Formula 1 e-sports now more exciting than the real thing
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Abu Dhabi is a boring racetrack that makes passing quite difficult, but if you could not find something interesting about the Brazil race (Ricciardo started at 14th and made his way up to 6th and Hamilton started on the pit lane and clawed his way up to 4th) or the Mexico race (won by Verstappen, a 20 year old guy who was not driving a Mercedes or Ferrari, with a 19 second margin over the 2nd place Mercedes, which has been dominant and is a much better car), it's possible you're just not an F1 fan.
That's fine, and it probably points to a good audience for the "e-sports" racing. Maybe some of those guys will convert to being F1 fans, maybe some of them won't, but it is not an expensive experiment for F1 to run. Pretty much all they have to do is push this while not embarrassing themselves too badly with the fans of motor racing who couldn't care less about e-sports. (who knows? The loud reaction among fans to the F1 logo change might indicate that they're all insane anyway, so it is impossible to predict)
That said, I also noticed that a lot of cars had to hold back quite a bit: the current aerodynamics of the cars means the choppy air seems to run about 1.5 seconds off of the back of the lead car, so if you're staying in clearer air, you're out of DRS. Meaning: people even trying to get into overtaking of the lead car are drastically lowering the lifetime of their tires if nothing else. Combine that with the wider car and there's not a lot of actual overtaking going on in race-leadership positions. It happens, but not a lot - more often I think there's the under/overcut calculations about when a pit stop happens, and the pass happens virtually with time lost in the pit lane.
This is all exacerbated by mercedes's dominance in the qualifying rounds. In a season where so many races were won from the front row if the leaders get out of the first lap clean without a crash, this is all huge. It adds up to: Hamilton totally dominated the second half of the season, easily winning the championship and Mercedes taking the constructor's championship even earlier. In terms of leadership swaps and contention for first, it's a boring season. Still: can't discount Hamilton here, he is an amazing driver and clearly the best on the circuit.
Overall? I had to start watching the red bulls and force india scrapping over the midfield, because the front of the pack was indeed boring. And I'm not sure that really appeals to average viewers.
Yes. Interestingly, I think there have been a few races where the television coverage follows that pattern too, basically ignoring the guys out in front until something happens, and spending a lot more time in the middle of the pack. Watching Force India is 100% fun.
> In terms of leadership swaps and contention for first, it's a boring season. Still: can't discount Hamilton here, he is an amazing driver and clearly the best on the circuit.
As far as the driver's championship, I wouldn't discount the competition Vettel and Ferrari put up, and if Vettel hadn't crashed out in Signapore it's at least possible they would have been fighting until the last race. The thing about Hamilton is that he makes it all look easy.
Formula 1 should seriously consider mandating reduced aerodynamic complexity. It might not be a great solution, but it's a better alternative to artificial DRS and snooze-fest races.
For what it's worth, the Sauber, Toro Rosso and Haas cars had a great battle last race. That said, turbulence affected them too, almost as badly as it did the front-runners.
Dunno, I love driving around in various racing sims and it's a lot of fun with a decent amount of passing unlike many circuits (GRID Autosport, F1 201x etc.)
The real-life F1 passing is pretty bad right now; that's not a problem with the circuit itself.
Some Hamilton quotes about the problems passing this time at Abu Dhabi: https://wtf1.com/post/lewis-hamilton-doesnt-think-yas-marina...
A very brief teaser for some potential changes to the track: https://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2017/11/26/tilke-considering-sma...
I have to admit that most of the time, I enjoy the chaotic tracks the most. Monaco is a classic for a reason, and there is something inspiring about the fact that a track as fundamentally insane as Baku can come about in these modern times.
isn't that the boring part? it's like playing F1 2017 on PC on easy mode.
Some race tracks just don't provide good racing and some are downright boring to watch despite being fun for the drivers. This is even more of a problem with Formula E, which usually runs on street circuits with mostly 90 degree corners.
Watching other people play video games has never felt remotely appealing to me. Must be one of the things somebody my generation truly does not get.
And I did not mean my remark in a normative way. I watch all sorts of sports, I play all sorts of video games, and I have occasionally enjoyed watching Machinima. I don't consider these activities morally superior to watching e-sports or other forms of video game streaming, I just don't see any personal appeal whatsoever in the latter.
In many ways, eSports are way better IMO than the traditional sports I watch: the players are more relatable, the casting is more interactive, the broadcasts are more available, the games are strategically much deeper.
