I think another key point to consider that you did not mention is the fact that Hamilton started racing in the era when a crazy amount of on-track testing was legal. By the time he debuted, he wasn't a rookie by today's standards. And I feel like this point of origin really matters in how he still views the simulator today.
I think that's an important point to make about why so many rookies nowadays go through the feeder series only to fall flat on the ice when they get to Formula 1. Hamilton had all the time in the world to physically prepare himself for his debut by racking up a huge amount of time in the car during testing. Modern rookies don't get that kind of opportunity to learn and prepare themselves. That's why they turn to the simulator, even though it still obviously is far from the same thing. Who knows how different the rookies seasons of all these drivers in recent years would have panned out if they just had more time, like Mick for example. Would he have been so crash prone if he had the same amount of time to test as Lewis did in the 2000's?
I think it's a big generational thing, younger drivers seem to see an advantage. Verstappen especially is really into simracing and said it has helped him in real life racing, You could train certain senses, try lines and overtaking techniques without the IRL risk of a crash.
"said it has helped him in real life racing" Sure, but we don't know if that's true, that's his impression. We would have to produce a very large and expensive study consisting of children growing up to be professional racers and put one group to practice in the sim and the other to not practice at all, control for some other variables, and see if one group's track time correlates with the number of hours in the sim. That's not gonna happen, so we'll never really know.
@@rubenssz how would practicing lines, overtakes, entry/exit, for hours upon hours, not result in improving your IRL technique at all? Even if it’s marginal it’s still an improvement
My son (who is 23) seems to benefit a great deal from the sims. To the point that when he goes to a real life track he's never been to before (but that he's driven on a sim), he can get within a tenth of the fastest drivers in pretty short order. Sim racing seems to be like sensory deprivation - and when sim drivers get onto real life cars they suddenly have all that other sensory information available to them. I'm, only privy to my son and his contemporaries who started racing at a time when sim racing games were already plentiful. These young guys seem to demonstrate that it's easier to go from a sim to a car than the opposite. In other words, the translation works a lot better going that way, because there is much less to unlearn, and much more to learn - and unlearning is much harder than learning. As a mental exercise, it's an amazingly valuable resource, and that's just one aspect.
Same car for same car. In a car I'm used to. On a track I know. I've managed to beat a pro due to sim racing experience. Specifically because I had figured out how to drift the car around certain corners faster then it could grip carry more speed through and grip up fast into straights. Think senna. Or older f1 drivers and the 4 wheel slide eras with powerslides. I showed said pro the line I take on a sim. And he later managed to improve upon that. The difference is. My line isn't safe with other cars on the track at least not close by. Vs the lines he takes don't risk other cars getting tapped defensively when trying to pass. Since I come from sim racing. I my normal lines are risky but very defensive and set up to cut off other racers lines and block over takes and potentially force people off the track or to space back alot. But mostly to give me space to push up on whoever is ahead and slip by and then try and gain lead. But facts are facts. Some stuff that works real life is still just too risky for real life if you care about sportsmanship. If sim racing where its screw it race how you want half the people are gonna be nice half are gonna be aggro. Won't ego take people out. But I will push like Hamilton pushes the safety car and like other known flat out drivers would push and sometimes have some crazy close calls. But my uncle legit worked indy. Have family in f1 nascar and other stuff. I know the real risks. On track very different. Why I prefer solo run time events. The risk is me. To myself. If I drift a corner pushing a car to the limits and detonate a tire mid corner and flip. I don't hit anyone else. If forcing oversteer and a deweight in the rear stalls the aero nobody else is at risk cause I was tryna rail a corner in a drift to take it a fraction of a second faster then gripping it and breaking even later and tryna come out on throttle earlier. If a jump the track too many times and cause broken struts or wishbones or any other linkage bits or rims and skid out like senna. I don't risk anyone else. Same with the lauda crash. But sim side. I've literally taken corners at like 235mph drifting in lmp cars tapped dude ahead of me who was trying to defend to aggressively spun him out like a mach F pit maneuver fly by. Nobody gets hurt. It has its downsides too. Becaude of my style. On real tracks in real cars. I work my way up slowly. And find the limits slowly and push. But because I know I have an aggro style I'll Specifically sometimes hold back more than I need to because I over compensate trying to be safe and fair and good sportsmanship. But if it ever got to a 1v1 where I know the other person and me at the lead in real cars were making the same risks and okay with the penalties. I think I might come out harder. Me trying to beat a real pro drivers real track time in a real car I can beat him in a sim with I went hard. But still solo time runs. But I think with enough practice and runs I'd feel more comfortable really getting on him. There's 2 corners on the track I take faster then him but go wide via drift and grip up and launch through his inside. Outside to hard inside back to outside. My run comes in middle a lil slower behind but at a higher entry speed and exit speed. Middle through to the outside cut through the middle into the inside setting up for the next turn. I cut it shorter distance and less turn but again slide the rear end out to get straight and onto the throttle faster and keep it in the powerband and higher gearing. The launch and the first corner he beats me on every time. He's better at the nuetral drop. But once I get ahead we take corners same speed or I'm slower on one but faster on 3 and 2 of them are back to back. He figured out my line eventually using the sim. And then got it faster. But becaude he's still faster in other areas of the track. I badically peaked the 2 corners. Only way to go faster is a higher downforce car with better tires and more power. But then it gets even sketcher. Or have something alot lighter with lower power maybe but higher grip and literally just manage to curb curb and rail the thing like a single set up turn with a counter weight into it. But only cause maybe higher average speed total like the miata track records situation. Slower but becaude it never has to really break it just holds the record most of the time.
I can relate. As an simulation engineer for 20 years, the older gen engineers don’t trust simulation results but the new gen take simulation seriously.
Pilots are the perfect example of why simulators work. Emergencies are somewhat familiar that way. Lewis could have been familiar with his suboptimal car. “I cannot connect with it” is simply unprofessional. That’s like a pilot saying: “Never been in a crashing plane before, sorry, don’t know, I cannot connect with it. I could have trained but it wouldn’t have been the same as this anyway.”
shouldn't serious engineers know the difference between 20 years of sims? the modern sim probably handles many orders of magnitude more inputs/outputs per second. i'm not an engineer and i know that computers 20 years ago have barely 1% the computational speed/memory space of today's computers - and that's not even specialised hardware. a custom-built sim should be capable of some pretty amazing detail these days and produce fairly reliable data. still incomplete ofc, but far far better than some 20 year old stuff.
Very true. We have equivalent situations in commercial air transport as well. It's a generational thing. Still some of the older guys are like "...you youngsters think point and click fixes everything. That's not real engineering"
I've spent over 2000 hours on sims, but on my first irl track day I had a total sensory overload. I was completly off pace, even though I'm usually one of the "fast guys" in a sim. It is quite a bit different experience, however in the last session, once my brain started adjusting, I was rapidly improving.
after doing probably 100+ hours around nordschleife for several years on different sim, i set a 8:02 BTG on my 3rd lap. Official time from the manufacturer was 7:55. So it does help quite alot when we get used to the actual g-force and elevations :) Sims are fantastic to become quite decent and get up to speed fast
It definitely takes some adjustment to go from sim to real life. I always feel like I have spider senses in real cars, which could easily lead to sensory overload. One of the biggest differences for me, though, is the sense of speed. Real life feels at least twice as fast.
@@tqracing thats because your real life can be affected if shit goes south. Your brain gets very aware when your at risk like that, thats where the focus comes from. Call it a survival instinct.
I think a VERY important thing you failed to mention is that Hamilton started in F1 in an era where sim software was premature and much less accurate. Driving in the sim in 2007 was only useful for learning the track corners and maybe an idea of what gear to be in for each corner. (Hamilton said so himself in the press conference after his fist win in the Canadian GP, 2007). On track testing was far more relevant and useful to improve yourself and your car. Hence, Lewis and other drivers of his generation such as Alonso, never got into sim-work that much and learned to deal and adapt without it. In this way, perhaps not doing sim work actually helped them improve their legendary on-track adaptability!
Interesting, because I see him almost every day at iracing and he drives race after race, changing cars all the time. Maybe this helps him with his "legendary on-track adaptability".
@@maciejwierorzymski7500 Fernando, Lando, Max, Carlos and others are all day in iracing. Max even competed in rfactor until the Le Mans scandal. Others, like Stoffel, were well known names back in the day in rfactor world championships.
@Jesús Fernández really? I thought he had gotten into it much more recently. It's good to know that the most experienced driver in F1 history has integrated sim racing in his training for so long
I remember guys like Christopher Bell and Kyle Larson talking about why they race sprint cars and it’s same concept as the sim. It’s not meant to keep in tune with the car but more so to keep your race craft up to par. Certain skills like being about to read the track and anticipate drivers movement can translate from discipline to discipline.
@baileysnow6031 That's why Alonso is the coolest F1 driver. He is actually doing other shit. Rather than just sticking to hyper engineered, hyper optimized masterworks of machinery. Alot of times, it's much funner and more interesting to drive absolute turds around at the limit.
I think that’s why the sim can be important to some drivers. It forces you to adapt to a different dynamic of driving where the sensory inputs are very limited. Now this may not aid or reflect directly in your pace in real life, but you are training your abilities to adapt to different scenarios which the ever changing factors of racing (weather, tires, car characteristics, etc) can pose a challenge. Max alludes to the adaptability part on the video Scott made about his sim experience as well. The focus of how you use the sim can influence the real life driving imo
I started in real cars and got into sims later, I too struggled since I lost the feeling for the car in the seat and there's no way to replicate it. I strongly believe that its easier for a sim racer to get into a real car and get good than it is for a real driver to get in a sim and do good. With a sim driver, they will hop in a real car and have even more information to work with while they're used to working with limited information where a real driver will get into a sim and suddenly have to make due with much less. Its always case by case, have someone I race with who got into iRacing and sits in the 2000's for ir and another who got in the sim for the first time and shot to the 9000's for ir. It will sometimes just click for some people, and not for others.
I have really tried to get sim racing. More from an academic exercise to see if I could understand how people are benefitting, and party to see if I vould join in on a bit of social.... nope. Sims feel utterly broken and wholly unrepresentative of all of the several hundred vehicles Ive driven and ridden on track. How on earth kids are learning anything is beyond me. The steering feel is unilaterally complete rubbish. Any real vehicle that feels like a sim ought not be allowed off the trailer let alone onto the track. It remains a mystery how some people achieve repeatable lap times in sim, and how they talk about improvements that they alledge can be translated to real vehicles.... I am genuinely interested in sim 'feel' and or if this isnt all ' the emperor's new clothes' mumbo jumbo. Kinda heartened that Hamilton isnt a big advocate.
I have heard rumours that real racing is a lot easier than sims, and by what your saying it seems true. You only have your hands, eyes and ears to understand what is going, compared to your whole body.
I started in sims and moved to real life and it is indeed easier in real life. The fidelity of what you feel is much higher and more obvious in real life. It’s just easier to know exactly what grip the car has in real life.
