Sim racing effects on your normal driving?

[R8pilot]

Hello Forum Members,

I'm very new to sim racing, but I've noticed some fairly strong effects that it is causing on my normal street driving; almost all negative!

I drive a reasonably high performance car (Audi R8 manual). And darn-it, I have started to miss occasional shifts and stuff! Grab for the shifter and it's not there! Silly me, the shifter isn't in the same place as on my sim rig, and it's a longer-throw H-pattern instead of the snick-snick sequential on my rig.

Also, my normal safe and courteous driving habits have started to wander, as I find myself thinking about racing lines and how fast that corner could be taken. I have to check myself!

I figure this will pass soon enough, but for now I feel like I need to be a little more present and careful.

How has sim racing changed your real-life driving?

 

[BrightCandle]

Hasn't had much effect generally for me, I keep that style of driving in the sim. But I was quite pleased last year when I avoided an accident and slide the rear of the car out with my abrupt movement, caught the slide and kept it on the black stuff without hitting anything. Without all the control training I get in a sim that at the least would have been a spin, probably much worse. Was almost enjoyable.

 

[Insert Coin]

I was racing one evening and drove my real car the next day with my wife. Was braking late at the next roundabout and got a yelling wife. Realized I was still in race mode. Oops.

 

[Deleted member 963434]

well at first it had too all negative effects for me, but then i think to myself better drive slow and be scared in real life cause yo play too much sims (and AC understeer simulator) and crashh too much in sims, than play nfs and think yo can drive same in real life always have grip and then die cause yo not always have grip in real life xD
well first thing was i learn what is understeer and oversteer in sims that was previous i even drive real car in real life. when i was making my driving license i already knew how cars drive and i knew better than i think people who teach my how to drive in driving school xD
i knew so much abous understeer from AC, that wheel become lighter when you understeering, but it was my only knowledge. then i found out about how understeer is different from sim to real life. cause i experience real understeer in real car, then i found out it not only wheel becomes lighter but whole car chassis shaking and vibrating as front wheels graining asphalt. and i foun out abous it after 3-5 years of having driving license. previously i was scared to drive faster in real life if i felt slight wheel lighter, but then i pushed it harder on wet and i felt whole car shaking then i knew previously as i was driving fast and wheel became little lighter it wasnt driving at the limit, but i think that knowledge may save my life not once. now i know where is the limit its when whole car chassis shaking. but i know i was prepared to real life driving from sims. i developed natual reactions to i think all scenarios what can happen suddently in real life and i know i will react correctly, maybe sims not 100% accurate but i know reactions what happend to car and what you must do its the same thing, just not 100% accurate but same sequence.
i even make thread about it how sims saved me from crashing, but nobody replied
heres my thread abous it and i tell same thing, sims help you to learn driving and react quickly. well i still dont know cause i played sims before driving real car, maybe its that it all natural to feel car and react etc. but i tell in this thread everything what i learned in sims and how quickly i reacted. i dont think guy who never play sims would think, and be able to press brake with left foot to slow car, and press throttle wit right foot to let rear wheels spinning to not it catch grip and spin him other side. that thing i learned from sims and its houndeds of hours put there to save me from crash in 3 seconds as situation i described there lasts, here my thread

I almost crashed today

wit my bmw e36 320i 150 hp, it was raining hard and i was driving fast in the city, i started braking before roundabout wit two lanes, right lane was driving learning car entering the roundabout from right lane so i choose left lane to pass him there, i loosing speed very fast, reducing from 4th...

www.racedepartment.com

 

[Mr Deap]

It's way too much different to say if it has any impact on the actual driving. Aside from that you learn real racetrack layout.

If you claim you're an avid top of the line simracer, you end up being mocked by everybody in real life.

 

[RasmusP]

Probably a bit off topic but I kept my car from spinning a year ago and it's definitely thanks to drifting in Assetto Corsa!
Uphill 170° turn, slightly off-set T-Junction at the start of a bridge.
1 small lane joining a 3 lane road.

Normally it's a very small turn but I got lucky with the lights and the side traffic was just starting again so I went into the turn in 2nd gear, about 30 kp/h.
Kinda quick but normally no issue...

I don't know what it was but it felt like a little oil patch. My car is an old C-Class from '95 with 120 hp, no locking diff or esp, rwd.
Rear instantly swung around and instead of panically braking, shifting the weight to the front and definitely spinning the car, I instead kept a very little bit of throttle, corrected 3 times (jeez, spinning a G27 is easier than a big fat old Mercedes steering wheel that almost touches your legs ), I was rolling straight again.