I can remember when game over meant try again from the start.
Video games are very much a spectator sport.
As mentioned in the article, Formula E also runs an e-sports version of its series. They had live e-races at every racing event last year. Unfortunately, the races were quite bad to watch - pretty much exactly like playing racing games online (everyone goes in hard at the 1st corner, lots of collisions). The F1 esports final was 10x more fun to watch, although there was some aggressive driving, they mostly drove the same way the pros do.
I'm not saying it's not fun. The driver's talent is there (many ex-F1 guys there), it has an appeal of manufacturers, there's hi-tech involved. But the cars are small, slow, light, silent, and they are all the same (chassis and aero). Plus, the fan boost... Ugh.
With all the big marques coming in FE will only go up in, and I hope it'll someday mature to something akin to F1 combined with Teslas in ludicrous mode. For now: any comparison to F1 is not merited.
The best Formula E race I've seen was the practice race before Season 1 at Donnington Park, a real racing track with sweeping, cambered corners fast and slow, uphills and downhills and a few big braking spots that allow for overtaking.
The world is full of race tracks that can't be used for Formula 1 any more, but would suit Formula E cars very well. Like Brands Hatch for example. Of course, the tracks are not usually suitable for large audiences or are at remote locations which makes it unappealing for the series from a business point of view.
The first time I tried racing in VR (in Dirt Rally), I had the brilliant idea of using a Group B car. On a flat screen, it just feels really fast and requires intense focus. In VR, you really feel like you're sitting on a rocket and the car is trying to kill you.
Merc-AMG's team make things look easy, but I guess that's because the audience just isn't liking the technical expertise required to consistently perform like they have.
F1 cars ultimately have to answer to physics, but F1 games are up to the designers and the game engine, which may not accurately represent everything (I trust they are trying, I have to believe people working on F1 2017 also love F1 the sport). Ultimately though they have to make tradeoffs because they can't fully represent physics, so that may mean advantages through game code. Maybe damage doesn't get applied to the car as it should or maybe there's network issues with collision. Smarter people than I could probably find some exploits.
Significant coverage also goes to drivers outside of F1 races, as they are multi-millionaires with planes and expensive cars. They probably aren't signing eSports drivers for multi-million dollar contracts.
I'm totally casual at F1 2017 though. I don't even have a wheel, so this opinion probably counts as much as my opinion on F1 aero design. :)
It could also break down gender barriers where either rules or physical intensity of a sport results in segregation (e.g. soccer) or a lack of female participation (e.g. F1).
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/may/16/f1-formula-one...
What? Higher resolution displays, better rendering, better input devices, and headsets with 360 degree fields of view help the immersion - but a huge part of driving (and other extreme sports you might want to emulate as an E-sport) is the raw acceleration, which you just can't duplicate with a video game (other sports have a physical exertion component, which is also hard to simulate).
You don't feel like you're on a sitting on a rocket. You imagine you feel like you're sitting on a rocket.
My point is that VR hits a "close enough" point at a much lower price, and flat screens didn't really do it. This dynamic doesn't exist with, as an example, skiing, where actually skiing isn't much more expensive than virtually skiing.
Maybe one day having a car for the track will be economically feasible, but for now I'm pretty happy with primarily accessing the sport through VR at a fraction of the price. I've actually looked at the cheap end of actually racing cars, but it's just not feasible because of hidden costs until a lot of things change about my lifestyle. Until then, a VR headset is far more doable.
I suspect a lot of people are in a similar boat, so having something pretty cool to actively participate in is a big improvement over just watching.
That's a good point. I'm not sure that skiing is a great example - it can be an extremely pricey hobby if you don't live near a good hill - but I agree there's a broad distribution of the experience achievable against the cost (I imagine an XKCD-style graph in the style of [1] or [2], with "How much it costs" on the X axis and "How awesome it is" on the Y axis, with labels for "VR auto racing", "Actual auto racing", "simulated bowling", "actual bowling", "Kerbal Space Program", "SpaceX", "Surfing", "Simulated surfing", etc.
The vdeo game simply does not reflect things like: track surface bumpiness, knocks in the car, feeling of the steering rack, driving over curbs, the forces on ones wrists and what happens to them after 20 laps, having to actually move your head to check the mirrors, tires going off, brakes fading, changing weather conditions and having to choose a different line in the wet and dry, dirt on the surface, brake discs going out of shape from overheating, etc. The video game experience does not relate to the real driving. All the forces under braking, acceleration, going over the crest, compression when going into the dips, gear not going in because the forces between the engine and the gesrbox do not allow for it to go in - it's all missing. It's a washed down experience. It's good maybe for concentration training and learning general track layout.
