow.
I’m only jumping in because I have unease at the use of the theory in this context.
“A theory is an explanation for a natural phenomenon that is widely accepted among the scientific community and supported by data.”
I think you are saying you have an hypothesis that you are hoping will be supported by data.
“A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon. In other words, a hypothesis is an educated guess about the relationship between multiple variables.”
This is just my personal bug, usually in response to “Evolution is just a theory”!
I find that sim racing focus is harder to achieve than IRL focus. I guess it’s because we don’t get hurt or break things in sim.
That being said, I appreciate this insight because I think sim requires a more deliberate kind of focus, one that’s a bit harder to maintain. This may be due to it not being “real”.
Perhaps there is more than one definition of theory? For example, consider this alternate (less restrictive) definition from Research Methods in Psychology:
What Is a Theory?
“A theory is a coherent explanation or interpretation of one or more phenomena. Although theories can take a variety of forms, one thing they have in common is that they go beyond the phenomena they explain by including variables, structures, processes, functions, or organizing principles that have not been observed directly.”
That is what I was going for when explaining the differences in my perceptual and procedural experiences between IRL and sim.
I’m sorry I took this off track. Maybe I should of said scientific theory. A scientific theory is the outcome of the scientific method, which requires testing.
I think your explanation says the same thing, but its in psychologist speak so no one can check
) magic.
