Tim Heinemann: From Sim to DTM - and the Top of the Standings

Richard Wilks · May 30, 2023

So another real life racing driver, that ran out of money, turned to sim racing, then got back in real racing thanks to patronage from one of the big names in German Racing? Well happy for him, but hardly "sim to real racing".

Andy Kettler · May 30, 2023

Awesome performance from Tim in both races at Oschersleben

Eckhart von Glan · May 30, 2023

many of the sim racers who "made it" in real life had a real life career before sim racing. Sim seems to be a good way to draw attention to yourself, which is great. I seem to remember he was not universally liked as a sim-racer, other players complained about his on track behaviour but maybe that was just jealousy.

GT-Alex · May 30, 2023

Eckhart von Glan said:
many of the sim racers who "made it" in real life had a real life career before sim racing. Sim seems to be a good way to draw attention to yourself, which is great. I seem to remember he was not universally liked as a sim-racer, other players complained about his on track behaviour but maybe that was just jealousy.

I'm a big advocate for giving simracing talents their chance, but at some point, if you want to do the "real" thing, you have to actually touch the thing. You can take a simracer who never had track experience before, but you need to make sure they'll have the necessary physical endurance and allow them an acclimatation period. There are some talents out there that can be made operational very quickly, but someone has to give them support. Biggest obstacle right now being team owners still being mostly old fashioned and closed to change. But talent detection through simracing is the future, it's cheaper and provides you with a way bigger pool of people to look at.

Richard Wilks · May 30, 2023

GT-Alex said:
I'm a big advocate for giving simracing talents their chance, but at some point, if you want to do the "real" thing, you have to actually touch the thing. You can take a simracer who never had track experience before, but you need to make sure they'll have the necessary physical endurance and allow them an acclimatation period. There are some talents out there that can be made operational very quickly, but someone has to give them support. Biggest obstacle right now being team owners still being mostly old fashioned and closed to change. But talent detection through simracing is the future, it's cheaper and provides you with a way bigger pool of people to look at.

Cheaper for who?

For the team owners is a lot better to pick someone from real racing rather than sim racing. They will be more up to speed, having spent their own money and time up until then. Why would a real team or organization go fishing around people from simracing, who still need to build themselves in a real car, not to mention the fact that then it won't even be clear if they can cut it in one, rather than pick someone with credentials in a real thing?...

Ole Marius Myrvold · May 30, 2023

Heinemann.dll

I don't think I've raced against many other simracers with the amount of controversies as this guy. Bans for cheating etc.

Nice to see people that are known for simracing getting results in the real world, but just like with Stoffel Vandoorne... It's not all sunshine in the simracing-story

GT-Alex · May 30, 2023

Richard Wilks said:
Cheaper for who?

For the team owners is a lot better to pick someone from real racing rather than sim racing. They will be more up to speed, having spent their own money and time up until then. Why would a real team or organization go fishing around people from simracing, who still need to build themselves in a real car, not to mention the fact that then it won't even be clear if they can cut it in one, rather than pick someone with credentials in a real thing?...

Because it's way easier to get actually talented drivers from the pool of simracers.

If we're talking very high budget, top profile teams, they run detection and academy programs already, going through simracing would allow them to cut a lot of costs as you could avoid the financial support of several seasons of racing, and have a more tailored training program that would stay located in a restricted geographical area.

If we're talking regular GT privateer team, then they have the choice of either picking up an unknown guy or rich old geezer to fill the seat unpaid, pay an established GT driver who took years to get to their level and don't have much more left in them, or get a young guy from simracing that will have the ability to adapt much quicker to anything - because that's a common skill shared among top simracers - who will not be asking for big compensations, if at all, at the begining. And if they're coming from an esports team, you might get some sponsors as well along the way.

Ross McGregor · May 30, 2023

Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Heinemann.dll

I don't think I've raced against many other simracers with the amount of controversies as this guy. Bans for cheating etc.