What's really annoying in virtually every video game is that, somehow, none of them even manages to really reflect the track width. All other things like changing weather is just algorithm, once you learn the algorithm, there's no surprise anymore.
* edit for readability
> no track surface bumpiness... none of them even manages to really reflect the track width.
iRacing laser-scans real-world tracks. You feel the bumps through your force feedback wheel and/or motion rig if available.
> having to actually move your head to check the mirrors
You absolutely have to crane your neck 1:1 in VR. Super immersive in flight sims particularly.
> having to choose a different line in the wet and dry, dirt on the surface
Even simpler sims model this kind of thing, and especially all of the market leaders. iRacing models rubber build-up during the course of the race, track temperature, water evaporation, etc.
> This is what keeps you focused.
Obviously there's no fear of death in a simulator; but the drivers in these virtual races take this stuff seriously. This isn't Forza.
> is just algorithm, once you learn the algorithm, there's no surprise anymore.
I'm not sure if you've played any modern sims, but they're incredibly sophisticated. iRacing is used by Nascar, etc. teams. DCS A-10 is an offshoot of a military simulator for pilot training.
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Oh and forgot to add... the F1 game featured in the article is trash as far as driving physics go. It's a 'game', not a 'sim'.
It's certainly not a replacement for an actual car, track time, etc, but the $1000 I spent on hardware to get a simulation of it (that I also use for other things like Flight simulation) was well worth it.
Someone already replied to you about how detailed iRacing can get. Some other sims are also quite good, but IMO none come close to iRacing's fidelity let alone the great online competition with safety ratings and sanctioned series.
You absolutely do have to care about tire temperatures, bumps on the road, dirty/clean/hot/cold track (e.g. shadows are cold) and brake temperatures. Especially once you get into the single seaters like Star Mazda or Formula Renault, where you have to start with cold, underpressurized tires because for competitive times you need an aggressive car setup that only starts working once you're warmed up.
It's no substitute for track days, but no-one in their right mind would let me take a 1966 Lotus 49 Formula 1 car (only a handful in existance) on the Nordschleife, let alone go wheel-to-wheel with others on one.
Top-tier sim racing teams actually do have race engineers and test drivers with telemetry and all to set up the cars. Racing sims have roughly the same amount of things to tweak as the real cars do.
But in F1, the often forgotten fact is that every car is different and engineered for the particular race track. The Ferrari that runs at Monza (low downforce) is significantly different from the Ferrari that runs at Monaco (high downforce) or Silverstone (medium-high downforce compromise). By contrast, every car is the same in simracing, apart from the setup (which can make a huge difference).
I think the biggest problem here is the depth of the pockets of each team. Those with bigger engineering budgets are dominating the podiums, while the smaller team struggle with 'hand me down' parts that are outdated when they get to them.
F1 has had to ride the hard line between actually showing progress in automotive R&D and still being somewhat a gladiatorial sport.
The progress made with hybrid engines, energy recovery, construction materials etc. have been monumental, especially in the past decade. However, that has also lead to less noisy cars, and a reduced element of danger. Good things when it comes to road car operation, but can work against the sport in the heat of battle on the track.
We can applaud the safety standard that get better each year, especially after the death's of Senna, and more recently, Jules Bianchi, but that sense of safety is also turning people away. No one wants to see a driver die (A driver's chance of dying in an F1 season in the 60's/70's was something like 20%), but again - the sport has become somewhat sterile and staid because of it. (Not to mention - Ugly, with the introduction of the 2018 halos).
Perhaps the fascination with eSports is that you CAN actually bang another car off the track, and you will get to see the spectacle of a crash without having to live with the fact that you might end someones life in the resulting conflagration?
Even when cutting to overtakes when cars pass. That move was set up 5 corners ago that's the interesting part.
Fuel saving is not really a thing any more. It was when the new turbo-hybrids were introduced but with the new injection systems and higher efficiency engines as well as increased fuel limits, there hasn't been really a need for running economy for the sake of making it to the end on fuel.
Mercedes engines give more than 50% thermal efficiency now. That is phenomenal.
> Add refueling back, make it more exciting.