@@2639263926392639 The cars themselves are veyr similar in performance, so things like braking, acceleration, cornering, where to shift, visibility (if you're in VR more so), and general vibe of the car (oversteery, understeery) helps you adapt faster as you are sort of familiar with these things. Sure you miss out on a lot of g-force, roll, slip etc. but you learn more about the track, speeds, shifting gears and everything else beyond the movement of the car.
I remember people argued over the RB car being designed for Max. I understand why though, his driver feedback is great and he's a top 3 sim driver. + Working with Adrian Newey must be a sick combo.
why is people drinking so much Redbull Koolaid about Adrian Newey? Max doesnt step out of the simulator and tell Adrian to do x or y, he steps out of the simulator and tells one of Adrian's minions that he feels x or y. Adrian Newey probably doesnt hear about it, he is just one person, Redbull engineering team is a complete group with 100s of people, i know he is the lead behind those 100s of engineers but in that case people should praise Horner since he is in charge of Adrian and his people and another thousand from the factories. Oh and he is the one that lobbied the Aero design era and the budget cap era. Without any of those 2 Mercedes would be still on top.
@@ChuyR. I think the point is that Adrian has done it successfully for so many years. Workers in the engineering team change over time but Newey is constantly there. This makes him the only constant variable which directs most of the attention to him. And rightfully so.
To be fair Hamilton did say he didn't like simulators in 2021, then proceeded to non-scheduled intense simulator sessions before Silverstone 2021 (both qualifying and race) when he saw that the championship was going to be tight, and continued ever since................
As a pilot, retired by age-related vision loss I was excited when the recent MS 2020 sim came along. Thought I could re-live my experiences, but without gravity and the forces of nature the experience was rather hollow. You can be on final in a monster crosswind making all the right control inputs and nature can still sweep you away. Its mainly the terrifying forces working on your body that tells you you have exceed what is prudent or even possible
The sudden turn of the wind and you feel the rain hitting the left side of the plane and not the right... Or the nauseating negative Gs. Really hope that that can be replicated somehow in the future.
When Max bypassed Leclerc in the rain @ Suzuka - Thats a move that he practiced in iRacing to see If it was possible. I think this is a good example that iRacing indeed can help drivers onc the track.
People REALLY have no idea how video games improve your brains reactions times, endurance, goal striking, mentality, etc etc etc.. theres SO many things video games will literally turn u into a freak
Yeah video games can teach you a lot, some people still think it makes you violent or something. Those are rare occasions when it does happen, I remember the U.S. Army made a game AA proving grounds for data and to recruit people.
It could be a generational thing. Seb himself said he had a simulator but wasn’t “focused on a virtual career.” Hamilton and Seb might be the last from that generation. Norris, Russell, Verstappen are from a new generation that concurrently spend a lot of time in the sim and now sets the precedence that all new drivers to be good on the sim.
Maybe I’m alone out here, but I just don’t enjoy video game racing as much as slamming gears and throwing a car around in real life to even want to get great at it. The lack of sensory inputs just kills it for me.
I think at the back-end of 2021 he said he used it a lot more, as he was pushing for the championship in every way. I remember him saying that he did a lot of work in the simulator and working out and working with the engineers to do everything he can
I saw someone comparing sim racing and racing with running on a treadmill and running on a road. It’s definitely different but you will get better. I totally understand the difference to irl and sim racing, I do both aswell but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from sim racing. One thing I think you can learn A LOT from online sim racing is how people will react to different scenarios. This is something no one will ever really master and it’s something you will constantly improve on the more you drive with others
Also, a lot of young drivers now start in the sim before or together with real racing. It's often talked about how it's easier for sim racers to step into a real car than the other way around - they get a new sense of how the car behaves, real life drivers lose one. But having these other senses work perfectly as well is usually beneficial.
Lets not get it twisted. Max doesnt sim race for practice or F1 driving. He does it because hes obsessed and overly competitive. His 4am stint showed us that before his F1 race.
Max actually acknowledges that there's a difference between the sim and real world driving. His logic is that the sim does improve his driving as it helps you train other sensory input compared to real driving, while Hamilton thinks it doesn't help him. Max also says it keeps him as sharp as possible and that racing truly is his life. There was never anything else.
@@michael1 Max is young and full of energy. Hamilton is not. When you get older you have to be much smarter about how you spend your energy. In a few years time Max will start winding down and wont be able to burn the candle at both ends.
@@michael1 lol, okay buddy. nobody feels the same way at 30 and even more so 40 (which Hamilton is) that they did in their early 20s or at 18. its clear by your hasty and disrespectful attitude that you are ignorant of much more but i dont have all day to educate you
Lewis is also from a time with basically unlimited testing, and he made his debut as a 22 year old. If I had to guesss I’d say 14 or 15 current drivers had their debut at an earlier age, (shit Max was only 17) & with testing restrictions it kind of makes sense for the new generation to implement the simulator as much as possible.
It’s pretty simple. It’s a generational difference. Most drivers who started with real racing and then tried simulators usually have problems with adapting to it, meanwhile most drivers who started with simracing or simultaneously started racing in both sim and real racing usually have it much easier to adapt. I know it because it was my case 😄
Jimmy Broadbent comes to mind with this. He's even said pretty much what you've said too. See also: his video with Ben Collins. Ben struggled to get to grips with sim racing. If I remember right, it was kind of like something about it felt a bit off to him.
They do come in handy, for me at least. I had the opportunity to run in the 2007 Nurburgring 24 Hour and did about 150 laps in rfactor to learn the track. It helped immensely. I also use it to help me practice keeping the car under control when it gets out of shape - I got sick of running into the fences in the sims so I got good at timing the brakes, throttle, and steering to guide the car away from the fence so I could keep going. And that skill has helped in real life as well.
Its generational. When Hamilton was coming to the sport sims wasn’t good as they are rn. And had unlimited track tests. But now it’s different. Sims have vastly improved. That’s one of the reasons that Verstappen is able to maintain a consistent faster lap time than the others.
I have 400+ hours on my sim, and i have just driven once on track (a 4 stroke kart, nothing fancy, but good enough). Driving irl seemed much easier for me than on the sim, i had so many more information about the car's behaviour, g forces helped me being more consistent and understanding better what the car was doing and how much i could push. When i came back home and did some laps on my sim, everything felt so numb and i wasn't enjoying it as much Driving irl came so natural to me at a time i didn't even have a driving license. From that day on i convinced myself that i'd be a better irl driver than a sim one
That's always been my issue with sim racing, G-forces. What I've learned is that like a blind person, when you are missing senses the remaining ones try to compensate. In sims this relates to the wheel, gauges, sounds and the cars vector relative to its motion.That's all you have. It's all the information you need, It's you are just not used to using it that way. Why would you when the seat of your pants in more intuitive. You don't have to think about it. What's interesting is it forces you to look at driving from a different mindset, you notice things that didn't matter before but are essential now. Lewis is right, there is no replacement for G-force. However what you get from not having it is a better understanding of all of the other cues and what they mean to your car.
I had the same thought when watching the video. Hamilton always says the Merc isn't suited to his style of driving but then proceeds to not give them loads of sim data to help the designers design something suited for him? While i don't think time in the sim would help his driving it sure helps the engineers. I think he's kinda shooting himself in the foot a little. It's notable that Russell does spend time in the sim and finds the Merc more suited to him than Hamilton does. Coincidence?
@@darransmith32 i dont think so. The merc cars have never been suited to one driver and neither is it suited to george this year. They put the best package out there hence why lewis and george are evenly matched over their times together. They are both just good drivers who can adapt to any car easily.
I think he said this in 21 when he didn’t need it but recently since 2022 he’s been doing it not because of helping his pace and racecraft but more so to find a setup to work for the car and fix the issues
I think with enough time in the sim you can sort of develop a seat of the pants feel. It's like the brain starts to fill in the gaps of information that is missing. So you have the forces through the steering wheel, visual ques and maybe even some tactile feedback through the seat. Then, when you get really tuned in to the simulator, the brain fills in some of the gaps. This last part is probably why some struggle with it. They don't get to the point of being deeply in tune with the sim, and therefore feel disconnected. I have many examples of when I can drive based on information that doesn't actually exist in the sim. One thing that comes to mind is feeling rear getting light. Say for example last corner at Oulton Park where you pass a crest. With many cars the rear gets really sketchy there. I can't feel it through the steering wheel. There's not really much in terms of visual ques, except for the attitude of the car. Still, I can get on the throttle keeping the rear just on the limit. That's something I feel more with my gut and my butt than anything else.
btw when I drive sim, the wheel is the first sense I use to detect oversteer, unlike what the video suggest with vision. You often microadjust as well on the wheel such that it visuals does not even show the slide anyways. I wonder if this is the same for others as well
The guy is 38 and has raced at the highest level for almost 25 years. He is driving and racing the real car all year long. He does not really need to develop his skills with something that is not close enough to the real thing. For 99% of driver those cheap laps are a good thing but for him It's pretty clear it's a bit pointless apart from planning next year structural changes to the car.
I feel like another reason why he's not as bothered with going to the sim just to make sure development direction will go his way is that he's probably trusted Mercedes enough that he knows the team can already try to make a car that suits him and helps him win. Even with the mess this year and last year, it's also where the habit part comes in. Even if he wants to go to the sim again, he'd probably see that as something that's alient to him anyway. Then again it could also be that the gains he could make driving in the sim are being outweighed by the cost of him driving in the sim (in time, energy, etc.) especially when you have that much experience like him on many different circuits that some of the younger drivers can't even drive on.
It’s just for some people. I’m not Lewis Hamilton but I realized when I improved my track driving it improved my sim driving as well. Sim racing is more like testing out ur theories of how the car would react and u apply it back to when u drive
Hamilton had the benefit of access to unlimited real world testing in his rookie years, so maybe that plays a part in the reason why he doesn't look up to the simulators like the drivers who came in after unlimited testing was banned would have.
So true, i friend of mine drives alot of iracing in he's Sim, but i drive tracks in real life. And i find it alot harder to brake on the edge in the Sim then in real life. I can't feel the g forces and the feeling even thought he has a very good setup is just not enought to feel the locking before it happens. But i do think racecraft, track knowledge, positioning ect. are things a sim can help you with. But driving on the edge every single lap seems more like gamebeling and mastering the game mechanics then mastering you'r own skill. You learning to deal with the game, and extraction the most out of it. But there will always be a little bit left out because of the lack of g forces and a motion rig is just not good enough(also most motion rigs don't have the screens mounted at the rig, so the rig moves but the image does not (very distracting).
I mean, if I was getting paid to drive on the weekends, I'd probably live on the simulator, in the gym, and pestering the engineers like inspector Seb 😂
@@RogerKeulen There's no bot model that can replace a driver. That's the ultimate reason why there's a real driver in the simulator. Computer F1 simulation doesn't work in the way you described.
