iRacing Shows First Pit Crew Animation Previews

[Paul Jeffrey]

iRacing have dropped a little preview video of some interesting development content coming to the sim in future builds, a fully animated lollipop pitcrew member!

Pit stops are an integral part of the endurance racing scene since the beginning of motor racing history, a place where you can win and lose those vital seconds that could prove decisive in the final result for you and your team, which makes it even more confusing as to why almost all modern simulations totally ignore this vital element of racing and at best provide the functionality but not the actual visual actions that form part of a busy mid-race stop.

iRacing are looking at changing all that as the plan to bring your racing crew to life with realistic looking team animations for when you come screeching on to pit road and back to your cars box.

Early footage in the above video shows some great promise, and the team over at iRacing have promised more detailed footage in the next few days showing off how they created the animations and hopefully giving us a little more insight into what (or should that be 'who') drivers can expect to see when entering and exiting the pitbox during a race weekend.

With over 40 cars present at the recent Daytona 24 Hour event one can only imagine how hectic that pit road must look. Lets hope the folks at iRacing have developed good penalty system for the dozens of cars plowing down its main rivals pit crews in the haste to win a vital few tenths of a second (or alternatively make them non-collidable, but where's the fun in that?)

Stay tuned to RaceDepartment.com for further updates and footage on this interesting work in progress feature. Looking for a good setup or just want a place to discuss your favourite sim? Why not checkout the iRacing Forum right here on RD?

Why hasn't this been done before? Looks cool doesn't it? What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below!

 

[Will Mazeo]

Maybe because no matter how good your simulation is it will always be different in real life so some things may have to be done different in the sim.
No wonder why real life teams only know how things go for real when the car is on track and they use far more advanced stuff than the "normal user" sims on the market. Some use wind tunnel and so many other stuff, yet they all know the car won't be exactly the same on track. What makes you think you can simulate it perfectly in a 2~8 core desktop processor?
Some of you need to think a bit before posting.

 

[xnorb]

Seems i wasn't able to make clear what i mean.
I'm not talking about iRacing being unrealistic, i talk about them modeling a car just like the real world car and then editing some numbers to make it match the other cars they simulated.

We know that cars aren't similar in the real world - why do they need to be in iRacing?
If the McLaren has higher topspeed than the BMW, then that's just how it is, and it should be that way in iRacing.

 

[muscimol]

They're not matching top speed, just the overall performance and it's the same for real world series. Read about GT3 BoP. Every GT3 car in iR is different, has it's strengths and weaknesses but putting real world numbers doesn't ensure the same lap time - heck, even doing BoP doesn't ensure it - some cars still will be faster in breaking zones, other ones on straights, some are faster in qualifications the others in race trim.

iR has to do BoP cars between seasons, because their tire model is evolving and different cars may respond different to tire changes and they do revise the car models introducing better suspensions models, updating aero calculations with more data from the manufacturers, etc.

 

[James Nance]

Look at the lambos recently from the Daytona 24 hours, they just got penalized for possible sandbagging there BOP and being over one second faster than any other car out there. Second think about each manufacture being represented, you think they want there cars to stink? no. A good example is the DRIVE car show where Chris Harris took the super cars for a test. Each manufacture from Ferrari, Mclaren and Porsche gave him there best cars, setup by there own mechanics and tuned to there max performance while at the same time hiding there numbers. It ended up being close, but I was amazed at how serious the manufactures were about the image of there cars, goes for the same for any game that features there cars. There going to give you the best data from there cars, data that works in a perfect world such as iRacing's. So iRacing is going to have to do there own form of BOP to equalize the cars and I think its pretty close itself. And the Mclaren does have the faster top speed over the BMW's.