Speaker 1: On August 8th, Nashville will host an IndyCar race for the first time and believe it or not, this is the track, the streets of Nashville it's here, where drivers will compete in the inaugural big machine music city, ground PR right now, every Indy car driver and team is facing the same huge problem. How do you practice and prepare a race on a track that doesn't exist? Nobody can practice here [00:00:30] because these are public roads. The track won't be built until the race weekend and drivers will only get two short practice sessions before they'll have to dive right in qualifying. So how will they know which way they're going? The answer is a race simulator, and I'm gonna show you what it's like to sample Honda's pro level driving SIM with a little help from my new friend Roja 2021 IndyCar rookie driver, her Dale coin racing and former formula one pilot SIM training is always [00:01:00] hugely important because of car strict limits on training Honda performance development offers this simulator to drivers on Honda powered indie car teams. Speaker 1: The SIM runs all day every day, and it's completely booked all year long. The cockpit is centered within a 180 degree screen lit by three projectors. Each of which has its own dedicated gaming PC and GPU. Those three PCs are joined by seven more for a total of 10 PCs just to make all this work. The entire system is mounted [00:01:30] on a hydraulic platform that elevates to provide some degree of motion feedback. No, you won't feel three GS in here like you would in a real indie car. But romance told me that the motion here is enough to give the feel for the experience. He said that he was over a second faster with a motion enabled than with it turned off. So just watching Ramon do a couple laps and show me the way around the track. They just turned motion on for the first time. Speaker 1: And now I can see what he means when he says how bumpy this track is. Every time he hits one of the separation joints and then concrete, the whole thing kicks up, or I can feel that in [00:02:00] my feet and I'm in the next room. Uh, I can't wait to see what it's like be in the chair and the field in let's talk about the process first before the track itself gets built. Engineers scan the entire thing, including the surroundings with lasers. Not only does that sound cool, but the process can detect every ripple and bump in the music city asphalt with mitric precision. In other words, the simulated road surface matches exactly what's happening in the real world. Add to that a bunch of custom modeling, thanks to extensive use of photos [00:02:30] and visual landmarks like trees, billboards, and that iconic bridge enter into the equation. Getting that stuff right, is almost as important as getting the shape of the track, correct? Because drivers will use these visual cues to help figure out where they are on this circuit to identify turning points, brake markers. And even though it's way to go something that is actually a little bit difficult on this circuit. Speaker 1: [00:03:00] So this is an actual in car wheel in front of me here. Get everything from the push to pass buttons, the mappings for the engine, the ECU radio button pages, how these actually work. Okay. That, yeah, I can change the page on the display here as well. My cars worth the wheel. Just like the real thing. Don't forget the DHL award. Don't forget the DHL law. Thanks the reminder. Okay. Clear to go. Oh, I spelled [00:03:30] it already. Great. All right. So, oh, I was supposed to go, okay. That was the DHL wall, right? Well, you did avoid it. Whoa. Speaker 1: I am, uh, very thankful that damage has turned off at first. I gotta confess. I was a little overwhelmed with it all. Despite all my years of eye racing, this felt completely different. It was a few laps before I stopped spinning and hitting the walls and started to be able to put a few you clean [00:04:00] labs together, and then they turn down the hydraulics, oh, we're moving. Okay. We're going up. This is pretty wild to have a full 180 degree view around me. I usually race with a VR rig at home, which is really immersive, but it doesn't come anywhere near and making it feel like this. I can look anywhere. I want to. It's only if I turn my head and look behind me that I can just see that I'm in a room, but not indeed sitting inside of an actual unique car here inside of a, a Delara chassis, which just kind of is at least the, the front third or so. Speaker 1: Anyway, [00:04:30] now we're moving. Okay, here we go. Extra incentive to stay off the wall. Oh my goodness. Yeah, this is a little different, by the way, if you're wondering why I'm shouting in such a quiet room it's because inside those headphones, I was getting the full bore engine