There's Just No Replacement for Real Life…

Even Though it Seems Like There Is: A philosophical rant from a sim racer

I’m an avid sim racer. What is a sim racer you ask? It’s typically a guy (shout out to the girls to… I see you), who has spent a bunch of money putting a fake steering wheel and gas pedals in one of the rooms in his dwelling so he can drive a fake sports car around a fake race track so he can feel a fake sense of accomplishment when he beats all the other guys who are fake driving fake fast. I can give this genre of entertainment crap because I am that guy. I know it’s fake and I absolutely love it. Here’s why. It’s one of the only video games where the instrumentation and inputs are so similar to real life that the better you get at sim racing, the better you get a real racing. And it’s getting more real every year. As a matter of fact, I watched a video where they put one of the leading simulated drifting guys in a real drift car and guess what. He hoon’d the crap out of it! That means he drove it very skillfully and successfully.

That said, sim racing still is not real. It’s fantastic and I have no intent of slowing down my sim racing habit. If anything I kinda plan on spending more money on equipment to make the experience even better (sorry honey… I know you’re gonna read this article). But sim racing doesn’t even hold a candle to a simple day at the track.

I used to take my sports car to the race track when I lived in Washington state, but it wasn’t track prepped. It had regular 3 point seatbelts, regular seats and because it was a convertible… inadequate roll over protection. To make things worse, because the terrain in Washington state is far more rugged than the Dallas area where I currently live. That means more trees, rocks, elevation changes. Simply put, there are more things waiting to kill you if you make a mistake. Here’s a story. Whilst driving at a track day event at Pacific Raceways, Washington, I was about halfway through the day when my brakes felt a bit soft. The straight I was driving down had a hairpin turn at the end of it and trees and boulders on the other side of the hairpin turn as a reward should you somehow fail to make said turn. Oh yeah… those spongey brakes were my brand new brake pads… melting… at 115 miles per hour. That’s me in the red car closer to my own demise than I knew. After a few rounds of this and getting faster and faster, I realized that this might be more dangerous than I bargained for without the proper safety equipment.

I put my track days behind me a bit and when I moved to Texas and had the room and the money to build a proper track car and visit safer tracks, I’d try real life track driving again. In the meantime, I became a sim racing connoisseur to the point where I almost started to think, sim racing could be a replacement for real track driving. I mean I didn’t really believe that, but the thought did cross my mind once or twice.

I’d become so competent and capable at sim racing that unless someone crashed into me or I didn’t know the track, I could just about guarantee myself a win or a top three spot, hands down. I could even have a sip of tea or check a text while careening down a straight away at 140 mph waiting for the next turn.

Here are a few distinct and profound reasons real track days are different than piloting the ole Xbox, PC or Playstation.

The Risk Factor

I don’t need to tell you that having a sip of tea or a look at your smart phone on a race track is far from real. Your brain knows that there’s a restart button available should things go pear shaped. There is an intimate feeling of risk and reward at a real racetrack. You know that if you master the day, you get to go home with your car and body in the same shape as when you left and there’s the exhilaration of mastering fear and controlling your own destiny. Because of this, your brain is dialed up so high that I could barely look at anything other than the track itself while driving. It took time even to look up at the racing stewards waving their flags or even down at your gauge cluster to see if your engine was over heating. I’m sure with more laps, you begin to relax a bit and observe the things around you but when I went, there was an exquisite sense for the danger involved in missing a turn. And let me tell you. After a day at the track, I was basically high in a euphoric state of accomplishment until the next morning. With sim racing, you feel great for about 30 seconds and then, you check for your next instagram like before throwing some leftovers in the microwave.

The Sensory Inputs

Racing driving is serious business. It always has been. There is a huge physical cost to hurling a ton two or so of metal around a couple miles of twisted pavement at speeds so fast an impact could separate your spine from your skull. All of your senses be come heightened and alert.

Sound- Engines screaming and tires screeching fill the air. You hear suspension travel and metal rattling and the sound of wind and other cars all around you.

Taste — On a hot or exhausting day, you taste the parchedness of your mouth or the salt of your sweat when you lick your lips. A gulp of water refreshes the palette 10 times more than having a sip of beer mid sim race.

Sight — Your vision quickens and focuses in the most intense of fashions. You really must try to fight your body’s tendency to engage in tunnel vision as it trains your attention to the threat ahead which is turns on the track and other cars. I don’t remember seeing my dashboard once. That’s a phenomenon I’ll need to break myself of as I continue in the sport. There’s important information there.

Smell — There’s the pungent smell of tires and brakes melting and the intoxicating smell of angry exhaust. There’s the chemical/electrical smell of clutches working hard and the smell of home made tacos for lunch. Everybody eats and during a long day at the track, food is still a must.

Touch — Every sense associated with feel is intensified. The weight of the helmet is on your head. The taught sensation of racing harnesses strapped to your shoulders, chest, waist and crotch is ever present. The minimized range of motion in your neck is noted because of the HANS (Head And Neck Safety) device is noted. When your sitting still, all of the cramped nature of a well built track car can seem oppressing, but once you get to speed and the sustained g forces are expelling enormous amounts of push pull and lean against your body, you get the feeling that your harnesses couldn’t possibly be tight enough and you’re thankful that modern engineering is working hard to keep your body in tact.

I even felt physical pain a couple of times. I was riding along with my instructor in his 420 horsepower, racing slick wearing BMW and we took a few long sweeping turns so hard it literally felt like the atmosphere in my knee was changing and my neck became a little sore fighting to keep my head up straight. Needless to say, when you’re sim racing, the only pain you feel is when some idiot crashes into you at turn one on lap one of a race you qualified really well for.

The People

In sim racing, you can and do frequently drive against real people and it can be a thrill to test your skill against theirs. If you have a microphone, they may even chat with you during the race. But as soon as you turn off the race, you’re rushed back to the reality that you’re in a room by yourself. At a real track, there are people all around with the same interests as you. After my last lap at the track day, I hung around for nearly two hours, packing my stuff and chatting with people. Those conversations are just as treasured of memories as the laps themselves.

If you focus on digital life, it can give you a false sense of balance and accomplishment. It can make you feel like you’re winning or at least maybe kind of happy. But that’s only until you get out and do it for real.

In Closing

In short, if you’re reading this and your not a car person, I hope you can still see that this experience doesn’t just relate to driving at the track. Digital life cannot replace real life at all. If you focus on digital life, it can give you a false sense of balance and accomplishment. It can make you feel like you’re winning or at least maybe kind of happy. But that’s only until you get out and do it for real. Porn cannot replace sex. Travel videos cannot replace going there yourself. Likes can’t replace a hug from someone who really cares. We live in a physical world and we are evolved to experience physical things. The digital world is a blessing that can give us a taste of real world experiences that we may not otherwise have access to like far off places or driving cars quickly. It can desensitize us to the impact or importance of actions and make us think that nothing matters because the danger and realism have been stripped away. It can rob us of the enormous feelings of positivity that come with being a part of our physical world. I work in technology for a living. I’m sure I’ll write about that sometime. But even though tech is my living, I don’t consider emersion in tech… living. It’s a tool we can and should use to enhance our lives. But it’s absolutely no way to live our lives.