Back when the basement troll ruled my subterranean lair, I despaired for his future. No sign of the competent, energetic and hard-working marketing executive he has since become, his days were spent in front of a screen, eyes glazed, fingers forever fidgeting. Alarms did not klaxon until well past noon, little beyond sweatpants and football jerseys were ever donned, and “friends” were avatars that one shared emoticons with. Like every parent of the digital generation, I despaired of what was to become of the sullen, bloated vampire living under my stairs.
One day, he popped up from his hideaway, all smiles and bonhomie, to announce he had learned some new tricks on his skateboard. I was beyond elation. Sports being a huge part of my life — and, until this point, not a factor in his — I thought this might be the breakthrough our strained father-son relationship needed. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I wasn’t going to inform him that skateboarding wasn’t really a sport or that I had no idea what the ollie or kickflip he now professed to be expert in was; I was just so thrilled he had found a passion that involved actual motion of limb.
If you’re a parent, you know the rest. Instead of heading outside, we returned to his dimly lit cave where he proceeded to … grab a joystick and show me how he could now “Xbox” a perfect backside Caballerial.
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The iRacing simulator gives racers a virtual lesson in racing.
Supplied, iracing.com
Now, nobody reading this — since, if you are indeed reading a newspaper or a newspaper website, you are, polls say, no longer a teenager — need be reminded that the online versions of most activities are vastly different from their reality. Digitized boxing, for instance, may be visually accurate, but it lacks something in the, let’s call it, intimacy department in comparison with the real thing. Ditto anything involving wrestling, weapons and, for the sake of this column, speeding cars. It would seem entirely appropriate, then, to simply dismiss all this Game Boy-ing as — parents, let’s shout it all together now — a waste of time.
Or not.
For the record, I hate games. I didn’t play pinball in university, I still don’t play cards despite the increasing pressure, at my age, to take on more sedentary pursuits. So, futzing around on a PS3 (every parent knows that stands for PlayStation) just fed into my derision of the gaming world. The lack of tactile feedback, indeed, the lack of any feedback at all other than some cheap-ass visuals, makes Gran Turismo as representative of racing in ‘”meat space” — that’s what the kids call the non-virtual (i.e. real) world, by the way — as porn does of sex. As far as I was concerned the verdict was in: Been there, done that and found the entire experience as useless as I thought it would be.
Or not.
My good buddy, Billy Smilovsky at Engineered Automotive, then spoiled all this sanctimonious smack talk by calling and inviting me to take a ride in his iRacing-powered simulator. Not quite the multi-million-dollar NASA-grade simulators the airline industry uses to train pilots, there was nonetheless a real Recaro seat to sit in, a steering wheel that had something similar to the resistance to turning one might find in a real McLaren MP4-12C and, particularly helpful to we of the old school, a visually accurate portrayal of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
Unlike the PS3 or Xbox “games” where my real life experience — I have driven the MP4 numerous times and lapped Mazda Raceway repeatedly — was completely wasted, I was almost instantly at home with iRacing’s “simulation.” Save the lack of tactile, seat-of-the-pants feedback — remedied if you’re wealthy enough to own one of the even higher-end simulators from VRX, CXC and Simcraft, which have pitch, roll and yaw action — everything was instantly familiar, making it perfect for experienced racers looking to learn the dips and doodles of an unfamiliar track. Indeed, many racers, successful or neophyte, use iRacing simulations to learn new tracks.
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iRacers Paul Kusheba and Tyler Hudson were among those who competed for the opportunity to qualify and race for a professional stock car race team this past summer.
Supplied, iracing.com
But here’s the thing. Experience, though it may be preferred, is not, as it turns out, necessary to get the most out of iRacing’s emulations. Like most common gaming rivals, iRacing’s simulations can be played, MMO-style (massively multiplayer online game; yes, I just learned it, too) against multiple competitors. And because the emulation is so very realistic — right down to forcing you to “warm up” the tires — iRacing’s on-track realism is, as it turns out, ideal for preparing even the comparatively inexperienced for real world racing.
Tyler Hudson and Paul Kusheba, both experienced “sim” racers, recently competed in the Peak Stock Cars Dream Challenge, a real-world “tryout” involving real cars, real horsepower and real racetracks. But both qualified for the Challenge by racing online — Hudson winning the NASCAR World championship, the highest-level oval series on iRacing, and Kusheba a 12-week Peak National Series.
What makes this story truly remarkable, though, was their relative inexperience in the actual cut and thrust of real-world racing. Hudson, 26, had only a year of asphalt experience in Super Truck racing to prepare him for the stock car portion of the three-day Peak tryout. Kusheba, 19, had some karting and Legends racing experience, but had never driven on dirt. Yet he excelled in a Late Model dirt car on Charlotte Motor Speedway’s ½-mile oval, all, he says, because he “practised” on iRacing.
Both surprised more seasoned racers by reaching the final three of the real-world competition before being eliminated by a more experienced Christian PaHud (who, as it turns out, also used iRacing’s simulations to prepare for the grueling stock car/go-kart/dirt racing Challenge). More telling, perhaps, is that neither Hudson nor Kusheba were running iRacing’s software on a fancy Dan tilting and twirling simulator. Nope, they honed their skills, like so many other inveterate gamers, using plain old desktop PCs and garden-variety steering wheel-and-pedals gaming consoles feeding their computer screens.
I wonder if their parents told them they were wasting their time.
Experience triumphs youth in this digital simulation
The original idea behind pitting me, a 57-year-old autojournalist with 28 years of real-life on-track racing experience, against an 11-year-old, who had almost no experience with video driving games (and, of course, none behind the wheel of a real car!) was to show how thoroughly youth dominates the digital world. And, had we fooled around on Gran Turismo 6 — where I, in a word, suck — that plainly would have been the case. But the realism of the iRacing simulation is so incredibly authentic that my experience paid off with something approaching expertise. But there’s no doubt that young Jake would have dusted my ass with a couple of days practice, despite the fact he could only reach the throttle pedal thanks to a pillow pushing him forward in the seat. More importantly, judging by the success of Hudson and Kusheba, a proficiency in iRacing might give Jake, should he want it, some proficiency on real-world tracks. The chances of me excelling in “sim” racing? Virtually none.
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