noise of a 2.2 liter twin tur will be six screaming. The song of its people. Sorry to say to anyone on the outside, all you can hear is worrying fans and hitting hydraulics. Yeah. I can definitely feel [00:05:00] all the separate and all that concrete. Oh, I can feel the kicks in the transmission now as well, shifting through the gears. So how does this feel compared to like an eye racing? It's actually, it is really, really, really different. I think the biggest difference is how much the car is moving around underneath me. And I can really feel that what if you ever or watch any of the in car races, they have amazing in cockpit and near cockpit views and you can see how hard the drivers are [00:05:30] working. Speaker 1: And now I know why, because these cars are constantly dancing and moving and bouncing around. That's one of the things that this SIM offers better than any consumer SIM is the tire model develop partnership will Firestone, at least provided some data for the, uh, input of this system. So the, the reaction of these tires is very close to what the drivers will feel in the real world. So I can actually kick the tail out a little bit, get a little bit of a slide going, which in something like iRacing is really hard [00:06:00] to do the slip angle on a tire. And most consumer Sims is so narrow that if you start to slide, it's really hard to recover from that. And even if you do, you lose so much time, but even here you can move the car around. You can slide around a little bit. You can lock up things a little bit, push through the corner a little bit and it just feels good. All right. 78.9, we're getting there folks. I feel pretty good about that. So I'm getting a little more comfortable now pushing [00:06:30] my breaking markers a little further back as I start to figure out what I need to do with the brakes and the Cindy. I'm still not locking up the front, which means I think I still have more room to go when it comes to breaking. Speaker 1: So someone who's never driven an indie car before, uh, virtually or for the real, uh, would you say this is an easy track to learn or, or a hard track to, Speaker 2: To, it's probably one of the hottest, I mean, yes, in the GP would've said, [00:07:00] okay, it's quite wide and you've got clear markers and you know, I can tell you where to break and so on it would've been smooth. Nashville's gonna be a bit Speaker 1: More rough. And does that give you an advantage going to Nashville because no, one's been there before. So are you in a better position maybe than some of your competitors Speaker 2: That I don't think it gives me an advantage that Nashville is a new track, but definitely puts us all on the same level. So I don't, I'm not at disadvantage if you want to. Uh, but uh, you know, we've got a little bit more, uh, through practice [00:07:30] in Nashville that we normally do. It looks like a super exciting track, but also super challenging. Uh, I mean, you're gonna find out on the simulator, uh, it's, it's been complicated to first few labs, but when you get into the rhythm, I think it could be, uh, an incredible event. Yeah. Speaker 1: Tell me about Nashville. Tell me what you've learned. Uh, so far today. Well, Speaker 2: It's, it's tight, it's bumpy. Uh, most of the corner are quite low speed corners. Uh, especially after the bridge, there's a super, super tight section where you actually work a lot on your arms. Uh, and then you go flat [00:08:00] out through the bridge, which is, which is cool. Uh, and then this big breaking at the end of it. And then you, you go into a, a, a more flowing section, I would say, uh, before going back on the bridge and that, that very, very tiny day, you actually look the same section wise, but one is quite big and one is very small. And so Speaker 1: How much time will you spray end in a simulator or how much time do you hope to spend in a simulator this Speaker 2: Year? Well, the simulator, uh, every team has got a, you know, a, a number of days, uh, this year we've, we've managed to, to do a, [00:08:30] a good schedule, especially that I still live in Europe. So, you know, coming for a day in a simulator and flying over wouldn't work, but we've, we've managed that pretty well. Um, you know, funny story before the ND G P um, on Thursday morning, I was in the simulator here, uh, working up on the setup for the, for the NDP, for the race. And then on Friday afternoon, we, uh, scored our first sport position. Uh, Saturday morning, can't remember what it was, but we score our first ball position. Uh, and we were like 12 hours before we on the simulator [00:09:00] and, and working on a setup. And it's quite funny to, uh, you know, that we could do stuff like that and, and really understand how to go fast. Speaker 