Nice to see people that are known for simracing getting results in the real world, but just like with Stoffel Vandoorne... It's not all sunshine in the simracing-story

Ah yes, the Touring Pro Series Porsche Supercup springs to mind! I remember Risto Kappett won the championship after Heinemann was removed. I sneaked second overall as a result

Richard Wilks · May 30, 2023

GT-Alex said:
Because it's way easier to get actually talented drivers from the pool of simracers.

If we're talking very high budget, top profile teams, they run detection and academy programs already, going through simracing would allow them to cut a lot of costs as you could avoid the financial support of several seasons of racing, and have a more tailored training program that would stay located in a restricted geographical area.

If we're talking regular GT privateer team, then they have the choice of either picking up an unknown guy or rich old geezer to fill the seat unpaid, pay an established GT driver who took years to get to their level and don't have much more left in them, or get a young guy from simracing that will have the ability to adapt much quicker to anything - because that's a common skill shared among top simracers - who will not be asking for big compensations, if at all, at the begining. And if they're coming from an esports team, you might get some sponsors as well along the way.

Will have the ability to adapt? What if he turns out to be useless on a real car? You do realize that you being good at a video game doesnt necessarily mean you have the stuff to handle a real car at speed, with all the things that it entails? There is no shortage of guys who tried a real car and fell short, much more than the few very padded cases of success.

Ole Marius Myrvold · May 30, 2023

Ross McGregor said:
Ah yes, the Touring Pro Series Porsche Supercup springs to mind! I remember Risto Kappett won the championship after Heinemann was removed. I sneaked second overall as a result

Yup.
Cannot remember exactly what it was, but something is telling me no fuel usage and no tyre wear. So, could race with 1l of fuel the whole race.

GT-Alex · May 30, 2023

Richard Wilks said:
Will have the ability to adapt? What if he turns out to be useless on a real car? You do realize that you being good at a video game doesnt necessarily mean you have the stuff to handle a real car at speed, with all the things that it entails? There is no shortage of guys who tried a real car and fell short, much more than the few very padded cases of success.

It's not about the majority succeeding, but the best ones succeeding. The pool of talented simracers is huge in comparison to pretty much anything else, and it's quick and easy to figure out if one can make the transition. Which is honestly not hard for the talented ones as long as they're physically fit enough. Remember GT racing fields are field with old geezers with beer bellies. If teams actually gave simracers fair chances, a lot of current drivers would be out of a job.

Regarding the ability to adapt, simracers can drive lots of different cars in different conditions with virtually unlimited practice time. Some are even able to sim hop and adjudt to different physics on the fly - James Baldwin being a prime example of that, and by experience I've seen quite a few others with a similar ability.

Richard Wilks · May 30, 2023

GT-Alex said:
It's not about the majority succeeding, but the best ones succeeding. The pool of talented simracers is huge in comparison to pretty much anything else, and it's quick and easy to figure out if one can make the transition. Which is honestly not hard for the talented ones as long as they're physically fit enough. Remember GT racing fields are field with old geezers with beer bellies. If teams actually gave simracers fair chances, a lot of current drivers would be out of a job.

Regarding the ability to adapt, simracers can drive lots of different cars in different conditions with virtually unlimited practice time. Some are even able to sim hop and adjudt to different physics on the fly - James Baldwin being a prime example of that, and by experience I've seen quite a few others with a similar ability.

Ah yes, i forgot, simracers are special, they literally the only people that go from playing a game to the real thing seamlessly right?...

Ah yes James Balwin, isn't he back playing video games for a living? And why you keep talking about "old geezers" in GT racing? You do realize that those guys basically pay to race right? And the teams WANT them for that right? They don't want some broke spotty kid, even if he would be faster. They want someone with MONEY. Are you that out of touch with real racing and how it works?...

GT-Alex · May 30, 2023

Richard Wilks said:
Ah yes, i forgot, simracers are special, they literally the only people that go from playing a game to the real thing seamlessly right?...

Ah yes James Balwin, isn't he back playing video games for a living? And why you keep talking about "old geezers" in GT racing? You do realize that those guys basically pay to race right? And the teams WANT them for that right? They don't want some broke spotty kid, even if he would be faster. They want someone with MONEY. Are you that out of touch with real racing and how it works?...