They just do data analysis. Like complex tire modeling. It’s one way Mercedes developed DAS. They simulated it’s effect using computer simulations, not just a driver in loop sim.
VR helped me a lot. I can't Sim race without it. Completely agree with the brake feel as well. Still so hard to feel a lockup. Also not sure if iRacing is just funky with brake lockups. I find once you grab a wheel it's really hard to unlock it. Almost feels like you accelerate with a brake lockup haha
I race in IMSA. The SIM is great for learning a track, brake points, and getting up to speed quickly when you arrive at the real track, but not great for improving your actual technique or driver skills, in my opinion. I do still use it before every race, as a refresher so its a good tool but just as another of many tools.
One thing folks have to realize is that Corrections at the Limit are done unconsciously. The conscious mind is too slow at racing speeds. The conscious minds job is to supply data to the brain, looking ahead especially. So if a Simulator can’t supply the tactile inputs that the subconscious reacts to, hams correct, it Could get ones reactions a tiny bit behind. Obviously fabulous drivers, especially the younger drivers who grew up with Video Games, know how to make it all work for themselves.
I not sure if hamilton is saying that it just slows him down, perhaps it more like he fears learning bad habits or uprooting the ones that he believes brought him success. and there are certain habits that are not just about reacting to the car... him making predictions such that he creates a stable platform when approaching a corner for example does somewhat rely on reacting to the live sensations coming through the car and his body but allot of it is muscle memory and thought patterns also.
That's what I think is going on here. You've got the older drivers saying vision isn't as important as other senses because that's how they grew up learning to drive. But younger drivers that might have had their first racing experience from video games have learned to rely on their vision more and hence learned how to use it subconsciously over other senses more. When they hop in a real car, all that previous skill is still there but now they have additional senses that might cause confusion at first until the brain figures out how to use it properly again. All the foundational handling skills are still there though which I think allows them to progress at a much faster rate. Anyone driver claiming sim doesn't have real benefits doesn't understand how adaptable the brian is, especially the younger you force it to adapt to something. The brain can get very good at predicting how it's moving in 3D space or other things are from visual ques knowledge of how things behave alone, but it's never going to get there if it can rely on other senses to more easily fill in the knowledge at first. That's just something older drivers won't get to experience without lots of extra work compared to someone who grew up doing it.
Video is 7:44 minutes and he only actually talks about WHY Lewis hates the simulator for 1 minute in total. Talk about milking videos for views and blabbing randomly holy shit.
it will be intriguing to see when he moves to ferrari if this guy has just got lucky with how well designed most of mercedes' cars have been or if he will be a regular podium finnisher.
I'm surprised Lewis doesn't use the sim on the new tracks before the race weekend just to learn the course at least. Then again that may be the few times he does use it. I always thought that simulator work was more about car set up and development than driver development anyway.
He also has significantly more experience over everyone (except Fernando) in on track Formula 1 driving. He was already racing at the top level when some of these guys were barely walking. That AND he's a 7 time world champ, he KNOWS how to race, so he probably puts his focus on other ways to improve his game and to compete better.
i agree that the g forces are absolutely a major part of driving and you can't get that in the simulator, but even with my basic set up i don't drive with my eyes, i drive mostly through the wheel and hands, vision is definitely not what i use to react to oversteer, if you set up the force feedback properly that should be your first instrument for detecting either understeer or oversteer, if you're using vision as your first instrument to react to these things then either your technique sucks or your set up does, brake feel now that is harder to simulate but there is hardware out there for that that being said i'm sure in f1 cars the gap between what the sim can do and what you actually do when driving irl is i'm sure even greater
Totally agree. Who uses vision to detect oversteer!? Always found this type of comment strange and manufactured. Of course you use the force feedback first.
I believe Hamilton is every bit as good a driver as Verstappen, despite the age difference. However, those "easy" years at Mercedes, when he won 6 titles and 80 some races, undoubtedly made him a bit complacent, and borderline desinterested, to the point he alluded many times to wanting to do other things in his life beyond racing. Then came 2021, with a ferocious rival in an amazing car, and things went from easy to very hard, especially in '22 and '23. Verstappen, the ferocious rival, is relentless in his training, the kind of driver that, in the old days when track testing was liberated, would likely stack thousands of kilometers in testing during the year. Essentially, Verstappen is hungry to improve and to refine his craft in ways Hamilton is not, and the sym defficiencies, and lack of realistic physiological "feeling" is obviously not a deterrent to Max, as it is to Lewis, because all he wants, really, is to be in a F1 race car, real or virtual, as much as possible. And this may be directly related to him winning 35 races in the past two seasons.
I remember hearing that Michael Schumacher also did not use the simulator during his stay at Mercedes. For what i have heard, he only used it for quintessential setup tests.
3:13 most realistic sim i used was in a arcade and it had a subwoofer below it along with the hydraulic things and good speakers and a direct drive wheel with 3 4K monitors infront of me so when i began to lose control i felt it in my stomach before i even looked at the screen
I realise testing is very limited now but why not build a practice dummy car for drivers with the same weight, power, downforce, controls, handling etc. as an F1 car? Also you could set up a sim with the real-world G loading using a centrifuge to produce the net resultant force.
I imagine a physical "dummy car" would count as a current chassis and therefore you wouldn't be allowed to use it. The newest cars you're allowed to test with are 2 seasons old. So in 2023 the newest car you're allowed to test with whenever is a 2021 car. And I'm also pretty sure the Sims the teams use all have replica cockpits with wheel weight, pedal force etc anyway As for your centrifuge point here I go The problem is physics and more specifically, Jerk. Now I'm sure you know what acceleration is, rate of change of velocity and the way it works is it has a size and a direction. If you were to powerslide around a roundabout at a constant speed you would still be accelerating because the direction your going constantly changes. Jerk meanwhile is the rate of change of acceleration. Part of the reason an F1 car is so physical is because the jerk an F1 car can create is quite high because at full speed, the rate it can change direction is huge. While a centrifuge can indeed create very high G forces the jerk from a centrifuge is fairly small. This is because a centrifuge is a massive structure that's very heavy and therefore takes a lot of energy to spin up and spin down So yeah the TL;DR is they're not designed to replicate the same forces and they wouldn't help make your sim more realistic
The value of the sim for drivers isn't to be a better driver, but to improve the skill of learning to adapt quickly. This is pretty obviously reflected from Hamilton's underperformance in this new F1 era, where he dominated the previous era, but has not been able to adapt as quickly as others.
Max spoke a few times about the benefits of sim racing. He said: I learned a lot about steering input to be as smooth as possible. He is one of the fastest out there, but some are better in certain ways and learns a lot from this. I think you can see this in tracks like red bull ring where the layout is simple and short. Steering input is so important here to scrape every 100th out of the car.
"Sim is pointless" And a real life racing has a great point which is...? Both are recreation/sport/entertainment, both don't have any point to exist or being engaged in beyond that
u can add bass shakers and feather weights to the pedals and overall chair to improve all the feels u need. overall 4 to 5 good bass shakers around ur seat and "chassis" can help u a ton with feelin the road and car. the spinning feather weights on each pedal give u even more understanding of the car. most sim racers even the crazy ones with shaking ground, dont have bass shakers somehow. but u can see them often in low budget sim rigs cause they are cheap and effective.
MotoGP riders don't train on a superbike because its close enough, but not the same and they might be learning habits that make them slower on the GP bike. I think the same idea applies here.
MotoGP riders regularly train on off road bikes though. The VR46 Academy has motocross and flat track, and produced the rider who's on the verge of winning his 2nd title in a row, so it's wildly misleading to claim MotoGP riders don't train on other types of bikes.
I tried recreational karting for the first time a few years ago as an adult and it's crazy how in-tune you become with the machine when driving. You feel every track imperfection. You know precisely where the limit of grip is, you can feel it. You know exactly what all 4 tires are doing at all times. You can feel when you lock up and slide under too much braking. I can see the logic in both sides with Max and Lewis when it comes to the sim
I have thousands of hours of sim racing experience and dont have 1 real racing trophy. Bet I would have gone further in my racing career with 1000 hours less sim racing and 5000 hours of time on a track in a radical. So I agree with Hammy
Ehh, i think it's more about the individual themselves, a case by case scenario if you will. Lewis is just a complete opposite to someone like Max who does a lot of simulation or a lot of sim racing when he's not inside a car just for an example.
I was on of the best in F1 sims, almost qualified for the esport finals in F1 2020 on questionable equipment! I stopped sim racing after 21 (occasionally once or twice per year), I drive my car much tighter and more calm than when I was simracing!
For 7 years he could just show up and win… that’s the reason he never used the sim. In ‘21, when his back was up against the wall, he started to train in the Sim before race weekends, and when he did, he looked absolutely at his best.
"Show up and win" not like he had to beat rosberg each weekend? Or 2018/17 where the ferrari was super quick on a multitude of tracks? Cut the crap lol
how some people make a video regarding something and suddenly make the video an advertisement for anything but what they initially said the given video was is still mind boggling to this day...
I think I understand. Compared to real-life, even the most sophisticated sim could feel 'canned' to someone on the top tier. No sim can truly replicate every tiny detail of the real thing, so Lewis said that he prefers to focus on dealing with the latter. It's his choice.
Lewis hamilton: lightining mcqueen Max verstappen: jackson storm Only thing i could think of, jackson did so much time in the sim and mcqueen did all of his practice in the pits.
I think it's a mistake not to use the simulator. Lew finished a winless P6 season behind Sainz, Russell, LeClerc, Perez and Verstappen -who ALL won a race and ALL used the simulator to maximum benefit.
@@asaness193III Kinda like schumacher, vettel, senna, fangio, clark, prost, etc etc etc. How many races was max winning before 2021? How many is he winning with the rocketship he's had since last season. Nice try..
While what Lewis is saying is impressive, sim is already a crucial component to a driver and teams. If sim is only like 70% of the real thing (and I’m sure it’s closer then that) then there are great benefits of using it. Turkey 2021 for example, RB’s setup was a disaster, they were super slow in all FP sessions, and Albon literally spent one whole night before qualifying in the sim, trying out different setups until they found something decent. So sim (and Albon) literally saved the day for RB. Besides that sim is just great for a driver to stay in shape during winter break, or just to prepare for a race. For example Baku is coming up, and if Max is driving every day 50-80 sim laps around Baku and Russell is just chilling somewhere of course Max will benefit from that, but racing has million other factors of course. But still that can’t take away benefits from using sim, and they are huge.
Might wanna start helping the team develop the "fucking car" Can't sit back and enjoy knowing you'll be on pole anymore. Get in the sim and communicate with the team. You'll get better in the sim and your feedback will help the team. 7 time wdc....You're not getting in the sim to improve as a driver. Youre amazing and they REALLY want all the advice you can give.
