Verstappen is Right About Sims

It bugged the hell out of me that he doesn't say its all about karting, but he's right.

Welcome to a free episode! The audio version is me freestyling, I don’t just read so there’s always a bit more to be learned there.

I think karting is the top form of motor racing. If you purify the racing experience, karting is it. Now they have added stuff to karts that does pollute the ultimate racing machine (plastics etc), but still it’s the elite racing device.

Now, I reckon Max Verstappen is the best performing driver alive, perhaps the highest level racing driver ever. He’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t think anyone can get near him really.

He was also a bit good in karts!

BUT, I don’t think he’s particularly enamoured with the karting world. He is far more into sim racing for fun and driver development.

It might be because his karting days weren’t that much fun for him, and sims is where he can get serious and have some good laughs with his mates at the same time.

Whatever it is, when Verstappen says he has ambitions to develop drivers in sim racing, considering his level of self-development, I take notice. It is also remarkable that he’s off testing GT3 on the rare weekends off he gets, which I reckon is how he gets to take his actual sim racing experience to the track. I think his love of the simulator is the drive behind the whole GT racing project, and he wants his sim racing mates involved.

Why Sims and not Karting for Verstappen?

Honestly, it pisses me off that Verstappen indirectly snubs karting by omission and talks about budget and how sims are the future. People also spend a fortune on simulators and the amount of time that goes into them is a massive cost. But that’s because I’m a karting guy, I take it personally!

So putting aside the fact I’d like to give Verstappen a bit of a rollocking, what is he seeing in sims that means he thinks karting can be left out of the equation.

By the way, I think drivers who have been paid for by family and academies all the way including Verstappen are, developmentally speaking, missing half the experience that can make a great man or woman. Without the struggle of finding your own way with the distinct likelihood of disaster you aren’t the full realisation of what I call the racing driver. At the same time, within that funny little world of F1, Max is the closest thing to it.

So, what did Max get out of sim racing that makes it such a big deal to him and therefore we should all pay very close attention to.

Obviously I don’t know him, but from what I’ve done with sims in coaching or for my own enjoyment and watching very skilful drivers hone themselves with sims, I can have a bloody good guess at why he is so into it, and why he’s probably correct that you can become a very good driver using just sims.

1. Intensity, Time, Flow, You’re Gone

Seat time at a kart track can be 10 to 20 minutes every hour, from 10am til 4pm. When I had endurance, I would drive a sim for hours at a time, barely emerging for sustenance. I could do that every day, and often would.

And that wasn’t fooling around time, that was deep intense driving. I could do a full Indy 500 race, then from what I wasn’t happy with go straight into testing. I had equations in my head for fuel load, tyre performance, stagger, camber and I had to resolve them all or I couldn’t leave the thing alone.

A 6 hour slog was not unusual, and I loved it. The learning was incredible and shapes so much of what I help drivers with now.

With today’s simulators, the intensity is multiplied with the realism. The immersion is total, and flow experience is addictive. With a modern sim you can disappear for hours, and not see the light of day. You feel like a vampire and commensurately weird, but the subconscious learning is huge.

I think the greatest thing I learned from sims is that you can raise your expectations of what is achievable. You don’t see it at the time, but it makes real world racing seem very disrupted and disorganised, and makes us seek to improve it.

2. Impossible Levels of Competition

The levels of opposition in sim racing are absolutely stupid. It’s where I first encountered the word alien, and the term is very apt for unreachable drivers. They often look like aliens too, because they are locked away for days at a time I’m certain.

I strongly recommend you choose to drive a popular car and circuit combination on a popular simulation, and master it to your own satisfaction. Discover how you can always go a bit faster until you feel like that’s it, you can’t even reach your best time any longer because it’s too good.

Then go online and search the world record times on that track and get crushed when you see you are 2 seconds off the pace!

Once you start researching and studying onboard videos that they publish, you will start improving on your own best time again. But you will find yourself analysing every single apex speed, every nuance of downshifting helping the rear of the car turn, sneaky little tricks and set up hacks (you can usually download the world record settings).

You are very likely to start blaming your own wheel, your GPU, screen, frame rates etc etc - just like with a real kart, there are many places to hide from finding your ultimate level.

Eventually you will race the top guys, or ones just above your level. Now the mano-o-mano drives start to take effect, and you will find yourself in a whirlpool of competition, grudges, revenge drives, jealousy, ego, anger, delusion, cheating accusations and all the other competitive drives that push you further and maybe create a bit of exhaustion and self destruction - but hey ho!!

But you get faster, you get a deeper understanding of driving. You understand the madness of what it takes to become an elite driver, and you learn how to switch it all on when needed.

For my purposes, you also take that intensity karting.

3. Never Ending Improvement

You can learn it from hammering away at world records, or getting into racing other humans and aliens. In sim racing, you will find that there is always another tenth, even without changing a thing. Set the track to zero evolution, same set up, no tyre wear and no fuel use.

You will notice that even you near perfect lap record was only NEAR perfect.

Then when you discover someone else went faster, you know for sure there’s more out there always.

The best example which is completely nuts, look up the dramas around the lap records in mario kart!

Take that attitude karting and you will become a driving force behind your team. It makes you relentless, and super focussed.

4. No more excuses, ‘it all Comes Down To Me’ Attitude Makes You a Winner

‘They all have better karts than me - I can’t possibly get near them’

… in sims it becomes

‘They all have more time than me to practise - I can’t possibly get near them’

The difference is you know on a sim, that the difference is you. If you set about immersing yourself in the improvement something very important gets learned.

It goes something like this:

I found a second a lap on the sim by going full into every possible detail. Granted it took me three days of solid driving and I aged 15 years in the process, BUT I found that time and I know a lot more about the real art of driving than these lot now!

That fact, and it will be an absolute irrefutable fact to you that vastly more amount of time can be found than you ever imagined before your sim experience, informs you that you can make up the difference between yourself and real life karting opposition. You know it’s possible, whereas before your feeling for the facts of life told you it just wasn’t worth the effort.

With that knowledge everything becomes possible. You have a new perspective on yourself that tells you winning is realistic.

5. Community of Freaks

I think this is particularly valuable to Verstappen. I think he found his people in the world of sim racing.

if you get deep into sim driving you will need to join forums and online communities to get your set ups and all the latest updates, solve problems with your pc and so on. You may even join a team of like minded drivers.

When you get involved with fellow driving freaks online where there aren’t limits to how much contact you can have, you can learn even more deeply and find every lap you make on a sim is part of something bigger. You’ll be finding improvement gains and communicating those gains to your mates online. That exchange cements your learning, and develops your abilities to communicate what your car is doing.

You develop your driving vocab, your skill for assessing a car and your understanding of how much more performance is available due to sharing your experience.

Take that to the kart track and you will become a dream to work with, and that means you get a faster kart!

Thanks for reading

Terence