Top Gear takes on F1 with Dom Duhan

[Dom]

In this month's edition of Top Gear Magazine, Dom Duhan was fortunate enough to try out a driver training F1 Simulator from a well known F1 team. The track, Barcelona, the car, an unnamed car from last season. The simulator was a bespoke for the team and was highly accurate.

So how did he get on? Well, with Darren Turner present - one of a team of F1 testers and drivers, the standard would be high.

After getting acclimatised to the cockpit - a full motion system with accurate forces on the wheel, Dom's first 8 lap run saw him immediately on the pace with a 1.24xxx. Unfortunately for Dom, the field of view gave him a bout of motion sickness almost immediately!

Luckily this did not stop his competitive nature and after another couple of 8 lap runs Dom got down to a respectable 21.6, which was just over a second off the F1 driver times and Darren, not bad after 24 laps!
Dom said "It was a fantastic experience and great to meet up with a driver of Darren's calibre, big thanks to the F1 team and Top Gear. I hope this paves the way for Sim Racing teams to become a part of F1 testing, providing thousands of hours of lap data for a fraction of the cost of running on a track."

To view the article click http://www.teamredline.co.uk/other/topgear_f1.pdf or get a copy at your local newsagent.

[FilipM]

Well done Dom, good read and great performance!

[Stan]

Good evening Dom and all,

As you've been lucky enough to test a real F1 simulator, I would really like to know what you have think of the software, how far/close from ours best formula sim's (nkPro, iracing and rFactor) in terms of physics could it be?

Thanks.


Stan.

[Dom]

Hey Stan

It felt quite close actually, I aclimatised to the sim pretty quickly despite not driving it before. I found it suprising that it was so close to what we already drive, however learning nuances on the fly was a little difficult! I decided as soon as I got it to really attack it.

Firstly careful of kerbs, I found that out with a couple of crazy moments testing the limits in the first 8 laps or so, gravel traps with high FFB and the motion platform are entertaining to say the least Even running a couple of wheels on the kerbs vibrated the whole platform so much it was difficult to keep in a straight line. I was worried about the physicality with the high FFB of it before I started but after a few laps you get used to the forces, though I wasn't as smooth as normal and the car was harder to counter-steer.

The car feel on track was very good, and due to the motion platform coupled with the strong force feedback, I received much more in the way of sensory input. I would say that it felt like F1C, high speed corners in general were quite easy to take, you could control the snappy moments if you predicted it. The slower corners were more tricky getting the power down and generally much more fun, you had to be aggressive to be fast however.

Braking was literally slam on the brakes as hard as possible then release as the aero effect reduces. I had to match the RPM to downshift which was a bit tricky at first as all I wanted to do was slam down 4 gears haha, in fact this took me some time to get used to and I still didn't get it right at the end.

The brakes were important, firstly I used a load cell brake, felt great actually What I did find funny was the sim racer technique of using the brake to turn the car with a little bit of throttle worked well, though I didn't change the setup (I would have put more rearward brake). The engineer told me that they never like to run brakes to the rear, brakes are determined by how much locking there is on the front, so once the fronts no longer lockup that should be the optimum brake bias. I said that sim racers use the brakes more for steering into a corner and run low brake bias - his response was that in a real life situation it was too dangerous to run brake bias too far back.

So after running around 3x8 laps and feeling very ill from the Field Of View bizarrely, I was satisfied with the performance. I know its easy to say but without this I could have put in about 100 laps and I think I would have been much faster. Still there were a few surpised people there.

Lastly, the engineer told me that simulators will be as important as wind tunnel technology in future, so much can be tested at a cheaper cost using simulators over track days. The sim is also perfect for drivers to get used to the controls in the real cars, something as sim racers we know about, however most F1 drivers don't have a keyboard in the cockpit hehe. I can forsee simracing teams being involved with testing for F1 teams, providing telemetry, replays even rudimentary setups.

[Dom]

iRacing has the best on track feel and was quite closer in terms of sensory input, however for the downforce cars the braking is incorrect, in iRacing you can easily lock up at high speed, whereas in reality you can brake hard until you reach 50 mph or so then gradually release the brake.