Apart from that my friends love to scream a little when I decide to "trail brake" deep into a corner.
They only know how to brake -> clutch -> roll -> turn -> shift -> clutch -> accelerate.
So always fun to do a deep trailbrake with rev matching and smoothly back on the throttle.

Although I'm not risking anything. Always more than enough room to simply brake. But they simply think I wouldn't brake at all

 

[blekenbleu]

Growing up with black ice and lake effect blizzards, I was used to getting out of control even before CASC ice racing. In a Pinto set up for autocrossing, I expected to get sideways at least once on any winter drive thru the Adirondacks. Actually, after years of track events, I became a more paranoid street driver,
because two-way traffic, no corner workers and a much higher ratio of inattentive drivers.
I am a slow sim driver because old, but also lacking "real" feedback compounds reflexive reluctance
to risk damaging virtual doppelgängers of self-maintained track cars.

 

[Kevin Troschinski]

In the last about 15 years of driving and simracing i had 2 or 3 dangerous situations, where i was about too loose the car, but every time i catched it like it was obvious to do so. I really explained it because i knew those situations from rFactor and instinctively knew how too "save" the car.

 

[flykas]

Well, I felt that after few days of racing in sim am am usually more attentive and concentrated on driving and preparing to take turns in a most effective way:] but one negative things is that I start to be too afraid that I'll loose traction, because it feels that the traction is way lower in Assetto Corsa than in real life, but that also might be because of lack of sense of speed in sim.

 

[Jason Mullin]

I don’t have a car, only motorcycles and I’ll put out there neither MotoGP or Ride has helped at all!

 

[AccAkut]

I pretty much started simracing while I did my drivers licence, and I think it has always helped me have an understanding of what a car does, how it reacts, weight transfer etc over your typical driver. Went to a driver safety course a few years later which confirmed it, I did not learn anything new that day, but confirmed that I already knew those advanced things (mostly "how to react to your car going beyond limits").

Funniest was the skid control course, on which I caught the car each time immediately instead of following the course of first just trying to brake, than trying to countersteer, to at the end maybe succeeding in catching the slide, after like 6 repetitions. Instructor laughed about it and joked if I had ESP in my Lupo (which didn't even have power steering). I had that instinct already from the countless T1 mayhems on public LFS servers

I've never been in a crash, but in many critical situations in which car control saved me (icy/flooded roads, sudden obstacles (deers, boars, lost tires...), unpredictable behaviour of other drivers).

 

[RasmusP]

I did not learn anything new that day, but confirmed that I already knew those advanced things

During my safety training the instructor said everyone with abs should slam the brakes when the car overrotates (we had a plate that pushes the rear wheels to one side or another, you don't know beforehand).
I asked if that would really work since the rear would get very light and probably come around even with abs.
He said "no, even without esp you just slam the brakes".

Yeah.. Did that on my first try and spun...

After that I simply did what I would do in simracing and it worked.

Same for the "water fountains, kid running on the street" simulation.
I had to lift the brakes a little bit to really steer and then brake again.
You can steer a little bit with abs active but only braking 90% is a lot more efficient when dodging something...

 

[AccAkut]

During my safety training the instructor said everyone with abs should slam the brakes when the car overrotates (we had a plate that pushes the rear wheels to one side or another, you don't know beforehand).
I asked if that would really work since the rear would get very light and probably come around even with abs.
He said "no, even without esp you just slam the brakes".

Yeah.. Did that on my first try and spun...

After that I simply did what I would do in simracing and it worked.

Same for the "water fountains, kid running on the street" simulation.
I had to lift the brakes a little bit to really steer and then brake again.
You can steer a little bit with abs active but only braking 90% is a lot more efficient when dodging something...

yeah it was that kind of thing, a plate that threw your rear axle either left or right, and you didn't know which direction. First run on it we should just "experience" it, without any instruction apart from "leave the pad through those cones" (it was in 2009, can't quite remember), but I remember catching the car with basically just one swift 180° rotation of the steering wheel, hands not leaving the wheel. Was a bit funny because for the whole course we had been assigned random partners (riding passenger with you, and then you with them), and I got a young chav with a tuned Opel, who wasn't quite a successful as I was.

The very short wheelbase and next to no weight on the rear for the Lupo probably helped, but it was still curious to see how directly sim handling transfered to the real car.