He hates it and Verstappen loves/is a master at it. 🤔. I think he has an argument but also being a master at vision in a sim can obviously help you on the track. It basically trains different muscles. It’s like a football player doing ballet/dance to help with footwork. Sometimes you can specialize but after a certain point you get so good that being multidisciplinary can help you improve at a quicker pace.
That’s debatable. For example, a driver could start using inputs that make them faster in the sim that would be slower or detrimental in a real F1 car. Gaining muscle memory for these sim inputs could impair real life performance. Lewis has talked numerous times about how the feeling of g-forces is critical for driving an F1 car at the limit (obviously). Without that sensation in your body, the sims could be genuinely useless or even detrimental to real life driving. I’m sure Max would say his style of driving an F1 car in the sim is quite different to how he races the real car. Max knows there’s a difference between the two and I’m sure keeps the techniques within their respective worlds. He certainly approaches sim driving with a very different style because he’s well aware of the differences. The only areas I see sims improving real driving is focus and endurance (keeping the focus and training the arm muscles with a direct drive wheel), but these are things all F1 drivers will already be more than great at anyways. Training the eyes would be mostly detrimental for muscle memory in real racing, the feedback just isn’t enough.
Maybe it's pointless for someone who has 100,000 hours of seat time and can drive any time he wants... not everyone has that luxury. If you're an up and comer any seat time is valuable
George and Lewis have raced in the same car for 25 races now. Of those 25 races, please list the tracks that george was quicker in. This should be good 😂😂😂
i agree. i was gokarting the first time recently after many years of simracing experience and i was pretty fast and stuff, but when i got back to the sim i just spun out nonstop because i suddenly realized all the lack of information is simply confusing me and everytime i drove good times in a sim it was not from being skilled at feeling the car, but just from knowing which inputs will cause which outcomes most of the time
We see foreign drivers come to Mount Panorama, Bathurst, never having driven there before yet they do great times straight away. The reason of course is that they have learnt this subtle but scarily fast circuit on a simulator. I would think that for a F1 driver a simulator would give a great circuit familiarity refresher course at least. In F1 every tiny bit counts.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me the sim would sharpen your visual skills as the handling of the car goes. Being a seasoned race driver is already going to have well developed "seat of the pants" feel for the car. It would stand to reason that a sim would elevate your visual cues to where you have another sensory input to tell you what the car is doing.
Yeea, i've spent over 500 h on a sim to drift, i can say that im not baad at it on my pc - i can drift really whole day, no problem, but i also had some drifting training sessions in real life, in real car.. I was exhausted after 3 hours, really needed to rest, drink a lot of water, get out of a car and just sit, relax.. and of course i was driving a car with at least 2 times less power than i use on my sim. This was a pretty nice experience and i think sims are still good to practice -because of costs.. its obviously cheaper to buy w sim setup than buying a car, setting some tunes, reparing broken parts, paying for track licences etc.
He's right about that "body feel". On full motion sim I got a 7 min lap in dirt rally 2.0 and at home with a basic wheel I got only 9 minutes. That is a CRAZY difference... so I can't even imagine how different that must feel for a professional driver like him, where you suddenly have zero sensory information.
I think it's laziness. Max is on pace to be the GOAT because he put it in the extra hours practicing in a sim. Nothing but disadvantages except for the fact you can't die if you try something stupid that's why it's the best kind of training. Sim racing alone won't make a race driver but while Lewis is busy keeping his energy Verstappen keeps racing everything on every track against everyone in every context ALL THE TIME. Doesn't matter if the car is real or not the racing is and so is the experience you gain out of it.
30 years ago drivers like Prost, Senna, Mansell, Piquet, the Schumacher brothers and other F1 drivers didn't have simulators, the used practice sessions to learn the tracks, but today to cut costs they use the simulators, and everything today is about the budget.
back in the day they had unlimited testing time, nowadays you are only allowed to run the car in official sessions (and a shakedown at the start of the year)
@@MisoElEven Like I said it's all about the budget, because of the cars don't get the track time and driver's performance is hurt, b ut Verstappen can't tell the difference between the simulator and the track so he drives like he's in the simulator still.
I just don't get it - why still no VR? Why loose the feel of distance in the sim with all those flat screens? Also with VR you can have a much snappier platform, because the whole package becomes more compact and lighter (less torque and your butt is the center of mass) thus can give you those fast and precise accelerations which racing drivers like so much. No high Gs of course, but still quite a lot of lateral detail compared to bulky screen-based configs.
The “driving” bit might be a bit different but the “racing” bit is exactly the same between sim and real life. Its actually harder to race in the sim due to limited senses that you get. Your opponent are also harder as they can practice more and have no fear of death so they likely to go all out where some might chicken out in real car. So sim may not improve your driving but it definitely will improve your race craft. Think about it, between the GP Hamilton did not participate in any races, Max probably had at least 20-30 races in the top professional sim racing league and it shows… Hamilton is done.
Have to agree. It's no coincidence I am sure how insanely quick Max is to get up to speed in any real life session. I'm almost surprised he doesn't confuse real life with the sim sometimes, lol.
"Hamilton is done" LOL you're saying this about the 37 year old that took Max to the last race in Abu Dhabi and would've had his 8th and retired had it not been for FIA incompetence? You say this when you have the eyes to see the obvious superiority of the RB car to every car in the field? If you weren't short sighted and potentially foolish you'd know that we don't even know what Leclerc would do to Max if he had a similarly performing car and competent team. Try being just a bit more objective and rational.
@@Melon623 objective and rational? Like accepting the fact that he lost the WDC to Max in 2021, had a winless season in 2022 and is now having difficulties beating his own teammate in 2023? Yes, Lewis Hamilton is done both objectively and subjectively.
@@tonamg53 Mate, they were BOTH championship winning cars :'D (both capable of) How else did Max manage to challenge for the win? You don't do that in a backmarker. And they both had their share of human mistakes but what actually lost Lewis the WDC was a literal non-racing interference (Masi).
Lewis is from an era where Sims were not used often and it was on track testing. Max is from an era where Sims are common. I'd like to see how often Kimi or Alonso use Sims.
When simulators came to the stables so that the drivers could familiarize themselves with the tracks, Räikkönen's interest in simulators was completely zero. He said that he learns a new track in a few laps.
I guess he didn't need a sim when he was driving a car that was 0.8s faster per lap than the rest of the grid in Q3 and Mercs were finishing with 40s between them and the 3rd place, wouldn't hurt to use one now tho
I've been playing Racing sim since Gran Turismo 3. GT4 and GT5 are my favorite racing sim games ever. What I learned about Racing Sim is that it gives you the knowledge of racing. You cannot gain the real-life experience of racing. GT4 was the biggest skill advancement for me because driving with sim cars became more better. I learned how to take lines, how race against bots, what happens during under and oversteer and etc. Eventually I maxed out my racing skills on GT4 and GT5 so it was time for track racing. Which I went to the tracks with my 92 Civic as I experienced everything from G-force, rolls, understeer and so on. With real-life racing, you can feel the tires, the tire pressure, the brakes, the steering wheel feedback, the engine and especially the vibrations. Having both is crucial to stay on top of your game. There are a lot of days where I cannot go to the track so I just play GT5 for 1 hour to keep my racing skills consistent. The great thing about Racing Sim is that you can drive on tracks that you would never be able to unless you have a lot of money. You can race with sports cars that you will likely never own. And you get to crash without major consequences. The bad thing about Racing sim is that all cars drive the same no matter what brand or how much horsepower it has. A FR will drive like an FR and an FF will drive like an FF. No matter if its a Ferrari or S2000, they will drive the same in a Racing Sim because there is no real-life physical limitations to them. Other than that, racing sims gives majority of us people the ability to race on tracks that we will never be able to do in real life.
With how Mercedes has been off pace the past 2 years and Russell has been beating Hamilton consistently. I think there is an argument to be had that, he really should be in the sim. Maybe if he used the sim more he would be able to adjust to the new car better or find something that they are missing to give them that edge they need. At this point in time a professional racing driver not using the sim is like professional golfer not going to a driving range or professional baseball player not going to a batting cage.
Simulators help to train yourself in understanding a wide range of cars. And it showed. Now everyone knows Lewis is a limited driver in general, great driver in great cars. However, a “GOAT in F1 in great cars” is not the same as a GOAT in F1 in general. Lewis choosing to not use simulators destroyed his legacy, all documentaries in the future will show his weaknesses, will show Russell joining and matching his pace straight away. And outperforming him in equal sub-optimal machinery. It will show Lewis saying “I cannot connect with this car” while Russell loved driving it and connected perfectly fine. Back in the days without simulators Lewis was great in suboptimal cars. Now with the new generation the level raised and Lewis is no longer average at all. He’s far below par.
@@sadikurrahman4833 Because you pay attention. If Lewis would pay attention to how suboptimal cars drive he could have seen the issues coming. But he has no interest. It’s all the same mechanism. It’s like how I notice you don’t give arguments and reply accordingly.
@@valkenburgert 😂😂😂😂riding max so hard. The delusional comments are towards the bottom no wonder yours is one of them Tell me who has max had as a competitive teammate? Who’s ahead in points between the Mercedes’ drivers? I thought max fans said ‘excuses such as experimental setups and anything else cannot be used’ like last season. What’s the excuse for Russell being behind this year? Go on let’s hear it It’s only a matter of time before you will use your last resort which I can hear it coming
@@valkenburgert I pay attention. That’s why I’ve got a job and don’t beg it 24/7 and just comment my whole life like an armchair expert thinking they know more than everyone else. Your status must be ‘unemployed but a UA-cam armchair expert’ because you’re doing a very good job with that Who are you to say that a ‘7 time champ’ is ‘below par’ 😂😂🤣🤣🤣that got me honestly. Schumacher was schooled by rosberg 3 times yet there’s always excuses for him. Max was beaten by ricciarso yet there’s excuses for him. Max fans just use the ‘car’ excuse when it can also be applied to their ‘goat’. Your driver has always had weak teammates throughout his career. It’s easy to have so much confidence and be ahead with weak teammates always alongside you to make you look better than you actually are.
It's the same with flightsims. I love DCS and I fly the Yak-52 in the sim at times. After having had a real aerobatics flight in an actual Yak-52 it felt completely different. Feeling the plane wobble in the air and feel the G-forces when doing a looping or tight turn, it's almost impossible to replicate that :)
I think another key point to consider that you did not mention is the fact that Hamilton started racing in the era when a crazy amount of on-track testing was legal. By the time he debuted, he wasn't a rookie by today's standards. And I feel like this point of origin really matters in how he still views the simulator today.
Also an interesting thing people don't realise about the whole alonso vs hamilton thing. Hamilton got much more seat time than alonso.
@@kantina4765 are you like actually stupid alonso had 2 world titles and 6 years of experience when he first became teammates with alonso
I think that's an important point to make about why so many rookies nowadays go through the feeder series only to fall flat on the ice when they get to Formula 1. Hamilton had all the time in the world to physically prepare himself for his debut by racking up a huge amount of time in the car during testing. Modern rookies don't get that kind of opportunity to learn and prepare themselves. That's why they turn to the simulator, even though it still obviously is far from the same thing.