I've never said the process was seamless, that's precisely my point, people are still too afraid to try it right now. But those who dared got great results out of those drivers, main issue so far has been the lack of long term backing due to the lack of funds engaged by simracing sponsors, and frankly too many communication operations academies when not enough seats were available to fill in the long run (GT Academy absolutely wasted an insane number of talents, they ran for so many years while in reality they only planned to sustain a couple seats in the long run). But this is changing, some sponsors are starting to follow racers from their sim career into their real cars career, while we see "normal" teams starting to try out simracers. It's still a slow process though.

James Baldwin right now is an example of another issue from the academy programs we've had until now: people being directly thrown in a great car in a top team with good shots at winning, getting victories and podiums from the get go, and then being dropped after a year to make room for next year's program. If tomorrow, RedBull dropped Max Verstappen and his only offers were Williams or McLaren, do you think he'd settle for this? Well, that's the same for these guys. They tasted the glory of fighting for a championship, so now they're not interested in joining a team that will bring them nowhere. One of the GT Academy winners actually resorted to buying his own race car instead after the Nissan LMP1 fiasco.

Now of course customer teams are not always wealthy, hence why I've mentionned teams who want to get results. Even then, some are still ending up with gentlemen drivers in their lineup, because good drivers usually don't stay bronze for too long - which is another way simracers can come into play. You can basically end up with a Pro quality Pro-Am lineup with them.

XhendrickX · May 30, 2023

Misleading article..........

Richard Wilks · May 30, 2023

GT-Alex said:
James Baldwin right now is an example of another issue from the academy programs we've had until now: people being directly thrown in a great car in a top team with good shots at winning, getting victories and podiums from the get go, and then being dropped after a year to make room for next year's program. If tomorrow, RedBull dropped Max Verstappen and his only offers were Williams or McLaren, do you think he'd settle for this? Well, that's the same for these guys. They tasted the glory of fighting for a championship, so now they're not interested in joining a team that will bring them nowhere. One of the GT Academy winners actually resorted to buying his own race car instead after the Nissan LMP1 fiasco.

What? No no, thats not at all what happened. Both James and that other bloke would KILL for a seat, any seat, they just don't have the money! (well the second one had, from his own pocket). THAT's the reality of racing!

Max Verstappen is a supreme talent on a REAL car, so thats why he is where he is, and it helped that his father was an ex racer himself and his family had the means. Still, Red Bull rather pick guys like him, who drive REAL cars since they are basically children, rather than kids who just drove video games.

And this is exactly why, you are comparing someone who only drove a video game to someone who basically is driving since they can barely walk or run. It will always be skewed towards real life experience, because NOTHING replaces seat time, specially when you have so much since such early age.

David Jundt · May 30, 2023

Ole Marius Myrvold said:
Yup.
Cannot remember exactly what it was, but something is telling me no fuel usage and no tyre wear. So, could race with 1l of fuel the whole race.

I got my single TPS win at Oran Park thanks to him cheating, maybe I should be thankful!

I seem to recall he also did a rather unsporty(fairmanship) move at one of the season finales of the RR TC Esport events at the Nordschleife, slowing down and letting some cars pass so someone else would win the title(maybe Keithley instead of Löhner?) since he couldn't win it anymore on the last lap.

Cool that it works out for him in real life(where you can't use hacks), but I won't be his fan and support him.

GT-Alex · May 31, 2023

Richard Wilks said:
What? No no, thats not at all what happened. Both James and that other bloke would KILL for a seat, any seat, they just don't have the money! (well the second one had, from his own pocket). THAT's the reality of racing!

Max Verstappen is a supreme talent on a REAL car, so thats why he is where he is, and it helped that his father was an ex racer himself and his family had the means. Still, Red Bull rather pick guys like him, who drive REAL cars since they are basically children, rather than kids who just drove video games.

And this is exactly why, you are comparing someone who only drove a video game to someone who basically is driving since they can barely walk or run. It will always be skewed towards real life experience, because NOTHING replaces seat time, specially when you have so much since such early age.