[Douglas Lundberg]

I bet u had a good time Dom

Originally Posted by Dom

iRacing has the best on track feel and was quite closer in terms of sensory input, however for the downforce cars the braking is incorrect, in iRacing you can easily lock up at high speed, whereas in reality you can brake hard until you reach 50 mph or so then gradually release the brake.

Some months ago i did a test in a Formula Renault and what u just mentioned is one thing that feels just so different from irl to simracing i think.
In the real car u can/should slam the brakes as hard as u can in the beginning and then gradually release it as you said. It feels like its way too easy to lock up in simracing if u ask me

[Dom]

Yes agreed, but even the ISI F1 sims brake properly, maybe its a downforce and brake pressure issue.

[Olde Bloke]

Congratulations Dom. Very impressive. Shame about the motion sickness. One would have to assume it's bad etiquette to projectile vomit from a moving simulator.


Re: brakes. I concur. In other sims I generally brake fully and reduce with speed. I thought the idea was that brakes aren't efficient enough to lock the tyres at high speed due to heat production. And that as speed reduces, they become more efficient than the tyres, hence potential for lock up. Something is wrong somewhere - it was the first thing I noticed in a first try with iRacing yesterday.

FWIW, I remember Jensen Button telling a journalist that he (can't remember the context) wouldn't need to worry about locking up an F1 car as he physically wouldn't be able to press the brake pedal hard enough anyway.

[Dom]

Ok thats interesting, I know that the F1 guys have some issues with simulators and braking as in reality they have gforce helping the press down on the brake

Projectile vomitting, now that would have been story - I was close, very close!

[Greger Huttu]

Originally Posted by Dom

Projectile vomitting, now that would have been story - I was close, very close!

You should have told them to increase the FOV!

[Olde Bloke]

...Which now stands for Field Of Vomit.

[Dave Williams]

Hi Dom, that looked like an awesome opportunity! Sounds like you did a pretty awesome job, as I myself being a sim racer would expect. It's great that sim racing is gradually starting to be taken more and more seriously and more stuff like this can come up.

I was lucky enough a while ago now to be invited to try a static simulator with a large dome screen and Formula BMW cockpit for the V1 Championship - http://www.v1championship.com/ (which never really kicked off due to the recession, but plans to restart again at some point). 3 of us from LFS were chosen as we had the top 3 times around the Blackwood FBM combo, and we were all very very close in laptime in the sim at Fortec. Heikki Kovalainen had been in the sim sometime earlier, and had set a time in the old Blackwood version which ran slightly quicker times than the new version does, but we were quicker than him if you take that into account. A vid of Scawen (LFS developer) driving it can be found here - http://www.racingi.com/view_video.ph...e=&category=mr

Anyway enough waffling from me about that. It doesn't compare to what you were able to drive. How did the opportunity come about??

[Dom]

That sounds a great opportunity as well Dave, good to see you were on the pace as well I think sim drivers will get many more opportunities in future, we have more opportunity to race than real world drivers and we have a larger competition base. It came about quite short notice and Greger was asked, however no passport! So I was asked instead and I couldn't pass on an opportunity like that

...Which now stands for Field Of Vomit

Haha, thats true, I couldn't change the FOV as it was specifically set, however one of the F1 test drivers also got very ill from the simualtor and sometimes needs 3 days to recover, it gives him awful migraines! I've driven in many simulators before and motion platforms (BRD namely) and I never had this problem.

[Stan]

Hi Dom and all,

Sorry not to reply sooner and thanks for your post.

You exactly point the sim problem, you can drive in a way that is not possible to achieved in real world; because most of the times, sim drivers can easiestly be smooth due to lack of motion,G's and wobbling, and in your case (driving a full motion F1 simultor inside an F1 Team ... good "pressure") I suspect that you thought so much that it's "as real as it gets" (because of the F1 shadow) that you probably have more driven than you do when you drive/play ours stuff. Those diferencies in the hardware (motion, load-cell, triple screen, fov, ...) are one of the reason why I never go online anymore; the other reason is because you don't drive ours sim's the same way when you want to have a real "sim experience" where you force yourself to drive like you'll do in the real world (and which is what is expected by the program's, ... for the sim to behave at it's best you have yourself to drive as expected) and not as you do in online sim racing when you want to make a time (left foot braking only, brake bias 50/50 instead of 2/3 in front or ultra fast downshifting).