Who knows how different the rookies seasons of all these drivers in recent years would have panned out if they just had more time, like Mick for example. Would he have been so crash prone if he had the same amount of time to test as Lewis did in the 2000's?
@@kantina4765 Lets not act like Nando was missing out. He drove the previous championship winning car lol.
@@F1ll1nTh3Blanks a car with entirely different characteristics. I'm not saying hamilton is bad, just an interesting fact most people don't realise.
I think it's a big generational thing, younger drivers seem to see an advantage. Verstappen especially is really into simracing and said it has helped him in real life racing, You could train certain senses, try lines and overtaking techniques without the IRL risk of a crash.
Alonso uses the sim a lot.
Yes, but Verstappen also just really likes sim racing.
"said it has helped him in real life racing"
Sure, but we don't know if that's true, that's his impression. We would have to produce a very large and expensive study consisting of children growing up to be professional racers and put one group to practice in the sim and the other to not practice at all, control for some other variables, and see if one group's track time correlates with the number of hours in the sim. That's not gonna happen, so we'll never really know.
@@rubenssz how would practicing lines, overtakes, entry/exit, for hours upon hours, not result in improving your IRL technique at all? Even if it’s marginal it’s still an improvement
@@copperandgold4674 We can say it could, but we don't really know, we don't have any data to compare the two scenarios
My son (who is 23) seems to benefit a great deal from the sims. To the point that when he goes to a real life track he's never been to before (but that he's driven on a sim), he can get within a tenth of the fastest drivers in pretty short order. Sim racing seems to be like sensory deprivation - and when sim drivers get onto real life cars they suddenly have all that other sensory information available to them. I'm, only privy to my son and his contemporaries who started racing at a time when sim racing games were already plentiful. These young guys seem to demonstrate that it's easier to go from a sim to a car than the opposite. In other words, the translation works a lot better going that way, because there is much less to unlearn, and much more to learn - and unlearning is much harder than learning. As a mental exercise, it's an amazingly valuable resource, and that's just one aspect.
You sound like my dad. We talk every day and sometimes I’ll share my screen with him on Discord so he can watch my races.
Same car for same car. In a car I'm used to. On a track I know. I've managed to beat a pro due to sim racing experience. Specifically because I had figured out how to drift the car around certain corners faster then it could grip carry more speed through and grip up fast into straights. Think senna. Or older f1 drivers and the 4 wheel slide eras with powerslides.
I showed said pro the line I take on a sim. And he later managed to improve upon that. The difference is. My line isn't safe with other cars on the track at least not close by. Vs the lines he takes don't risk other cars getting tapped defensively when trying to pass. Since I come from sim racing. I my normal lines are risky but very defensive and set up to cut off other racers lines and block over takes and potentially force people off the track or to space back alot. But mostly to give me space to push up on whoever is ahead and slip by and then try and gain lead. But facts are facts. Some stuff that works real life is still just too risky for real life if you care about sportsmanship. If sim racing where its screw it race how you want half the people are gonna be nice half are gonna be aggro. Won't ego take people out. But I will push like Hamilton pushes the safety car and like other known flat out drivers would push and sometimes have some crazy close calls.
But my uncle legit worked indy. Have family in f1 nascar and other stuff. I know the real risks. On track very different. Why I prefer solo run time events. The risk is me. To myself. If I drift a corner pushing a car to the limits and detonate a tire mid corner and flip. I don't hit anyone else.
If forcing oversteer and a deweight in the rear stalls the aero nobody else is at risk cause I was tryna rail a corner in a drift to take it a fraction of a second faster then gripping it and breaking even later and tryna come out on throttle earlier.
If a jump the track too many times and cause broken struts or wishbones or any other linkage bits or rims and skid out like senna. I don't risk anyone else. Same with the lauda crash.
But sim side. I've literally taken corners at like 235mph drifting in lmp cars tapped dude ahead of me who was trying to defend to aggressively spun him out like a mach F pit maneuver fly by. Nobody gets hurt.
It has its downsides too. Becaude of my style. On real tracks in real cars. I work my way up slowly. And find the limits slowly and push. But because I know I have an aggro style I'll Specifically sometimes hold back more than I need to because I over compensate trying to be safe and fair and good sportsmanship.
But if it ever got to a 1v1 where I know the other person and me at the lead in real cars were making the same risks and okay with the penalties. I think I might come out harder. Me trying to beat a real pro drivers real track time in a real car I can beat him in a sim with I went hard. But still solo time runs. But I think with enough practice and runs I'd feel more comfortable really getting on him. There's 2 corners on the track I take faster then him but go wide via drift and grip up and launch through his inside. Outside to hard inside back to outside. My run comes in middle a lil slower behind but at a higher entry speed and exit speed. Middle through to the outside cut through the middle into the inside setting up for the next turn. I cut it shorter distance and less turn but again slide the rear end out to get straight and onto the throttle faster and keep it in the powerband and higher gearing.
The launch and the first corner he beats me on every time. He's better at the nuetral drop. But once I get ahead we take corners same speed or I'm slower on one but faster on 3 and 2 of them are back to back.
He figured out my line eventually using the sim. And then got it faster. But becaude he's still faster in other areas of the track. I badically peaked the 2 corners. Only way to go faster is a higher downforce car with better tires and more power. But then it gets even sketcher. Or have something alot lighter with lower power maybe but higher grip and literally just manage to curb curb and rail the thing like a single set up turn with a counter weight into it. But only cause maybe higher average speed total like the miata track records situation. Slower but becaude it never has to really break it just holds the record most of the time.
I can relate. As an simulation engineer for 20 years, the older gen engineers don’t trust simulation results but the new gen take simulation seriously.
Pilots are the perfect example of why simulators work. Emergencies are somewhat familiar that way.
Lewis could have been familiar with his suboptimal car. “I cannot connect with it” is simply unprofessional. That’s like a pilot saying: “Never been in a crashing plane before, sorry, don’t know, I cannot connect with it. I could have trained but it wouldn’t have been the same as this anyway.”
shouldn't serious engineers know the difference between 20 years of sims? the modern sim probably handles many orders of magnitude more inputs/outputs per second. i'm not an engineer and i know that computers 20 years ago have barely 1% the computational speed/memory space of today's computers - and that's not even specialised hardware. a custom-built sim should be capable of some pretty amazing detail these days and produce fairly reliable data. still incomplete ofc, but far far better than some 20 year old stuff.
Very true. We have equivalent situations in commercial air transport as well.
It's a generational thing. Still some of the older guys are like "...you youngsters think point and click fixes everything. That's not real engineering"
@@oldmanc2 Point and click is in no manner engineering. New products, many of them are poor in performance to what preceded them.
@@stephencurry8552 Agree completely
I've spent over 2000 hours on sims, but on my first irl track day I had a total sensory overload. I was completly off pace, even though I'm usually one of the "fast guys" in a sim. It is quite a bit different experience, however in the last session, once my brain started adjusting, I was rapidly improving.
after doing probably 100+ hours around nordschleife for several years on different sim, i set a 8:02 BTG on my 3rd lap. Official time from the manufacturer was 7:55. So it does help quite alot when we get used to the actual g-force and elevations :)
Sims are fantastic to become quite decent and get up to speed fast
It definitely takes some adjustment to go from sim to real life. I always feel like I have spider senses in real cars, which could easily lead to sensory overload. One of the biggest differences for me, though, is the sense of speed. Real life feels at least twice as fast.
@@M4RK_F what car were you driving?
@@tqracing thats because your real life can be affected if shit goes south. Your brain gets very aware when your at risk like that, thats where the focus comes from. Call it a survival instinct.
@@T3CMAD9 e90 m3
I think a VERY important thing you failed to mention is that Hamilton started in F1 in an era where sim software was premature and much less accurate. Driving in the sim in 2007 was only useful for learning the track corners and maybe an idea of what gear to be in for each corner. (Hamilton said so himself in the press conference after his fist win in the Canadian GP, 2007). On track testing was far more relevant and useful to improve yourself and your car. Hence, Lewis and other drivers of his generation such as Alonso, never got into sim-work that much and learned to deal and adapt without it. In this way, perhaps not doing sim work actually helped them improve their legendary on-track adaptability!
Interesting, because I see him almost every day at iracing and he drives race after race, changing cars all the time. Maybe this helps him with his "legendary on-track adaptability".
@@maciejwierorzymski7500 Fernando, Lando, Max, Carlos and others are all day in iracing. Max even competed in rfactor until the Le Mans scandal. Others, like Stoffel, were well known names back in the day in rfactor world championships.
I would just like to point out that Alonso has in fact got into sim racing. He's a regular in multiple categories in IRacing
@@martimxavier9690 He has been competing in Iracing for like ten years.
@Jesús Fernández really? I thought he had gotten into it much more recently. It's good to know that the most experienced driver in F1 history has integrated sim racing in his training for so long
I remember guys like Christopher Bell and Kyle Larson talking about why they race sprint cars and it’s same concept as the sim. It’s not meant to keep in tune with the car but more so to keep your race craft up to par. Certain skills like being about to read the track and anticipate drivers movement can translate from discipline to discipline.
F1 drivers would be so much cooler if they raced other disciplines regularly
@@andrewahern3730 Alonso would like a word with you
@baileysnow6031 That's why Alonso is the coolest F1 driver. He is actually doing other shit. Rather than just sticking to hyper engineered, hyper optimized masterworks of machinery. Alot of times, it's much funner and more interesting to drive absolute turds around at the limit.
@@ChefofWar33 i so hope he does the Indy 500 again
I think that’s why the sim can be important to some drivers. It forces you to adapt to a different dynamic of driving where the sensory inputs are very limited. Now this may not aid or reflect directly in your pace in real life, but you are training your abilities to adapt to different scenarios which the ever changing factors of racing (weather, tires, car characteristics, etc) can pose a challenge. Max alludes to the adaptability part on the video Scott made about his sim experience as well. The focus of how you use the sim can influence the real life driving imo
I started in real cars and got into sims later, I too struggled since I lost the feeling for the car in the seat and there's no way to replicate it. I strongly believe that its easier for a sim racer to get into a real car and get good than it is for a real driver to get in a sim and do good. With a sim driver, they will hop in a real car and have even more information to work with while they're used to working with limited information where a real driver will get into a sim and suddenly have to make due with much less. Its always case by case, have someone I race with who got into iRacing and sits in the 2000's for ir and another who got in the sim for the first time and shot to the 9000's for ir. It will sometimes just click for some people, and not for others.
