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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

My daughter immediately asked: who's winning? Darn good question, and I didn't find an answer in the article (though admittedly I skimmed a bit).

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The gamers are generally faster because the games are not perfect simulations of reality.

Or even if they were, the "real" drivers are trained to respond to a completely different set of sensations. The simulation can be perfect, but when you're sitting still, you don't feel things such as whether the simulated car is slipping at all (just an example, there are of course a thousand other things).

Well, you feel it but in a different way. People spend a lot of money on Force Feedback wheels, with the fancier ones running into 4 figures.

Through the wheel, you're expected to feel everything including tyre grip, slip, road conditions, etc.

>Through the wheel, you're expected to feel everything including tyre grip, slip, road conditions, etc.

Well, there are other solutions for that as well, but that's beyond most mortals.

The not dying part seems limiting.

I was watching a part and yes. You're making a joke but this (plus that it wasn't for competition points; there was no point to winning) was clearly affecting the race and reduced my enjoyment because they just weren't always giving it their all.

With force feedback wheels and pressure sensitive brake pedals you can get a feel for traction pretty well.

Sim accuracy could affect times either way (also some sims are pretty darn accurate). I suspect the biggest difference is the risk taking aspect. Sim drivers don't have to think about safety at all.

They had damage on low, but having watched it, considering the damage to the car is important to the finish.

Except in iRacing, where even minor incidents are tracked across races and low safety rating has disqualify you from higher split

> Sim accuracy could affect times either way

I meant that pro sim racers are generally faster than pro drivers at sim racing, not that the simulation times are faster than the real times.

Professional drivers destroy in simulations like racing.com

Professional drivers that also spend a lot of time sim racing, that is...

The same is true in this series. Drivers like Max Verstappen and Lando Norris (among the best drivers in the world) so very well, but they also spend a lot of their free time playing these games.

Other world class drivers (Hamilton, Vettel, etc), likely wouldn't do anywhere near as well.

Obviously there is some overlap in the skills required, but at the end of the day, experience gaming is going to help more than more experience in a real car.

Hamilton’s done a few exhibition sim races, and generally does very well in them. The skills translate much better from track to sim than they do the other way around. If you watch the break and throttle pressure on these streams, it’s obvious that the professional racers are much better. They do things like trail breaking, and managing engine power a lot more competently and consistently than the sim enthusiasts. I’d imagine the main obstacle would be getting used to the different feedback sources. It’s also worth noting that most F1 drivers (I don’t really know about other motorsports) do at least some sim training. Kimi is the only current driver I know of who’s said he doesn’t use the sim.

Yeah, 100% agree that real experience translates to gaming experience better than gaming experience would translate to a real car.

The sims that the teams run (especially the top teams) are significantly more advanced than a CodeMasters game and fancy steering wheel...

Not sure what the teams use these days, as they seem to have become more secretive about it as the technology has gotten better. But I’ve seen some of the commercial products that have the enormous surround screen, moving chassis, and thing attached to the helmet to simulate force on the neck. I’d imagine the better off teams have facilities like that. The software would certainly be better than the CodeMaster game, but I can’t imagine it being that much better than iRacing (apart from being more customised to the current tracks/cars).

I follow Kimi on Instagram and he's posted a story where he's at home sitting in a simulator, with his son on his lap. (Kimi was doing throttle and brake, and gear changes, while his son was turning the wheel.) So he does own one for playing.

I just checked this on google, and it turns out he did at least some sim training/testing with Ferrari. I just remember a lot of the interviews/press conferences where he talks about how much he hates them. Not sure if they can still manage to get him in one at work though.

https://www.crash.net/f1/news/187198/1/kimi-learns-nothing-u...

A few of the real drivers are also highly ranked simmers as well. Max Verstappen (one of the best drivers in F1) is commonly seen in public iRacing races

Obligatory reference to him practicing an overtake [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y5-DZNjBOg&feature=youtu.be] before doing it in real-life. Also see https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Max-Verstappens-move-on-the-out... .

Except first place was the Renault test and reserve driver ...

In this case, it looks like a NASCAR spotter was the winner: https://kickinthetires.net/esports/spotter-josh-williams-ups...

GT Sport has a DLC-mode where you can do time trials vs. Lewis Hamilton's lap times. On a track where he clocked 1 minute 37 seconds, I was pretty shocked to find that the top 10 GT Sport players _all_ clocked lap times around 2 seconds faster than that.

Whats so shocking about it? Hamilton probably spent an hour or so for each of those laps, maybe less. Top 10 guys spend days or weeks doing it.

Yeah it makes sense when you think about it, but the first time you see it you're like wtf.

In the case of the big Nascar race today, the winner (Hamlin) is a professional IRL racer who was discovered in the eSports world

earlier this week, there was an article about F1 drivers playing the codemasters F1 game, and the best pro driver came in 8th and seemed pretty happy to have done that well.

the rationale is that driving is not just a challenge of operating the controls, but a physical challenge too. when you take away the physical aspect, the drivers lose not only the advantage of their physical training, but also an important input that they use for reactions.

You underestimate the pro drivers. The reason why they came in 8th or so is that they did not train for it. They were competing as rookies in a game that some of the sim races spent hundreds of hours in. They are bound to be much slower that "pro" simracers.

The other sensory inputs are a factor, but most drivers adapt very fast to it. Give them enough seat time and you see them top of the charts, they are not pro real life drivers because they lack reflexes or understanding of racing dynamics.

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