sim-ply racing –
The drivers love it, everyone’s playing nice, and the ratings aren’t bad either.
Elle Cayabyab Gitlin
Motorsports is no exception, and its prospects are bleak when you consider what collapsing sales
will do to marketing budgets. But while the pandemic rages, drivers, teams, and series are coming together online to put on a show for the rest of us. Or as NASCAR’s Scott Warfield puts it, to give people “a distraction for 823 minutes, two hours on a Sunday and return some sense of normality to their lives. ”
The move from real-world to online racing really took off in mid-March , over the weekend that should have seen F1 start its year with the Australian Grand Prix. The first events to draw big audiences were put on by esports organizers. By week two , big racing series like F1 and IMSA were starting to get in on the act. These days every real-world series has an esports league, so none of them is exactly a stranger to the concept. But NASCAR was the first to elevate its esports to broadcast TV with the start of its iRacing Pro Invitational series. It’s also leading the pack when it comes to giving fans something approaching normality.
“Our content team was wondering , after we have gone through the archives and put up every old s and ‘ (s and s s race, what are we going to do for the next eight weeks? Well, now here’s Jeff Gordon calling the race; here’s Dale Earnhardt Jr racing against Clint Boyer, which people have been clamoring for. You’ve got Sportscenter reaching out wanting drivers to come on Sunday morning and do a pre-race interview… That is hard to replicate. You know, it’s our 28 th year with (iRacing) and we’ve had a decade to build and partner and make this thing real, “Warfield told me. That’s paying off — NASCAR’s production values are high, as are its ratings.
So far, the other major professional real-world racing series are adapting to social isolation a little more slowly. F1 has started its own series of Virtual Grands Prix, using the excellent (F1) game from Codemasters. But the sport has been less successful than most when it comes to getting its real-world stars involved and even allows competitors — which included names from other sports like cycling and golf for the first event — to use driver aids in its races, which also feature reduced damage.
IndyCar has been the last to join the fray, and I think it deserves a special mention here. There’s no studio broadcast here; Leigh Diffey, Townsend Bell, and Paul Tracy are still calling the races, but quite obviously each from their own home. Somehow getting a bunch of presenters together in one place to call the action seems very pre-pandemic to me.
People are playing together
Plenty of professional race car drivers turn to sim racing for the same reason as you or I — it’s fun as well as good practice for the real thing — and so it wasn’t too hard for Darren Cox and Torque Esports to put together a grid that included some big names from series like F1 and IndyCar to race alongside esports pros. Some of the younger real-world race car drivers like Max Verstappen and Lando Norris even race for professional esports teams alongside their better-paying normal jobs and are therefore able to hold their own against the sim pros, who spend an awful lot of time practicing . “The issue is these aliens — they just grind it out, right? You give them the car the day before and they’ll do hours’ practice, whereas the real drivers will do a couple of hours and then they’re done, “Cox told me. (And yes, I’m pretty sure he did call the ) rFactor 2 experts “aliens” —at least that’s what the tape says.)
Getting the participation of real-world racing pros is only getting easier, which is probably a good thing for growing the esports audience. Warfield thinks the fear of feeling left out will draw recalcitrant or skeptical racers online, and the fear of being beaten (plus, let’s face it, a lot of free time) will get real-world pros to up their game. “These guys and gals at their core are racers, and they’re competitive as hell. And they don’t like losing. The kid that won
our Coca Cola (iRacing) series race at virtual Miami-Homestead Speedway — he did 1, 06 practice laps at Homestead. ”
Perhaps most encouragingly, so far everyone appears happy to play together, and apart from the occasional scheduling snafu that sees two races happening simultaneously, no one is locking drivers into exclusive leagues. “If you start talking about contracts, then you decide to take the fun out of it. When those guys want to go run open-wheel or a dirt track or anything else, as long as that allows our fans to engage with it as well , that’s fantastic, “said Warfield.
“We put all rivalries aside, [saying]” right, this is for the best of the sport, “and our hope is that there’s not a land grab from other people that upsets the equilibrium of a community that’s been around 40 years, “Cox told me.
It’s not about how fancy your rig is, it’s what you do with it
The move online has seen a bit of a scramble for sim rigs, some fancier than others. Our friends at CXC Simulations, which builds extremely high-end sim racing rigs , has been pretty busy. Classified as an essential business because of its military contracts, it’s still operating, although on split shifts. “Our sales department has been very busy with interest in new simulators as well as our Certified Pre-Owned simulators, and our customer service department has been tremendously busy. We have a lot of customers who are now becoming very active and using their simulators not Only as a training tool, but also to compete in organized sim races. So we have a lot of demand, but we are somewhat limited in how quickly we can manufacture and ship new simulators, “CXC boss Chris Considine told Ars.
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