Sports

How do NASCAR drivers stay out of the racetrack? Hours and hours of video game play


“Practice makes perfect.” That’s what you tell yourself when you’re throwing spirals through an old tire, with a dream about the NFL, or shooting a gun in the garage door and fantasizing raising the Lord Stanley Cup.

However, how do you become perfect, if all you need to practice is to bend a 3,300-pound car to your will? After all, there is no easy (or legal) way to climb a NASCAR Car Cup Series and race with your friends around the vicinity.

Well, there isn’t. However, with the advent of racing simulators, that is changing – and fast.

As anyone who has played with the latest PlayStation or Xbox can attest, video games are more realistic, lifelike, and immersive than ever before. Today’s gaming hardware is so advanced that popular titles like Forza and Gran Turismo can accurately reproduce the real racing experience on a real track.

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If those console franchises open the door to sim racing for everyday gamers, then PC-only offerings like iRacing and rFactor 2 take it a step further.

“I discovered iRacing with a simple Google search” Anthony Alfredo, driver of Our Motorsports No. 23 Xfinity Series, told ESPN. “Finally, I got one of those Logitech pedals and wheels to play with at my desk and it was as simple as that, for a few hundred bucks, I was sim racing.”

iRacing is arguably the biggest name in the ever-expanding world of racing sims. It is said to boast 225,000 active subscribers, including drivers from practically every major race in the world: NASCAR, Formula one, IndyCar and several others. Driving McLaren Lando Norris has long been found loitering in the iRacing corridors and the 2021 F1 champions Max Verstappen as well as the 2005 and 2006 champions Fernando Alonso has also been spotted in its races.

Rajah Caruth is another person with substantial sim experience. The 20-year-old is competing in the ARCA Menards Series with Rev Racing in 2022 and he is participating in select Camping World Truck Series events with Spire Motorsports and a limited Xfinity Series schedule with Alpha Prime Racing.

And thanks to iRacing, he got here.

“NASCAR is where I want to race and I’ve just wanted to race in real life since I was a kid, and so the only way to do that, I think, is through online racing,” Caruth told ESPN. “It was never about racing online for the sake of it, so it was never my goal to start on iRacing, but I know it’s a gateway to starting racing.”

However, it is not just a gateway. iRacing is so realistic that the company has worked with NASCAR to develop new tracks such as the 1/4-mile track used at the LA Coliseum in February and the Chicago track that will debut next July. Racing simulation has become an invaluable development tool – for racers, teams and the sport as a whole.

The trend in motorsport around the world over the past two decades has been that the time of testing and practice sessions has both diminished. This helps keep costs down – in theory, at least – and ensures that spectators are seen as more on the right track with something at stake, whether it’s hot races being added or races. more complex type matches.

“I’m a NASCAR Cup Series driver, one of 40 in the world, and since I’ve only run half a season in 2020 at Xfinity, I haven’t been to many of these races yet,” Alfredo said. “I think back to one of them, Sonoma, it’s a road, and I hold the green flag and I’ve never even seen this place. So that’s where the simulator benefits more than ever. I’ve never seen it play such a big role in my career.”

During our chat, Caruth opened up Virtual Racecourse, an online tool that lists your every move in iRacing and provides detailed telemetry (he said he often compared compare with real-world teammates for more insights) and driver training, and start to list the amount of time he’s spent in various cars driving a number of different laps in recently.

“I drove an hour and a half last day at Watkins Glen … because we’re going there in a couple of weeks,” Caruth said, “and I’ve done an hour and a half the last two days in Michigan, because of that. is my next race in ARCA.”

Alfredo says that, on average, most drivers in NASCAR will do about 10 hours of simulation work per week. Some, especially in large fleets equipped with custom sim rigs developed by automakers like Ford, Chevrolet or Toyota, will spend more time behind the wheel.

What the biggest teams in NASCAR can offer are multi-million dollar pieces of equipment, the result of years of research and development paid for by some of the biggest automakers in the world. And while there’s no doubt about the unspeakable precision and ingenuity of those simulators, at their core what they offer are sensations like the ones you’ll find in other games. setups cost tens of thousands of dollars in different drivers’ homes and entry-level $300 sets of wheels and pedals are available at any electronics retailer.

And that’s one thing across the board, from video games to prime time, you won’t find anywhere else in sports.

“I think just coming from sim racing and being a real world racer, it’s nice to say that I built my first computer at 12 years old and that was the first computer I started. And from racing on my computer, “I competed at the Daytona 500, just a couple of years later,” says Alfredo, “That’s pretty crazy, because you don’t hear of any anyone who plays Madden and then becomes quarterback on a Super Bowl team.”



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