In NASCAR, simulators aren't just toys anymore (cont'd)

Kyle Busch spoke on behalf of Sim Factory at a conference earlier this year in San Jose, Calif. Drivers like Allmendinger, Coleman, Colin Braun, Brandon Whitt and Willie Allen train in simulators regularly. Before open-wheel driver Tony Kanaan tested a Formula One car in Juarez, Mexico, he had Sim Factory put together a custom simulation of the road course. Austin Dillon prepped on a simulator before a test at Iowa Speedway, and had developed such a base of knowledge before getting to the race track that his team was able to trim a full day off the schedule. Ryan Newman estimates that drivers can achieve on a simulator 60 percent of what they'd get out of a live practice session on the race track.

Scott Speed prepares for his first full season of Cup racing.

“

I don't think you can make a race car driver in a sim. But I think you can make one better. By far, you can make one better.

”

ROBERT COULTER, Sim Factory

Accounts like that are helping simulators become more established within the NASCAR industry, where even people who aren't professed "game guys" are seeing the results. Robert Coulter, one of the founders of Mishawka, Ind., based Sim Factory, sees a parallel to engineering, which a decade ago was still struggling for acceptance in a sport full of drivers and crew chiefs who drove and set up cars solely by feel. Now, engineering is standard practice.

"We have tons of people who come in here. Allmendinger, that kid is in here every day, and he does it to get his skill set up. You're around 40 other people, real people, and you learn to get to the front," said Coulter, who has a background in military flight simulation. "I think it will get to the point where it is in the military and in general aviation, where you don't fly until you have hours and hours in the simulator. If you're going off on a sortie, you'll go over the entire mission in a simulator, right down to the bomb run. That's where we're going."

Racing simulators are nothing new; there was even a NASCAR-licensed racing sim on the market from 1999 through 2003, and the developers of that title recently formed a new company, iRacing, that launched a broad-based simulator last August. Sim Factory has been around since 2006, but its first attempts to get NASCAR teams to share data about how the race cars handle were met with closed doors. That kind of information was considered secret, and organizations weren't giving it out. That began to change once NASCAR introduced its new Cup car. Suddenly there was a treasure trove of information on the old car that teams didn't need anymore, and Coulter was successful in getting some organizations to part with it. The result was the vehicle in Sim Factory's popular ARCA title, a car that experts say performs very much like the real thing.

"The timing was ideal. All the spoiler stuff became outdated just as the game came out," said Mike Logan, a veteran in specialty fabrication who's worked for top Cup teams for a decade, and provides Sim Factory with much of the technical information it uses to build its race cars. "Teams are opening up to them. We converted the suspension, chassis, everything. They did a full body scan so they can run the 'twisted sister.' It's a real car, an actual car that raced in 2006. All setups actually matched. It behaves the way it should behave. All that stuff translates perfectly."

The result is a simulated car that's set up very much like the real thing, down to the smallest detail -- from shocks and suspension, to engine telemetry, to tire integration data. Programmers have even been able to mimic the car's aerodynamic handling characteristics "within 90 percent of real life," Coulter said. Very little of that would have been possible without input from teams. Time was, programmers had to build sims off driver recollections -- which are notoriously unreliable, as it turned out -- and their own assumptions. The degree of reality suffered greatly as a result. Not anymore.

"Teams bring everything to the table," Coulter said. "It's almost like sim racing has been locked in a cage, been a seed that hasn't been given water to grow. As NASCAR moves away from testing, and as more kids come up who are more used to games, it's only going to improve." (Continued)