Like in a fever-dream, race tracks, canyon roads, and highways were all empty. People—including driving enthusiasts and professional racers—stayed home in droves in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Engineers behind the tech curtain refined and redefined dynamic driving simulations. The hardware and software to simulate racing grew exponentially. Professional drivers streamed their simulated race series. Formula 1 launched the "Virtual Grand Prix" with name F1 drivers racing against competitors who were professionals from the e-sports arena. Competitive simulation boomed when everything else in the world seemed to have shut down.

The world is open again, and race tracks buzz with the resonance of race cars. Post-COVID, many enthusiasts and hobbyists dropped out of the race simulation world. Yet sim racing survived its volatile COVID fad status. It's thriving and more relevant than ever.

The Real Deal

Wani Finkbohner of RacingFuel Simulators AG in Horgen, Switzerland, described the gamut of responses he hears from stakeholders involved in the simulation industry. "Sometimes sim racers tell me that our simulator doesn't feel real. Sometimes real race drivers tell me that it's useless. But they keep coming back, and at the end it becomes indispensable for their training."

The "real deal" has been the focus since the start of sim racing. However, the "hardware was far behind software development," said Finkbohner.

"Our motivation was to build hardware as close as possible to a real race car—merge the two worlds and make it a beautiful and compact training machine," he said. "Our customers are mostly drivers and teams, but also institutions like universities. We are very obsessed with getting close to the 'real deal.'"

Dynisma in Bristol, United Kingdom, consists of a team of talented engineers who created an incredibly accurate, data-driven simulator specifically tailored toward the likes of F1.

"It's all about real correlation between what you see and feel in the simulator with what you get from the real car," said Simon Holloway. He stressed the importance of what the driver feels while using the simulated vehicle model, expressing how vital it is to have a one-to-one correlation when testing. "It's not just the vehicle model and the behavior of the vehicle itself. It's the tire model, the powertrain model, the aero model, and what you're driving on.

"What the physical tire is running over is obviously very important as well," he added. "We use LiDAR [Light Detection and Ranging] scan data for the surface the vehicle is actually driving on so that we can get really good correlation between the tarmac, the tire behavior, and the vehicle behavior, which then all leads to the performance."

The accuracy derives from telemetric data collected from the real race car. Engineers create a digital twin—a virtual replica of real-life conditions a driver sees, feels, and experiences on track, uploaded into the simulation. That includes factors like tire degradation, aero changes, weather conditions, "even down to the vibration from the powertrain," said Holloway.

Capturing the full scope of data from the race car, track, and weather conditions enables the engineers to create the correlating motion that mimics what drivers experience in-car. This increases driver immersion, which Holloway described as "closing the loop between the virtual model and the real driver-in-the-loop behavior."

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