I have really tried to get sim racing. More from an academic exercise to see if I could understand how people are benefitting, and party to see if I vould join in on a bit of social.... nope. Sims feel utterly broken and wholly unrepresentative of all of the several hundred vehicles Ive driven and ridden on track. How on earth kids are learning anything is beyond me. The steering feel is unilaterally complete rubbish. Any real vehicle that feels like a sim ought not be allowed off the trailer let alone onto the track. It remains a mystery how some people achieve repeatable lap times in sim, and how they talk about improvements that they alledge can be translated to real vehicles.... I am genuinely interested in sim 'feel' and or if this isnt all ' the emperor's new clothes' mumbo jumbo. Kinda heartened that Hamilton isnt a big advocate.
I have heard rumours that real racing is a lot easier than sims, and by what your saying it seems true. You only have your hands, eyes and ears to understand what is going, compared to your whole body.
I started in sims and moved to real life and it is indeed easier in real life. The fidelity of what you feel is much higher and more obvious in real life. It’s just easier to know exactly what grip the car has in real life.
@@2639263926392639 The cars themselves are veyr similar in performance, so things like braking, acceleration, cornering, where to shift, visibility (if you're in VR more so), and general vibe of the car (oversteery, understeery) helps you adapt faster as you are sort of familiar with these things. Sure you miss out on a lot of g-force, roll, slip etc. but you learn more about the track, speeds, shifting gears and everything else beyond the movement of the car.
*make do
I remember people argued over the RB car being designed for Max. I understand why though, his driver feedback is great and he's a top 3 sim driver. + Working with Adrian Newey must be a sick combo.
Top 4. LaMelo Ball took his spot
why is people drinking so much Redbull Koolaid about Adrian Newey? Max doesnt step out of the simulator and tell Adrian to do x or y, he steps out of the simulator and tells one of Adrian's minions that he feels x or y. Adrian Newey probably doesnt hear about it, he is just one person, Redbull engineering team is a complete group with 100s of people, i know he is the lead behind those 100s of engineers but in that case people should praise Horner since he is in charge of Adrian and his people and another thousand from the factories. Oh and he is the one that lobbied the Aero design era and the budget cap era. Without any of those 2 Mercedes would be still on top.
@@ChuyR. I think the point is that Adrian has done it successfully for so many years. Workers in the engineering team change over time but Newey is constantly there. This makes him the only constant variable which directs most of the attention to him. And rightfully so.
Adrian Neway is a god. Rumour has it that he only has to touch the car to download information to it.
Well, at the end of the season we can conclude that all of the work definitely paid off...
I’m not a Hamilton fan, but I’d say he’s done pretty well without it lol.
Pretty well, given that he has beaten the simulated perfect lap time twice during real life quali.
@@mishka1313 Singapore 2018 and Monza 2020 right?
How did you get that stat? Not disputing it because both examples sound right but curious to know the source being the F1 nerd I am!
@SI57 stfu, he was 8 tenths faster than bottas. It was an amazing lap. You're making it sound like an average lap
@SI57 yeah only max can beat machine not lulu
To be fair Hamilton did say he didn't like simulators in 2021, then proceeded to non-scheduled intense simulator sessions before Silverstone 2021 (both qualifying and race) when he saw that the championship was going to be tight, and continued ever since................
As a pilot, retired by age-related vision loss I was excited when the recent MS 2020 sim came along. Thought I could re-live my experiences, but without gravity and the forces of nature the experience was rather hollow. You can be on final in a monster crosswind making all the right control inputs and nature can still sweep you away. Its mainly the terrifying forces working on your body that tells you you have exceed what is prudent or even possible
The sudden turn of the wind and you feel the rain hitting the left side of the plane and not the right... Or the nauseating negative Gs. Really hope that that can be replicated somehow in the future.
@@the-core-experience you could... but maybe only with a massive setup that airlines used
When Max bypassed Leclerc in the rain @ Suzuka - Thats a move that he practiced in iRacing to see If it was possible. I think this is a good example that iRacing indeed can help drivers onc the track.
The fact that Max is ranked 3rd in the world at virtual racing is insanity
@@Lanse1984 and he's top 50 in fifa
@@Lanse1984 Is it? Being the best in the world is his literal job. It would be weirder if he wasn't considering how much time he spends in sims.
Impossible for him tho practice that move on Leclerc in iRacing seeing as it doesn't have rain...
dumbest comment to you sir
People REALLY have no idea how video games improve your brains reactions times, endurance, goal striking, mentality, etc etc etc.. theres SO many things video games will literally turn u into a freak
Yeah video games can teach you a lot, some people still think it makes you violent or something. Those are rare occasions when it does happen, I remember the U.S. Army made a game AA proving grounds for data and to recruit people.
It could be a generational thing. Seb himself said he had a simulator but wasn’t “focused on a virtual career.” Hamilton and Seb might be the last from that generation. Norris, Russell, Verstappen are from a new generation that concurrently spend a lot of time in the sim and now sets the precedence that all new drivers to be good on the sim.
but how about alonso??
@@el-danihasbiarta1200 Alonso is also from a new generation, he's the best rookie out there now
Q
@@omurize2007 a rookie who's dating a swift
Maybe I’m alone out here, but I just don’t enjoy video game racing as much as slamming gears and throwing a car around in real life to even want to get great at it. The lack of sensory inputs just kills it for me.
I think at the back-end of 2021 he said he used it a lot more, as he was pushing for the championship in every way. I remember him saying that he did a lot of work in the simulator and working out and working with the engineers to do everything he can
I think it was after the Austria double header when he and Mercedes got battered by Verstappen he started using it more
Yeh but he’ll say whatever sounds the coolest at any given time.
I saw someone comparing sim racing and racing with running on a treadmill and running on a road. It’s definitely different but you will get better. I totally understand the difference to irl and sim racing, I do both aswell but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from sim racing.
One thing I think you can learn A LOT from online sim racing is how people will react to different scenarios. This is something no one will ever really master and it’s something you will constantly improve on the more you drive with others
Also, a lot of young drivers now start in the sim before or together with real racing. It's often talked about how it's easier for sim racers to step into a real car than the other way around - they get a new sense of how the car behaves, real life drivers lose one. But having these other senses work perfectly as well is usually beneficial.
max is a sim racer and plays sim games all day its like a hobby for him that's why he doesn't mind doing it.
Nonono, F1 is a hobby to his sim racing career.
@@tqracing nonono, sim racing is a hobby to playing tea time with Penelope.
@@danilicious2308 Yeah, you might right about that.
nonono he makes F1 money so he can pursue his sim racing hobby.
@@tqracing guarantee this man is over 35
Lets not get it twisted. Max doesnt sim race for practice or F1 driving. He does it because hes obsessed and overly competitive. His 4am stint showed us that before his F1 race.
Max actually acknowledges that there's a difference between the sim and real world driving. His logic is that the sim does improve his driving as it helps you train other sensory input compared to real driving, while Hamilton thinks it doesn't help him. Max also says it keeps him as sharp as possible and that racing truly is his life. There was never anything else.
Hamilton felt it didn’t help him back when he was dominating question should be how does he feel about it now?
Max just proves the adage that the dumb things sports stars say in interviews are just that, dumb
@@michael1 Max is young and full of energy. Hamilton is not. When you get older you have to be much smarter about how you spend your energy. In a few years time Max will start winding down and wont be able to burn the candle at both ends.
@@nKs_D4 What? You're talking as though Hamilton is 79 or something. You guys that get so fat by 30 you can't walk isn't "aging", it's lifestyle.
@@michael1 lol, okay buddy. nobody feels the same way at 30 and even more so 40 (which Hamilton is) that they did in their early 20s or at 18. its clear by your hasty and disrespectful attitude that you are ignorant of much more but i dont have all day to educate you
Lewis is also from a time with basically unlimited testing, and he made his debut as a 22 year old. If I had to guesss I’d say 14 or 15 current drivers had their debut at an earlier age, (shit Max was only 17) & with testing restrictions it kind of makes sense for the new generation to implement the simulator as much as possible.
It’s pretty simple. It’s a generational difference. Most drivers who started with real racing and then tried simulators usually have problems with adapting to it, meanwhile most drivers who started with simracing or simultaneously started racing in both sim and real racing usually have it much easier to adapt. I know it because it was my case 😄
Jimmy Broadbent comes to mind with this. He's even said pretty much what you've said too.
See also: his video with Ben Collins. Ben struggled to get to grips with sim racing. If I remember right, it was kind of like something about it felt a bit off to him.
Great to see more insight into how different drivers improve and practice away from the track.
They do come in handy, for me at least.
I had the opportunity to run in the 2007 Nurburgring 24 Hour and did about 150 laps in rfactor to learn the track. It helped immensely.
I also use it to help me practice keeping the car under control when it gets out of shape - I got sick of running into the fences in the sims so I got good at timing the brakes, throttle, and steering to guide the car away from the fence so I could keep going. And that skill has helped in real life as well.
Its generational. When Hamilton was coming to the sport sims wasn’t good as they are rn. And had unlimited track tests. But now it’s different. Sims have vastly improved. That’s one of the reasons that Verstappen is able to maintain a consistent faster lap time than the others.
I have 400+ hours on my sim, and i have just driven once on track (a 4 stroke kart, nothing fancy, but good enough). Driving irl seemed much easier for me than on the sim, i had so many more information about the car's behaviour, g forces helped me being more consistent and understanding better what the car was doing and how much i could push.
When i came back home and did some laps on my sim, everything felt so numb and i wasn't enjoying it as much
Driving irl came so natural to me at a time i didn't even have a driving license. From that day on i convinced myself that i'd be a better irl driver than a sim one
That's always been my issue with sim racing, G-forces. What I've learned is that like a blind person, when you are missing senses the remaining ones try to compensate. In sims this relates to the wheel, gauges, sounds and the cars vector relative to its motion.That's all you have. It's all the information you need, It's you are just not used to using it that way. Why would you when the seat of your pants in more intuitive. You don't have to think about it. What's interesting is it forces you to look at driving from a different mindset, you notice things that didn't matter before but are essential now. Lewis is right, there is no replacement for G-force. However what you get from not having it is a better understanding of all of the other cues and what they mean to your car.
I drive with the senses of my wii wii.
it's no coincidence that the red bull is perfectly adapted to Max's driving style.
I had the same thought when watching the video. Hamilton always says the Merc isn't suited to his style of driving but then proceeds to not give them loads of sim data to help the designers design something suited for him? While i don't think time in the sim would help his driving it sure helps the engineers. I think he's kinda shooting himself in the foot a little. It's notable that Russell does spend time in the sim and finds the Merc more suited to him than Hamilton does. Coincidence?
@@darransmith32 since 2021, Hamilton has been constantly showing IG stories of himself doing sim work. So your statement isn’t exactly true.
@@darransmith32 i dont think so. The merc cars have never been suited to one driver and neither is it suited to george this year. They put the best package out there hence why lewis and george are evenly matched over their times together. They are both just good drivers who can adapt to any car easily.
if thats true, during the first half of the 2022 season max and redbull were saying the opposite. its not that easy lol
@@darransmith32 Hamilton is doing sim work, but he doesn't necessarily enjoy it compared to driving a real car (given unlimited testing).