Not only is refueling terribly dangerous but I can't really agree that it would be more exciting to see teams play with strategy rather than try to overtake on track or by undercut/overcut on the pit lane (I liked seeing Ferrari play their good old fake pitstop overcut with Räikkönen vs. Perez a few races back, just like in the Schumacher-Todt days).
A lot of people are agreeing that the major inhibitor to the competition are the current front wings. They develop a lot of the cars' downforce and are the reason the cars are so fast at the moment, but completely lose their efficiency when following another car. Compare a last year F1 front wing [0] with one from about 15-20 years ago [1].
All those bits and pieces are there for a reason. They're the product of days and months of CFD work in supercomputer clusters (F1 regulations actually limit the amount of FLOPS in the aero clusters!). Additionally, when there's a minor collision in the first lap, a few of those bits might go missing but not enough to warrant a front wing change. That means that the driver is impaired for the rest of the race, and none if it is conveyed to the viewer (unless Martin Brundle spots it and tells it to the viewers).
A few years back there was the "overtaking working group" (OVG) that looked into this and their verdict was that the rear wings need to be higher and front wings simpler and make the underbody create more downforce (ground effect, without skirts though). Unfortunately that's the opposite of what they've been doing for the past few years and it shows.
[0] https://cdn-8.motorsport.com/static/img/mgl/3600000/3610000/... [1] http://www.racecar-engineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
f1 used to be about the best maker, not the best driver. quite a philosophical difference there.
In terms of prize money, F1 still cares a lot about the constructor contest. It's not something fans are conscious of, necessarily. For example, sixth place in the constructor contest was decided on the last race, and there were three teams that could have taken it. It doesn't sound like much but it's worth twelve million dollars...
Can anybody speak to what the issue is preventing cars from following each other closely in the turns? Loosing "clean air" and aerodynamic downforce is my completely uneducated in F1 guess.
The front wing is responsible for a lot of the downforce but loses too much of its efficiency when in turbulent air. The remedy would be moving the rear wings higher (more slipstream with the turbulent layer of air higher above the cars), simplifying the front wings (which increases drag in clean air) and making the car underbody provide more downforce. Unfortunately, that's not the direction the F1 regulations have been moving to.
[0] https://cdn-8.motorsport.com/static/img/mgl/3600000/3610000/... [1] http://www.racecar-engineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1...
"This video contains content from Formula One Management, who has blocked it..."
That is the message I got trying to watch the video embedded in the article.
The exclusivity and false sense of importance portrayed by F1 is just really lame, I feel like they go out of their way to make it hard to watch.
This coupled with the fact the actual racing has been boring and over regulated makes me glad I don't waste my time with F1 any more.
But, to the matter at hand, the vid only seems to be blocked when it is embedded on websites. I had a "watch this on youtube" link in the message and when I clicked there it took me to youtube.com and the vid started playing. Whatever the reasoning is to block embedded vids but not the vid altogether is beyond me. But then again, so is uglyfying the car with apendages that make it look like a flipflop...
E-sports? That's nice, but we've had sim racing for a long time. And F1 2017 is not even a simulator. It's made for the broad audience, who would play it on a PS4 with its controller, but not for hardcore sim racers.
Vandoorne competed in a serious rFactor F1 league and it's not like he was the fastest guy.
Having had a royal ass-kicking delivered to me by Stoffel Vandoorne and Rubens Barichello in iRacing, I have to say that they might not be the fastest simracers out there but boy are they fast! I'm not a top-tier simracer by any means but these guys were at a whole different level.
Verstappen also used to do tons of simracing at top levels in the past. I wonder why they never mention that in the broadcast, because I think it's a major influence to him. Before he ever sat in a single seater car, he had had thousands of hours in a virtual one. His epic save in the rain at Interlagos 2016 was a classic simracer move. Anyone else would have braced for impact but he sat there as calmly as one can because he'd been there before in a sim, just waiting for the front wheels to bite and then let go of the brake at the right moment. You can't practice that in a real car because you don't end up in that kind of situations often enough and walk away from them.
They should make a game for an era like "the V6 era" and give us a supported racing game, with DLC of current drivers or setups per season, but the core game is built as a community, and iterated upon.
A new game each year is just like map packs that divide player bases.
Dirt Rally is a recent Codemasters game that is excellent, if you're into rallying. It's almost as good as Richard Burns Rally, and miles ahead of any other rally game/sim.