Also a few years later in 2013 I was allowed to join a presentation course for tire dealers. One task was just following the instructor (a seasoned rally driver) in a group of like twelve BMW 118i on a wet test track. He drove up front, and we should just try to follow. Just a presentation on how good tire XXXL SUPER was on wet road. I was in the first car behind him, and at the end of the laps we had lost the rest

edit: just to be clear I don't think I'm the perfect driver. I suck at maneuvering backwards, and took a long time till my driving school instructor deemed me confident enough for the licence test

 

[Damian Reed]

I have to admit, there's been a few times I've hopped into my car after a racing session and thought I had a flat tyre!

 

[Jan Larsen]

Back when I started simracing in the late 90's, I experienced something similar. GPL ruled the simracing world back then for many years and its that sim that taught me how to countersteer, balance the car with the throttle and trail braking. I now know how to do all three, but since I was dumb enough to get married, have kids etc, I'm now driving around in a stationwagon so slow that none of those skills are ever needed...

 

[Terry Rock]

I tend to be more aware and drive within the speed limit as a direct result of my simracing.
That is not to say I ever went around breaking laws and acting like an idiot.
I just keep that speed more for the simulator.
There is no risk of injuring anyone or getting pulled over and ticketed.

 

[Jeremy Ford]

Sim racing has improved my real driving skills. I'm simply bossing the corner exit out of my local Aldi.

 

[MPortnoy]

I find myself thinking about racing lines and how fast that corner could be taken.

This line above reminded me of this. 100% accurate

 

[Terry Rock]

This line above reminded me of this. 100% accurate

View attachment 491123

Question is.... "What do your neighbors see?"

 

[Ghoults]

To me simracing has always had a calming effect. I feel that I sort of get my racing done in a simulator and then I can drive normally without the urge or need to feel the speed. I have had periods in my life younger where I could not have a steering wheel with me or did not have internet in my apartment. And as a result I did not simrace at all or did very little of it. During those times I always notice that I feel like there is something missing and I need to drive my car harder to get that fix.

But when I'm simracing I have absolutely no trouble staying under the speed limits, slow down for road constructions zones with absurdly low speed limits when the workers have gone home for the day. That being said I can't resist doing some powerslides when the first snow falls and hand brake turns and stuff like that.

Simracing also helps with basic car control skills. I started simracing pretty young and I remember a funny anecdote from my driver educations. In finland one part of the driving education is driving in slippery conditions on a test track. One of the excercises they make (made) you do is emergency brake in a slippery tight corner while staying in your lane. First with abs and then without abs using cadence braking. And last with corner entry oversteer initiated by the instructor with hand brake. My memory is not exact how it happened but here is the story anyways.

The way it happens in practice is that the instructor sits next to you and pulls the hand brake and releases just before you are supposed to brake and turn. The idea I think is to make the driver to spin so they can explain why it spun. The instructor could not get me to spin around. We did it like 4 times each time him being more and more aggressive with the hand brake. I knew instinctively and from simracing how to countersteer in a slide, how to brake smoothly and how to even use throttle to stabilize the fwd car. Even things like lift off oversteer I knew that doing things too quickly creates an imbalance in the car so I knew how to come off throttle smoothly while starting to turn in. Even thinking about my lines as I am doing it. In the end on 5th try the instructor simply pulled the hand brake and grabbed the wheel so he could get to me spin and could explain what happened...

All that about sim driving technique being useful in real life is only true for only as long as you use real life driving techniques in your sim. Some sims have bad physics that can encourage players to use unrealistic driving techniques to get out of slides for example. Iracing and raceroom and lots of rf1 mods come to mind. If you try to get out of slide in real life using those special techniques that work in those sims you are going to die. Or worse still, kill someone else.

Things like steering more when you start to oversteer (to get more understeer) or pressing brake and throttle at the same time. Or even just smash your brakes to stop because countersteering doesn't work at all. The car straightening out effect you get in those sims is not really there in real life. Or even in other sims unless you find the very peculiar circumstances when those things can work, a little bit. Being smooth with your inputs, not overcorrecting and predicting works in most sims like it does in real life even if you need to turn more or less and the speeds are totally different. The good thing is real life is very slow, speeds are slow so and there are lots of electronics to save you. In the end the dangers of real life driving are totally different to simracing so the best advice to give, I think, is to keep your ego in check. If you need car control to take out of a dangerous situations you have most likely already messed up once because you failed to identify a risk ahead.