I’m pretty sure it was mentioned recently that he has started doing more sim work lately.
I think he said this in 21 when he didn’t need it but recently since 2022 he’s been doing it not because of helping his pace and racecraft but more so to find a setup to work for the car and fix the issues
I think with enough time in the sim you can sort of develop a seat of the pants feel. It's like the brain starts to fill in the gaps of information that is missing. So you have the forces through the steering wheel, visual ques and maybe even some tactile feedback through the seat. Then, when you get really tuned in to the simulator, the brain fills in some of the gaps.
This last part is probably why some struggle with it. They don't get to the point of being deeply in tune with the sim, and therefore feel disconnected.
I have many examples of when I can drive based on information that doesn't actually exist in the sim. One thing that comes to mind is feeling rear getting light. Say for example last corner at Oulton Park where you pass a crest. With many cars the rear gets really sketchy there. I can't feel it through the steering wheel. There's not really much in terms of visual ques, except for the attitude of the car. Still, I can get on the throttle keeping the rear just on the limit. That's something I feel more with my gut and my butt than anything else.
btw when I drive sim, the wheel is the first sense I use to detect oversteer, unlike what the video suggest with vision. You often microadjust as well on the wheel such that it visuals does not even show the slide anyways. I wonder if this is the same for others as well
This was before dd flooded the market. so now we rely on the ffb that has improved a ton recently
@@sethhu20
The guy is 38 and has raced at the highest level for almost 25 years. He is driving and racing the real car all year long. He does not really need to develop his skills with something that is not close enough to the real thing. For 99% of driver those cheap laps are a good thing but for him It's pretty clear it's a bit pointless apart from planning next year structural changes to the car.
I feel like another reason why he's not as bothered with going to the sim just to make sure development direction will go his way is that he's probably trusted Mercedes enough that he knows the team can already try to make a car that suits him and helps him win. Even with the mess this year and last year, it's also where the habit part comes in. Even if he wants to go to the sim again, he'd probably see that as something that's alient to him anyway. Then again it could also be that the gains he could make driving in the sim are being outweighed by the cost of him driving in the sim (in time, energy, etc.) especially when you have that much experience like him on many different circuits that some of the younger drivers can't even drive on.
It’s just for some people. I’m not Lewis Hamilton but I realized when I improved my track driving it improved my sim driving as well. Sim racing is more like testing out ur theories of how the car would react and u apply it back to when u drive
Hamilton had the benefit of access to unlimited real world testing in his rookie years, so maybe that plays a part in the reason why he doesn't look up to the simulators like the drivers who came in after unlimited testing was banned would have.
So true, i friend of mine drives alot of iracing in he's Sim, but i drive tracks in real life. And i find it alot harder to brake on the edge in the Sim then in real life. I can't feel the g forces and the feeling even thought he has a very good setup is just not enought to feel the locking before it happens. But i do think racecraft, track knowledge, positioning ect. are things a sim can help you with. But driving on the edge every single lap seems more like gamebeling and mastering the game mechanics then mastering you'r own skill. You learning to deal with the game, and extraction the most out of it. But there will always be a little bit left out because of the lack of g forces and a motion rig is just not good enough(also most motion rigs don't have the screens mounted at the rig, so the rig moves but the image does not (very distracting).
I mean, if I was getting paid to drive on the weekends, I'd probably live on the simulator, in the gym, and pestering the engineers like inspector Seb 😂
Could you introduce more about 'computer simulations' for F1? How does it work and what's the difference than a simulator? Thanks.
You replace a _driver_ with a _bot_ that uses *monte carlo* (random) and then have millions of itterations.
@@RogerKeulen There's no bot model that can replace a driver. That's the ultimate reason why there's a real driver in the simulator. Computer F1 simulation doesn't work in the way you described.
They just do data analysis. Like complex tire modeling. It’s one way Mercedes developed DAS. They simulated it’s effect using computer simulations, not just a driver in loop sim.
@@LoganLeGrand The key is, how do they do data analysis based on complex models? What are the methods for the analysis?
VR helped me a lot. I can't Sim race without it. Completely agree with the brake feel as well. Still so hard to feel a lockup. Also not sure if iRacing is just funky with brake lockups. I find once you grab a wheel it's really hard to unlock it. Almost feels like you accelerate with a brake lockup haha
I race in IMSA. The SIM is great for learning a track, brake points, and getting up to speed quickly when you arrive at the real track, but not great for improving your actual technique or driver skills, in my opinion. I do still use it before every race, as a refresher so its a good tool but just as another of many tools.
One thing folks have to realize is that Corrections at the Limit are done unconsciously. The conscious mind is too slow at racing speeds. The conscious minds job is to supply data to the brain, looking ahead especially. So if a Simulator can’t supply the tactile inputs that the subconscious reacts to, hams correct, it Could get ones reactions a tiny bit behind. Obviously fabulous drivers, especially the younger drivers who grew up with Video Games, know how to make it all work for themselves.
I not sure if hamilton is saying that it just slows him down, perhaps it more like he fears learning bad habits or uprooting the ones that he believes brought him success. and there are certain habits that are not just about reacting to the car... him making predictions such that he creates a stable platform when approaching a corner for example does somewhat rely on reacting to the live sensations coming through the car and his body but allot of it is muscle memory and thought patterns also.
That's what I think is going on here. You've got the older drivers saying vision isn't as important as other senses because that's how they grew up learning to drive. But younger drivers that might have had their first racing experience from video games have learned to rely on their vision more and hence learned how to use it subconsciously over other senses more. When they hop in a real car, all that previous skill is still there but now they have additional senses that might cause confusion at first until the brain figures out how to use it properly again. All the foundational handling skills are still there though which I think allows them to progress at a much faster rate.
Anyone driver claiming sim doesn't have real benefits doesn't understand how adaptable the brian is, especially the younger you force it to adapt to something. The brain can get very good at predicting how it's moving in 3D space or other things are from visual ques knowledge of how things behave alone, but it's never going to get there if it can rely on other senses to more easily fill in the knowledge at first. That's just something older drivers won't get to experience without lots of extra work compared to someone who grew up doing it.
You do the same thing in a racing sim. Do you race at a high level at all? You have to make split second decisions just like you do IRL.
I'm a Hamilton fan, but I think the SIM work Max does I believe it's helping him immensely.
Video is 7:44 minutes and he only actually talks about WHY Lewis hates the simulator for 1 minute in total. Talk about milking videos for views and blabbing randomly holy shit.
it will be intriguing to see when he moves to ferrari if this guy has just got lucky with how well designed most of mercedes' cars have been or if he will be a regular podium finnisher.
I'm surprised Lewis doesn't use the sim on the new tracks before the race weekend just to learn the course at least. Then again that may be the few times he does use it.
I always thought that simulator work was more about car set up and development than driver development anyway.
He also has significantly more experience over everyone (except Fernando) in on track Formula 1 driving. He was already racing at the top level when some of these guys were barely walking.
That AND he's a 7 time world champ, he KNOWS how to race, so he probably puts his focus on other ways to improve his game and to compete better.
i agree that the g forces are absolutely a major part of driving and you can't get that in the simulator, but even with my basic set up i don't drive with my eyes, i drive mostly through the wheel and hands, vision is definitely not what i use to react to oversteer, if you set up the force feedback properly that should be your first instrument for detecting either understeer or oversteer, if you're using vision as your first instrument to react to these things then either your technique sucks or your set up does, brake feel now that is harder to simulate but there is hardware out there for that
that being said i'm sure in f1 cars the gap between what the sim can do and what you actually do when driving irl is i'm sure even greater
Totally agree. Who uses vision to detect oversteer!? Always found this type of comment strange and manufactured. Of course you use the force feedback first.
I believe Hamilton is every bit as good a driver as Verstappen, despite the age difference. However, those "easy" years at Mercedes, when he won 6 titles and 80 some races, undoubtedly made him a bit complacent, and borderline desinterested, to the point he alluded many times to wanting to do other things in his life beyond racing. Then came 2021, with a ferocious rival in an amazing car, and things went from easy to very hard, especially in '22 and '23. Verstappen, the ferocious rival, is relentless in his training, the kind of driver that, in the old days when track testing was liberated, would likely stack thousands of kilometers in testing during the year. Essentially, Verstappen is hungry to improve and to refine his craft in ways Hamilton is not, and the sym defficiencies, and lack of realistic physiological "feeling" is obviously not a deterrent to Max, as it is to Lewis, because all he wants, really, is to be in a F1 race car, real or virtual, as much as possible. And this may be directly related to him winning 35 races in the past two seasons.
I remember hearing that Michael Schumacher also did not use the simulator during his stay at Mercedes. For what i have heard, he only used it for quintessential setup tests.
Sim racing has come a long way since Schumacher raced..
Michael got motion sickness from it, that was one of the main reasons.
3:13 most realistic sim i used was in a arcade and it had a subwoofer below it along with the hydraulic things and good speakers and a direct drive wheel with 3 4K monitors infront of me so when i began to lose control i felt it in my stomach before i even looked at the screen
I realise testing is very limited now but why not build a practice dummy car for drivers with the same weight, power, downforce, controls, handling etc. as an F1 car?
Also you could set up a sim with the real-world G loading using a centrifuge to produce the net resultant force.
I imagine a physical "dummy car" would count as a current chassis and therefore you wouldn't be allowed to use it. The newest cars you're allowed to test with are 2 seasons old. So in 2023 the newest car you're allowed to test with whenever is a 2021 car. And I'm also pretty sure the Sims the teams use all have replica cockpits with wheel weight, pedal force etc anyway
As for your centrifuge point here I go
The problem is physics and more specifically, Jerk. Now I'm sure you know what acceleration is, rate of change of velocity and the way it works is it has a size and a direction. If you were to powerslide around a roundabout at a constant speed you would still be accelerating because the direction your going constantly changes. Jerk meanwhile is the rate of change of acceleration.
Part of the reason an F1 car is so physical is because the jerk an F1 car can create is quite high because at full speed, the rate it can change direction is huge. While a centrifuge can indeed create very high G forces the jerk from a centrifuge is fairly small. This is because a centrifuge is a massive structure that's very heavy and therefore takes a lot of energy to spin up and spin down
So yeah the TL;DR is they're not designed to replicate the same forces and they wouldn't help make your sim more realistic
Lewis grew up in the non simulator era and dominated in the Sim era......and he won with NA engines and Hybrid Engines lol how he not GOATED
The value of the sim for drivers isn't to be a better driver, but to improve the skill of learning to adapt quickly. This is pretty obviously reflected from Hamilton's underperformance in this new F1 era, where he dominated the previous era, but has not been able to adapt as quickly as others.
This💯
Max spoke a few times about the benefits of sim racing. He said: I learned a lot about steering input to be as smooth as possible. He is one of the fastest out there, but some are better in certain ways and learns a lot from this. I think you can see this in tracks like red bull ring where the layout is simple and short. Steering input is so important here to scrape every 100th out of the car.