It's exactly what happened for many of these people, I know and talked to some of them, that's a very common sentiment. I know the prices for some seats, one of these guys was asked 150k € for an ELMS LMP3 season with ARC Bratislava. James is trying to raise 200k £ and aims for a GT3 seat, national or european. That's definitely top team prices.

Max Verstappen literally used simracing to experiment moves he then replicated in real life and amazed everyone with. He doesn't comes from simracing, but it's a tool he uses. Well, technically everyone in F1 uses simulators now, that's the major part of their driving practice actually, but yeah, the F1 ladder is not even comparable. It's the most conservative racing environment by far, has traditionally always worked with drivers that were groomed from their early childhood into being single seater racers, and serious simracing esports didn't even exist when the current generation of F1 drivers started (one could argue it still really hasn't fully started yet). Anyway, that wasn't the point I was making there with the Max example. The idea was: would he settle for a Williams or McLaren in 2024 ? The answer is: absolutely not. Hell, worse drivers with much less achievements than him found themselves without a seat because they refused to take one that was worse than what they had before.

So, back to simracing as a talent detection tool: it's extremely fresh. It doesn't work standalone in F1 right now because it's just too recent. You'll have to wait for a couple decades to see simracers come into the upper tiers of that ladder, but the day will come when someone will have put their child in a sim cockpit from the age of 3, and the kid getting a F4 test in real life at 16 and put out great times. There's at least a couple kids right now that are creeping in top simracing events while they're 11 or 12 years old, because their parents have started pushing them to practice a lot on that a few years ago.

Just as you said, nothing replaces seat time. Well, simracing is seat time, and you can have a LOT more of it. Yes, it's not exactly the same, but it's more than close enough. It's all you need to build muscle memory, and with a simulator, you don't need to spend money and tons of time traveling or managing logistics. The week that karting boy spent on having 2 practice sessions, a qualy session and a race on a single track ? The simracing kid would have been able to do that on 10 different tracks, and still have had more time to study or train physically. The main drawback is they won't be used outright to feeling Gs with their body, but technology is also evolving and will compensate for that in future years, with motion rigs, vibrating seats, VR and so on. All while the kid will have developped prediction capabilities that real life doesn't necessarily encourages as much. Adapting to the real car will feel more like getting used to a different gym routine rather than having to learn something completely new for someone with proper preparation.

Now for GT racing, all the whole "everyone started karting at the same time they started walking" is not a factor anymore, so top simracers now often have more seat time already. The forces in GT cars aren't as high as well, so physical fitness is less of a problem. In fact, all those simracing academy program drivers have had better physical training than 95% of established GT drivers. And as simracing esports develops, pro simracers will undergo full on pro-athlete training programs, like in other esport scenes where teams have their competitors practice 8 hour a day while following tailored diets and gym routines. Meanwhile, race cars keep getting more and more expensive to run, despite the efforts to limit costs in most series. Sims are getting better in the meantime. Some of the hardware is literally getting more evolved that what actual cars are using (Simucube FFB pedals are actually crazy), and doesn't require you to move it with a trailer or truck, respect noise limits and opening hours, and you don't have most parts having between 2 and 100 hours of life in them before you need to throw them out. As a sponsor, you could gamble your money on a single kid that you think will be the best, or run an esport series with hundreds, or even thousands of candidates who will nicely sort themselves out on their own, and then you still have enough money to pick a few of them to put through a training program, while they can already get you a ROI with online activities.

Leynad777 · May 31, 2023

Richard Wilks said:
So another real life racing driver, that ran out of money, turned to sim racing, then got back in real racing thanks to patronage from one of the big names in German Racing? Well happy for him, but hardly "sim to real racing".

Tim was saying in an interview, that sim racing is a much better school than karting because it's basically the same. The karting probably helped more than he thinks in getting used drive at and over the limit at an early age, but I guess motorbikes could've done the trick as well.

LoreGT · May 31, 2023

GT-Alex said:
It's exactly what happened for many of these people, I know and talked to some of them, that's a very common sentiment. I know the prices for some seats, one of these guys was asked 150k € for an ELMS LMP3 season with ARC Bratislava. James is trying to raise 200k £ and aims for a GT3 seat, national or european. That's definitely top team prices.