About the degressive braking, I have been surprised that it had surpised you as it's the only way of braking on a real race track (weight transfer purpose).

As you said that it was the first time you used a load-cell, I have recently bought (and didn't received it for now) this excellent G25 mod (for what I have read) that I am happy to submit to you: www.apelectrix.com

Last, could you try to be more specific about the sensory output that you have feel from the soft itself still compared to what we know, even if I understand that it is not easy to do on a forum.

Anyway, sorry for the long post and thanks again for your comments.


Stan.

[Dom]

Well a few things

I found the simulator suprisingly more like simracing titles than I imagined, the forces through the platform and the ffb did make it harder to drive of course, however I think its only a matter of time until you get used to it and of course get fit! Fitness I can tell is an important part of controlling the car better - seems I need to get down the gym.

What suprised me about the braking was that it was very 'safe', you brake hard in a straight line roll into the corner then accel, I still think that sim racer technique of using the brakes to steer into the corner is a valid one, some drivers in real life do this anyway, Schuey and Lewis for instance. So if you are asking me if simracers have unrealistic setups or driving styles I would say no - just more risky.

The software didnt give too many clues away, the sounds I think helped, I could hear if I was slipping, it was a leap of faith into some corners, the FFB gave me a lot of feeling.

[Olde Bloke]

Dom, could you be a bit more specific as to what, exactly, you could feel in the FFB e.g. rear sliding gave such and such effect. There's some dispute amongst the different sims' advocates as to what's real and what's a sim giving false signals to substitute for real physicals.

Or where you too busy clinging on to the wheel to notice?

BTW, I thought one advantage of sims is not having to go to the gym! Or do you have 'plans'.

[Dom]

Well you could slightly feel if the car was losing grip as the force became slightly less, I would say though that most of the driving was quite reactionary, sometimes the car would suddenly start to loose traction and I needed to quickly react.

Do I think other sims are similar? yes I think a mix of F1 by ISI and Nk Pro.

haha, also luckily I do some exercise, rowing etc So the arms were ok Though racing and do that for 70 laps i would need to increase fitness levels drastically, you had to hold onto the wheel very tight.

[Stan]

Originally Posted by Dom

So if you are asking me if simracers have unrealistic setups or driving styles I would say no.

No, this was not a question, but thanks anyway.


Stan.

[Olde Bloke]

We know F1 drivers use left foot braking. And in other cars, a bit of a left foot 'prod' on the brake is often employed to help them around a bend.

But this technique of right foot on throttle in all cars to stabalise and control the whole left foot braking/turning phase is not normal in the real world surely? It certainly isn't in the Skip; there's an amazing Infineon world record on Youtube (1:45.932), but it RL, they say it's more or less impossible in that car because the steering column is in the way. Mind you, I've not seen any RL vids of Skips moving sideways through every corner the way everyone remotely on the pace drives in iRacing. So, IMO, the physics is off anyway.

But are there any "aliens" you know of who don't have their right foot on the throttle into the corners? Not that I use a clutch pedal and are bitter and twisted and have just flown like a projectile over the top of the slippery bend at VIR-full (end of third straight) for no reason I can understand for the umpteenth time or anything like that..dammit!

Seriously, I do realise the technique's not easy or everyone would be doing it and be as fast. I'm just struck by some of the fast replays where it sounds like the engine's running continuously through the bends but with a slight modulated mangled noise as the brake comes in. Mine are more: brake...engine..brake...er crash.

[Dom]

Well, I think you are right in the skippy the steering column is in the way Bastien did a world record with the old physics using right foot braking alone so it can be done

I've always used brake and throttle for balancing the car on the fast corners (inducing understeer into the corner if im running a low wing setup) and on slow corners applying throttle only really to rev match to stop a potential spin. The old build of iracing showed alot more throttle under braking than what we are actually using, the new build should be more accurate, for instance now it appears I use very little!

I do think it is a legitimate technique, schumacher seemed to use it to great effect But I also think in some real life cars such as the skippy you would find the physicality of left foot braking impossible.