1: Now, I know you spent some time in IRA in some other consumer grade simulators, how do they compare to something like this, or do they even compare to something like this? I Speaker 2: Mean, you know, our racing and, and our factor two and all those games, they they've done an incredible job. I stopped playing video games in 2011 and I restart in 2020. So you can, you know, nine years in that industry was a huge change. And, and I to learn [00:09:30] a, a lot, um, obviously you're still limited by the hardware compared to a simulator like the Honda one, you know, you're gonna see it, it moves, it's got three engineers to run it. Uh, we, the scan of the truck is incredible. We've got the, the right model of the car. We can compare with real data, uh, from the race track, from the real car. So, you know, it's a different level, but then on the graphics and so on, it's not as good. So, you know, I think our racing are factored tune and on they're doing a [00:10:00] great job. I'm super excited. The IndyCar's got a video game coming next year with model sport games. And I can't wait to get involved because for me, it's amazing that we can race with people along, you know, everywhere in the world. And they're faster than us. Most of the time. I think Alex, when Scott, McIn, they're super fast in the same, having the rest of us, we fast, but we know as fast as, as those young guys and Speaker 1: What sort of skills translate well and what sort of skills don't translate as well from a simulator to, to the Speaker 2: Real world. I think the hardest part in the simulator [00:10:30] is the, the feel of speed, you know, because it's only 2d. It's only visually that you get the back and then it's, most of the feedback also comes through the wheel, especially at home, you know, it, the seed doesn't move. So all the feedback comes through the wheel. Whereas if you raise a car, it all comes through your spine and, and your arms as well. But the feel of the rear end is more your body moving rather than the steering wheel getting light or heavier. So that's where one different. And then personally, while fine, it hard on the same is to know which speed you carry into [00:11:00] the corner. You know, sometime you want to go too much now faster into the corner, because, you know, you can carry a little bit more speed, but when it's a screen telling you, it's hard to know exactly what two miles now. Speaker 1: So I just learned that when I was driving, they actually had the resistance turned down by about half in the steering. So I've asked them to turn it all the way up for me, just so I can experience what an actual ind car driver would feel. And this is pretty intense. I have a fanatic DV, two at home, and, uh, this [00:11:30] is pretty comparable to full bore fanatic. Uh, this is impressive to do this for a couple. This did. Oh yeah. You need some good for strength and a couple cans of spinach, I think, but this is a lot more fun this way. All right. Thank you. Uh, I guess does that mean we're done all right. Thanks very much for the opportunity. I don't want to get out, but they're telling me I gotta get out. Speaker 1: [00:12:00] That was pretty intense. The fidelity of the SIM is what's really impressive. You can feel every bump much more so than you can in most road Sims. Yeah. I think I'm racing. Another simulators also are measuring down to OME precision like this or one is, but the feel of it is just different the way the tire reacts, the, the whole dynamics of the thing helped by the motion, for sure. But even beyond the motion, even before that was turned on, it just feels so much different than a consumer grade SIM so much more involved, but really the big, big step forward is the motion. The, the, the feeling, the [00:12:30] dynamics of the tires that you don't get into consumer grade SIM to feel the car around. That's one thing that you hear Indy car drivers say over and over again, that driving a real Indy car doesn't feel like an IRA or something like that because the car moves so much. Speaker 1: And now I know exactly what they're saying and, uh, yeah, I believe it. This is very, very different. And, uh, I want one that was one hell of an experience, sadly, and almost surely the closest I'll ever get to actually driving in IndyCar. But for now I can say, or on the streets of Nashville, at least I have as [00:13:00] much on track experience as the best of the best. My esteemed coach said, if I got into the seventies, I'd be doing pretty well. I managed to run a 78.9 more than a second inside the goal and a little lower five seconds slower than the man and self for probably not good enough to qualify for the race, but close enough to make me wonder how much better I could do with just a few more latch.