Dirt Rally is not for me, it's like Project Cars unrealistic hard while not be very realistic, in contrary to Grandprix Legends and Assetto Corsa. Dirt 3+4 with this Ken Block shit or random generated boring generic tracks - no thanks. DiRT 2 is still the best in presentation (it looks better in 4K on PC than DiRT Rally, see YouTube videos), DiRT 2 has a nice single campaign, a nice menu, great tracks in 8 different regions, a great physics engine and car deformation and so much more - I don't get why their newer games all are a lot less fun to drive and in general build together so lackluster. Maybe they should take a break for a year, not releasing yearly updates to F1, DiRT (and DiRT). A new DiRT 2 and a new GRID 1 and a new DriveClub would be awesome - do it.
Dirt Rally is probably the most realistic rally simulator out there, or at least second after Richard Burns Rally. There's nothing that's comparable to those two out there.
And it feels alright to me compared to my experience driving in low grip conditions on dirt, snow and ice (on traffic and doing drifting on empty lots). Also when watching replays it looks like real rally driving (most car games don't look at all like the real thing when watching replays).
But rallying is really friggin' difficult. Richard Burns Rally is probably even more difficult than Dirt Rally. It takes a while to get a hang of the loose surface and the lateral dampening from packing snow and dirt in front of the tyres.
But once you catch the drift (pun intended), it becomes nice and fluent. You need to flick the car in nice and early, get going sideways and then modulate the drift with throttle and brake. I really like the FWD and RWD cars in Dirt Rally, the 4WD's are not as intuitive as in RBR (but that might be because they don't model the 2000's era computer controlled center differentials).
The big difference to driving sims on tarmac is that you don't really spend a lot of time full throttle. Instead you accelerate to a decent speed and then modulate the throttle to compensate for changes in the track surface. Braking is also similar, to slow down you give very little brake pedal with lots of modulation and only go full brakes when doing left foot braking (right foot on throttle).
I can't speak about Dirt or F1 or WRC games because I haven't put much time into them. I'm more into simulation than racing games.
Oh wait you might survive thanks to F1 technology in your car
In any case, that lap records were beaten this year tells an altogether different story: the engines used don't matter that much for the lap times after a point. After all, they were running almost the same engines last year, a little development notwithstanding, and were much slower: what has changed, and what dominates the gains in lap times, is aerodynamics – which are severely restricted by the rules. That was also the case a dozen years ago when we had the similarly powerful, larger but lighter N/A V10 engines (no hybrid part to lug around back then), accompanied with a narrower track and grooved tyres to reduce the cornering speeds. Thus the comparison is moot: everything around the engine dominates the equation anyway, but that is hardly news.
To put it in perspective - Even in the heady days of F1 racing in the 80's. All the fuel used by every car in every team on every racetrack each year (including all practices, qualifying and races) still used less fuel than a single 747 on a transatlantic flight.
If we round the latter to 12,000 per hour and convert to litres at a density of 1.23 for kerosene, that's 43 litres per passenger for a British Airways -400 with 345 seats, which is fairly low density due to a large number of suites and business seats:
https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/British_Airways/British_Ai...
That 43 litres propels that passenger 510 nautical miles in one hour, 945km. 22km per litre.
Now, an Air Canada 777-300ER which is a generation on from the 747-400 burns about 8,500kg per hour with 458 passengers... And an A350-1000 should beat that by about 15% when it enters service.
The efficiency of even semi-modern airliners is remarkable.
All F1 cars (under 2017 regulations) start a 45-55 lap (2 hour) race with 100Kg of fuel. No more can be added. Given that the cars will probably do another 50 odd laps during the 3 practice sessions and qualifying sprints, then each car will use about 200Kg of fuel per race meet. Lets round it up to 250Kg to allow for idling/testing in the garage, in/out sequences into the pit lane etc.
There were 20 cars competing in the 2017 season (10 teams with 2 cars each), across 20 different tracks:
250 x 20 x 20 = 100000Kg of fuel used over the 2017 season.
The time to fly from London to New York is around 8 hours, so the 777 would burn:
8 x 8500 = 68000Kg
So, a modern airliner would save a little more fuel on a transatlantic one way flight, but we are still around 2/3rds of the entire F1 season's worth of fuel - and that is just ONE plane out of the hundreds that make that flight every single day. (and don't forget that I added about another 25% of fuel load onto the F1 figures to allow for errors, but I don't think many cars will do more than 100 laps on a race weekend - so ACTUAL usage may be 25% LESS than I extrapolated, making them almost equivalent figures for both plane and F1 season).
Otherwise you’re a hypocrite.