Can a Sim Racer Perform in a Real Race Car?

[Erwin Greven]

100 dollars + 300 dollars = 400 dollars... There are cheaper games...

I was thinking about trying iracing, but i am cured immediately.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

you do not buy the game you pay a fee for the server / race / grid selection system. which, of yourse, doesn't make it cheaper but is worth gold with limited time at your hand.

 

[Erwin Greven]

Sorry... hundreds of dollars for such a game is detesting.

 

[Neilski]

It sounds like a lot, yeah. I'm not trying to sell it to you here (I personally abandoned it after one 3-month trial) but like @Eckhart von Glan said you have to factor in how much time you use it for. Once you do that, it looks a lot less crazy.
You can dip your toe in the water for some small initial fee (right now, 3 months is only $16.50 for a new member). Then, if you like it, you renew your membership and buy tracks and cars when you wish. If you spend even just 200 hours a year using it, and spend a total of a few hundred bucks buying ALL of the content (not even compulsory) then you clearly have a small hourly cost, in the ballpark of $2 per hour. Many people will play it far more than that, and of course you only buy the content once. Hence Eckhart's ongoing hourly cost is about a quarter of what I just estimated.
How much would it cost you per hour to drive a kart around the crappy local track designed for 12-year-olds? My crappy local track would charge me around £50/hour.
I have already spent over 300 hours on Dirt Rally, which cost me a little over £20. That's stupidly cheap. LFS cost me a similar amount and god alone knows how many hundred hours I have spent on it (probably well over 1000). At that stage the hourly cost of the game is meaningless. You could even be paying more for the electricity to run your rig! (And don't forget the size of the investment you have to make in the rig itself... GPU and wheel for example.) And because the cost per hour of iRacing is much higher, it looks really big, but remember it's really big compared to something stupidly small.

 

[Joerg Baermann]

Depends how much there is put into the word "perform".
If he has driven regular street cars besides sim racing he should be able to do better than someone who hasn't practiced the track for real nor on a sim, at least for the first couple of laps.
There are plenty of drivers from all kind of racing series that have proven sims to be good tools for learning and practicing tracks.

 

[Eckhart von Glan]

totally with jörg on this one, if the aim is memorizing an approximate turn in point, roughly the length of a straight, the psoition of the kerbs etc., I suppose the chap who has spent time in a simulated environment (from arcade game all the way to f1-team owned simulator) will always have a slight advantage.
What I find frustrating no end are the endorsements of certain games / sims by real drivers clearly dictated by the marketing departments. Annoying.

 

[Postipate92]

Sim racing can atleast make you better driver. My story:
We went as work group (15) people to drive karts for one day. I havent ever even tried kart and some of the guys were tried it 2-5 times. At qualifying my laptimes were 0.55 and second best 0.58. Was more easy to find limits of car with experience of sim racing+better driving lines.

 

[apex11]

It's hard to drive to the limit and beyond, but driving a car isn't hard. If it were why do billions of people do it everyday?
There is also the fact that cars are made to be user friendly and all the driving aids and LSD's and aero etc.
Makes me laugh when people bang on about turning driver aids off on 'sims' and then playing around with the LSD....lolz.
Limited slip diff is a driver aid...

 

[apex11]

Well guys I'm popped on here to say that i'm due to test a Mini Cooper race spec car at Silverstone national in next few weeks. Having never driven a race car before but only having played 'sims'.
Current sim of choice is PCars and AC.
Plan is to practice on those titles then do a comparison and all will be uploaded to youtube channel.

I'll pop back in with some links if anyone is interested in following it. Just a bit of fun really.