Max Verstappen literally used simracing to experiment moves he then replicated in real life and amazed everyone with. He doesn't comes from simracing, but it's a tool he uses. Well, technically everyone in F1 uses simulators now, that's the major part of their driving practice actually, but yeah, the F1 ladder is not even comparable. It's the most conservative racing environment by far, has traditionally always worked with drivers that were groomed from their early childhood into being single seater racers, and serious simracing esports didn't even exist when the current generation of F1 drivers started (one could argue it still really hasn't fully started yet). Anyway, that wasn't the point I was making there with the Max example. The idea was: would he settle for a Williams or McLaren in 2024 ? The answer is: absolutely not. Hell, worse drivers with much less achievements than him found themselves without a seat because they refused to take one that was worse than what they had before.

So, back to simracing as a talent detection tool: it's extremely fresh. It doesn't work standalone in F1 right now because it's just too recent. You'll have to wait for a couple decades to see simracers come into the upper tiers of that ladder, but the day will come when someone will have put their child in a sim cockpit from the age of 3, and the kid getting a F4 test in real life at 16 and put out great times. There's at least a couple kids right now that are creeping in top simracing events while they're 11 or 12 years old, because their parents have started pushing them to practice a lot on that a few years ago.

Just as you said, nothing replaces seat time. Well, simracing is seat time, and you can have a LOT more of it. Yes, it's not exactly the same, but it's more than close enough. It's all you need to build muscle memory, and with a simulator, you don't need to spend money and tons of time traveling or managing logistics. The week that karting boy spent on having 2 practice sessions, a qualy session and a race on a single track ? The simracing kid would have been able to do that on 10 different tracks, and still have had more time to study or train physically. The main drawback is they won't be used outright to feeling Gs with their body, but technology is also evolving and will compensate for that in future years, with motion rigs, vibrating seats, VR and so on. All while the kid will have developped prediction capabilities that real life doesn't necessarily encourages as much. Adapting to the real car will feel more like getting used to a different gym routine rather than having to learn something completely new for someone with proper preparation.

Now for GT racing, all the whole "everyone started karting at the same time they started walking" is not a factor anymore, so top simracers now often have more seat time already. The forces in GT cars aren't as high as well, so physical fitness is less of a problem. In fact, all those simracing academy program drivers have had better physical training than 95% of established GT drivers. And as simracing esports develops, pro simracers will undergo full on pro-athlete training programs, like in other esport scenes where teams have their competitors practice 8 hour a day while following tailored diets and gym routines. Meanwhile, race cars keep getting more and more expensive to run, despite the efforts to limit costs in most series. Sims are getting better in the meantime. Some of the hardware is literally getting more evolved that what actual cars are using (Simucube FFB pedals are actually crazy), and doesn't require you to move it with a trailer or truck, respect noise limits and opening hours, and you don't have most parts having between 2 and 100 hours of life in them before you need to throw them out. As a sponsor, you could gamble your money on a single kid that you think will be the best, or run an esport series with hundreds, or even thousands of candidates who will nicely sort themselves out on their own, and then you still have enough money to pick a few of them to put through a training program, while they can already get you a ROI with online activities.

Been following the conversation for a while, and my general impression is that either you have zero understanding of how real life racing works, or you're simply blindly advocating for simracing.
Organizations choosing simracers over seasoned karting/feeder series talents because they're cheaper?
GT teams going for 50 year old dentists due to their experience and not their pocket money?
Drivers not wanting to settle for anything other than a top seat because "they tasted greatness"?
Dude.
I really hope it's the second case I mentioned earlier, and you're just some simracing event PR who's shilling for a living, because your takes feel completely disconnected from reality.

Jiltjes · May 31, 2023

I used to race Tim in RaceRoom several times, coincidentally.
He IS from another planet! Drinks rocket fuel in the morning and kerosine for lunch.
Great to see him do good IRL too!!

Tim Heinemann: From Sim to DTM - and the Top of the Standings

"Still a bit surreal"​

Sim racing success revives real career​

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Ok, I am a dinosaur

"Still a bit surreal"

Sim racing success revives real career

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