SIM Winning Formula

As our POC Sim Racing League begins practicing for its upcoming race at Bathurst, I’m reminded of a public sim race earlier this year where I finished qualifying with what felt like a solid lap time and was subsequently given 1.7 seconds worth of reality check by 2021 IndyCar series champion Alex Palou. The depth of talent available in iRacing is immense and those of us who aren’t pros can generally hop on, get served some humble pie, and be reminded that we have more work to do. One of the most important things to remember while racing (or participating in any other kind of competition) is that there’s always room for improvement, no matter who we are. Every racer has their excuses when they lose or feel stuck: I don’t have as much time to practice, I’m not a pro driver, my equipment isn’t as good as the other guy’s. These excuses offer us a choice to either dwell on things we can’t control and maintain our current level of skill, or to accept where we are currently and do whatever is possible to improve.

Once we’ve moved past being a novice, the cycle of improvement generally involves a series of plateaus followed by breakthroughs. As we reach these plateaus, we start feeling frustration as we turn lap after lap in practice and just can’t seem to reduce that lap time below a certain point. This is where we have to remember a few important things: we can still improve, we generally have the same ability to be as fast as anyone else, and we need to employ focused and meaningful practice. And with that fluff about inner game out of the way, let’s get into some key points I’ve found for meaningful practice in iRacing and elsewhere.

Numero uno, stop crashing while practicing, and keep the car on track. It’s easy to get carried away with the fact that the sim has a reset button and to approach laps where it’ll either be a perfect lap or you’ll bin it. We learn extremely slowly if we can’t make it around the track each lap. We still need to push the car and explore the limits but we need to get there systematically, even if it feels boring and tedious. This is how pros do it, and so should you.

As we are learning a track, we first need to pick our references in a way that we know for certain we can make it around the corner. For some of us, that means braking one marker earlier than we may think. For others, maybe it’s three markers early. Find whatever margin of safety you need to make it around successfully each time, and make that your key priority. Once you’ve done a couple laps and have your initial references picked out, a good strategy is to brake hard for each corner and slow to what feels like an appropriate turn-in speed for that corner, even though it’ll be way too early to actually turn in. Pay attention to how early you could have turned in vs. how far away the turn-in point actually is. Looks like you’re slowed down 50 ft early vs. where you should be turning in? Now take half that distance and brake 25 ft later next lap. Half, not all, because if we get too greedy we break rule number 1 which is keeping the car on track.

Once we’ve found some good references and can turn laps that are approaching our limit, our next bad habit is to impatiently try and lop off huge amounts of lap time each subsequent lap. Even if we know someone else is lapping two seconds faster than us, the chance of every corner miraculously coming together all at once to find those two seconds is practically zero. Be patient and think about how a very small improvement applied over each corner adds up to a larger sum over the course of the lap. Setting our goal to improve by around half a tenth or less per corner gives us a target that’s achievable while still leaving room to correct for mistakes.

iRacing has many options for comparing yourself to others. You can look up race results, participate in open practices, and even pay for Virtual Racing School and directly compare telemetry with pros. More recently, Garage 61 has become available as a free telemetry-sharing service. I recommend signing up with either Garage 61 or VRS and learning the basics of analyzing your telemetry vs. a reference lap under similar conditions. The first thing to look for is to find the one or two corners where you’re losing the most time, dig into why you’re losing that time, and then work towards reducing that gap. This is where we tend to fall into the previously mentioned trap of trying to find too much time all at once. Data shows the pro driver on VRS brakes 50 ft later and gets you by half a second in turn 2? Slim chance that you’re going to just move your brake point 50 ft and instantly shave that half second. Think about what you can do to brake 5 ft later on this lap, and shave a smaller amount of time. Keep it realistic and move incrementally and patiently toward your goals. Once you’ve found 0.05 s, work towards the next improvement until you’ve hit a plateau with your current focus. Then re-evaluate and find the next lowest-hanging fruit.

A driver who keeps the car at 10/10ths but is on the correct line 70% of the time is almost always going to be faster than a driver who is on the line 100% of the time but is driving at 7/10ths. Trail braking and rotating the car into and out of a corner is significantly more important and should be your focus rather than thinking about exactly where on track the car needs to be through the corner. Your ability to keep the car on the limit through the corner is actually what will create the racing line. For example, you know you apexed too late if it’s easy for you to get all the way to the outside at corner exit. Conversely you apexed too early if you have to wait until well after the apex to get back on the gas. You’ll find the correct apexes, braking points, and turn-in points by keeping the car on the limit and evaluating what parts of the corner felt too easy, too difficult, or just right.

Any fool can smash the gas and power out of a corner. The difficult part is corner entry. This is where people lose the most time and need to focus their practice. Blend the end of straight-line braking into your turn-in and trail braking to have an efficient corner entry. Once you finish straight-line braking, your brakes’ main purpose becomes rotating the car. Reducing speed is just a side-effect of using the brakes to shift weight forward and gain rotation. Rotating the car on the brakes turns the racing line into a decreasing-radius spiral similar in shape to an Euler spiral. Accelerating out of a corner creates an increasing-radius Euler spiral. I learned this through an excellent guide on Adam Brouillard’s Paradigm Shift Racing website, and this has completely changed how I approach my line through a corner. Their writing explains this much better than I can, so please see the link below or search google and make this mandatory reading.

https://www.paradigmshiftracing.com/racing-basics/the-racing-line-four-elements-of-a-perfectcorner?view=full#/ Brouillard provides a comparison of a few different line options, beginning with the aforementioned Euler spiral as a “baseline” path, followed by geometric arc and a late apex arc and then gets into the physics of the perfect line through the corner. The focus through the article is not on following an imaginary line but rather how to focus the forces and keep the car on the limit.

In iRacing’s sound settings, you can independently set the tire noise from other sounds. Max out your tire noise and turn down all other noises. Because we can’t feel g-forces in the sim, we really have to use all our other senses to make up for it and keep the car at the limit. Use tire noise to gain feedback on whether the tires are at, or beyond, the limit. Learn what sound the tires make while at peak grip, and focus on maintaining that noise all the way through the corner. Most people drive with either the front or the rear of the car, meaning they feel comfortable focusing on keeping one end or the other at the limit. I personally drive with the front of the car, meaning I like to keep a very small amount of understeer on the front tires to sense that the car is at the limit. In the sim my focus is on getting consistent tire noise and feedback from the fronts, from turn-in all the way to the apex. Increasing noise settings helps with this significantly.

Outside of racing, I’ve recently spent an embarrassing amount of time having an existential crisis and exploring the thought of what happens after life, trying to understand consciousness, and reflecting on how short our amount of time here really is. Our time is valuable so why waste it with imperfect practice? Next time you practice, take a step back and evaluate how you can better apply yourself. Take one element of this piece and attempt to internalize it throughout your practice session. Even if it’s just working on your mental game and keeping your morale high while in the plateau part of the improvement cycle. Or if you’re a seasoned driver and didn’t learn anything from this, at least you know to seek elsewhere for your woes. So good luck, stay strong, and keep improving!