Great video as always!
"Sim is pointless"
And a real life racing has a great point which is...?
Both are recreation/sport/entertainment, both don't have any point to exist or being engaged in beyond that
Asking Lewis why he doesn’t use stimulator is like Asking Neo if he watched Matrix 😂
u can add bass shakers and feather weights to the pedals and overall chair to improve all the feels u need.
overall 4 to 5 good bass shakers around ur seat and "chassis" can help u a ton with feelin the road and car.
the spinning feather weights on each pedal give u even more understanding of the car.
most sim racers even the crazy ones with shaking ground, dont have bass shakers somehow. but u can see them often in low budget sim rigs cause they are cheap and effective.
Max is younger and grew up playing video games. Lewis started with remote control cars
MotoGP riders don't train on a superbike because its close enough, but not the same and they might be learning habits that make them slower on the GP bike. I think the same idea applies here.
MotoGP riders regularly train on off road bikes though. The VR46 Academy has motocross and flat track, and produced the rider who's on the verge of winning his 2nd title in a row, so it's wildly misleading to claim MotoGP riders don't train on other types of bikes.
@@M2fiftycal I said not superbikes, I didn't mention anything about other kinds of bikes. Yes all of them do some kind of dirt.
All the pre 2008 drivers hate the SIM, they all get motion sickness but the playstation generation like max and lando doesn't get affected
I tried recreational karting for the first time a few years ago as an adult and it's crazy how in-tune you become with the machine when driving. You feel every track imperfection. You know precisely where the limit of grip is, you can feel it. You know exactly what all 4 tires are doing at all times. You can feel when you lock up and slide under too much braking. I can see the logic in both sides with Max and Lewis when it comes to the sim
I want my son to try karting when he's older. This is something I've often thought about.
I have thousands of hours of sim racing experience and dont have 1 real racing trophy. Bet I would have gone further in my racing career with 1000 hours less sim racing and 5000 hours of time on a track in a radical. So I agree with Hammy
You know its deadly serious when even the pro himself doesnt have interest in the sim
in the end, they probably get to drive real race cars more often than we do sim cars
But there is a pro that have interest in the sim, and is also successful in real driving. I think this is very individual.
Ehh, i think it's more about the individual themselves, a case by case scenario if you will. Lewis is just a complete opposite to someone like Max who does a lot of simulation or a lot of sim racing when he's not inside a car just for an example.
It's just the matter of mindset
I was on of the best in F1 sims, almost qualified for the esport finals in F1 2020 on questionable equipment! I stopped sim racing after 21 (occasionally once or twice per year), I drive my car much tighter and more calm than when I was simracing!
For 7 years he could just show up and win… that’s the reason he never used the sim. In ‘21, when his back was up against the wall, he started to train in the Sim before race weekends, and when he did, he looked absolutely at his best.
"Show up and win" not like he had to beat rosberg each weekend? Or 2018/17 where the ferrari was super quick on a multitude of tracks? Cut the crap lol
how some people make a video regarding something and suddenly make the video an advertisement for anything but what they initially said the given video was is still mind boggling to this day...
It’s an analogue versus digital thing. To me the digital simulation never matches the real thing so I’m with Hamilton on this.
max learns from the sim and sim raceing hes world number 3 at that and has calmed down on the track since this
I think I understand. Compared to real-life, even the most sophisticated sim could feel 'canned' to someone on the top tier. No sim can truly replicate every tiny detail of the real thing, so Lewis said that he prefers to focus on dealing with the latter. It's his choice.
Lewis hamilton: lightining mcqueen
Max verstappen: jackson storm
Only thing i could think of, jackson did so much time in the sim and mcqueen did all of his practice in the pits.
I think it's a mistake not to use the simulator. Lew finished a winless P6 season behind Sainz, Russell, LeClerc, Perez and Verstappen -who ALL won a race and ALL used the simulator to maximum benefit.
@Warden Cobb And yet he his more wins, poles and podiums than all of them combined. Maybe, just maybe he knows what he's doing.
@@Bahamuttiamat Or maybe, just maybe, he had the fastest car for almost a decade, by a mile.
@@asaness193III Kinda like schumacher, vettel, senna, fangio, clark, prost, etc etc etc. How many races was max winning before 2021? How many is he winning with the rocketship he's had since last season. Nice try..
While what Lewis is saying is impressive, sim is already a crucial component to a driver and teams.
If sim is only like 70% of the real thing (and I’m sure it’s closer then that) then there are great benefits of using it.
Turkey 2021 for example, RB’s setup was a disaster, they were super slow in all FP sessions, and Albon literally spent one whole night before qualifying in the sim, trying out different setups until they found something decent. So sim (and Albon) literally saved the day for RB.
Besides that sim is just great for a driver to stay in shape during winter break, or just to prepare for a race.
For example Baku is coming up, and if Max is driving every day 50-80 sim laps around Baku and Russell is just chilling somewhere of course Max will benefit from that, but racing has million other factors of course. But still that can’t take away benefits from using sim, and they are huge.
I'm with Hamilton here but I'd still do the sim in the off seasons at least.
Might wanna start helping the team develop the "fucking car"
Can't sit back and enjoy knowing you'll be on pole anymore. Get in the sim and communicate with the team. You'll get better in the sim and your feedback will help the team. 7 time wdc....You're not getting in the sim to improve as a driver. Youre amazing and they REALLY want all the advice you can give.
He hates it and Verstappen loves/is a master at it. 🤔. I think he has an argument but also being a master at vision in a sim can obviously help you on the track. It basically trains different muscles. It’s like a football player doing ballet/dance to help with footwork. Sometimes you can specialize but after a certain point you get so good that being multidisciplinary can help you improve at a quicker pace.
That’s debatable. For example, a driver could start using inputs that make them faster in the sim that would be slower or detrimental in a real F1 car. Gaining muscle memory for these sim inputs could impair real life performance. Lewis has talked numerous times about how the feeling of g-forces is critical for driving an F1 car at the limit (obviously). Without that sensation in your body, the sims could be genuinely useless or even detrimental to real life driving. I’m sure Max would say his style of driving an F1 car in the sim is quite different to how he races the real car. Max knows there’s a difference between the two and I’m sure keeps the techniques within their respective worlds. He certainly approaches sim driving with a very different style because he’s well aware of the differences. The only areas I see sims improving real driving is focus and endurance (keeping the focus and training the arm muscles with a direct drive wheel), but these are things all F1 drivers will already be more than great at anyways. Training the eyes would be mostly detrimental for muscle memory in real racing, the feedback just isn’t enough.
Maybe it's pointless for someone who has 100,000 hours of seat time and can drive any time he wants... not everyone has that luxury. If you're an up and comer any seat time is valuable
I'm pretty sure the sim does help. Probably why George is quicker 👀
George and Lewis have raced in the same car for 25 races now. Of those 25 races, please list the tracks that george was quicker in. This should be good 😂😂😂
@@andrewmelton2686 I donno but he finished above him last year...
@carl595 ah yes because points tell the whole story. I guess we can conclude that ocon is faster than alonso also then 💀
@@andrewmelton2686 And he's been out qualified by him 3 times out of 3 so far this year
@carl595 but ham destroyed him in quali head to head last year ? 😂
i agree. i was gokarting the first time recently after many years of simracing experience and i was pretty fast and stuff, but when i got back to the sim i just spun out nonstop because i suddenly realized all the lack of information is simply confusing me and everytime i drove good times in a sim it was not from being skilled at feeling the car, but just from knowing which inputs will cause which outcomes most of the time
So, what you’re saying is the most important “sensor” in a race car is the driver’s arse?
Indeed
We see foreign drivers come to Mount Panorama, Bathurst, never having driven there before yet they do great times straight away. The reason of course is that they have learnt this subtle but scarily fast circuit on a simulator. I would think that for a F1 driver a simulator would give a great circuit familiarity refresher course at least. In F1 every tiny bit counts.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me the sim would sharpen your visual skills as the handling of the car goes.
Being a seasoned race driver is already going to have well developed "seat of the pants" feel for the car. It would stand to reason that a sim would elevate your visual cues to where you have another sensory input to tell you what the car is doing.
Yeea, i've spent over 500 h on a sim to drift, i can say that im not baad at it on my pc - i can drift really whole day, no problem, but i also had some drifting training sessions in real life, in real car.. I was exhausted after 3 hours, really needed to rest, drink a lot of water, get out of a car and just sit, relax.. and of course i was driving a car with at least 2 times less power than i use on my sim. This was a pretty nice experience and i think sims are still good to practice -because of costs.. its obviously cheaper to buy w sim setup than buying a car, setting some tunes, reparing broken parts, paying for track licences etc.
Because he doesn’t have the best car by miles in a simulator
7>2 and btw Lewis is old school driver, max is new gen..that's the big difference i think, is like asking prost if he want to play at PC or drive
Lewis is really like McQueen and Max is like Jackson storm. 😂
He's right about that "body feel". On full motion sim I got a 7 min lap in dirt rally 2.0 and at home with a basic wheel I got only 9 minutes. That is a CRAZY difference... so I can't even imagine how different that must feel for a professional driver like him, where you suddenly have zero sensory information.
He just wants to chill
Yes he cares more about his fashion
@@nixxol oh no, how could that be!?? clown
I think it's laziness. Max is on pace to be the GOAT because he put it in the extra hours practicing in a sim. Nothing but disadvantages except for the fact you can't die if you try something stupid that's why it's the best kind of training.
Sim racing alone won't make a race driver but while Lewis is busy keeping his energy Verstappen keeps racing everything on every track against everyone in every context ALL THE TIME. Doesn't matter if the car is real or not the racing is and so is the experience you gain out of it.
30 years ago drivers like Prost, Senna, Mansell, Piquet, the Schumacher brothers and other F1 drivers didn't have simulators, the used practice sessions to learn the tracks, but today to cut costs they use the simulators, and everything today is about the budget.
back in the day they had unlimited testing time, nowadays you are only allowed to run the car in official sessions (and a shakedown at the start of the year)
Back in the day Ron Dennis "hired" helicopters to help dry the testing track faster so Hamilton can do more fast laps before his rookie season :DD
@@MisoElEven Like I said it's all about the budget, because of the cars don't get the track time and driver's performance is hurt, b ut Verstappen can't tell the difference between the simulator and the track so he drives like he's in the simulator still.
@@MisoElEven still schooled the champ and made him salty since 😂😂😂😂
If someone was salty for that long I’d take advantage of that
I just don't get it - why still no VR? Why loose the feel of distance in the sim with all those flat screens? Also with VR you can have a much snappier platform, because the whole package becomes more compact and lighter (less torque and your butt is the center of mass) thus can give you those fast and precise accelerations which racing drivers like so much. No high Gs of course, but still quite a lot of lateral detail compared to bulky screen-based configs.
The “driving” bit might be a bit different but the “racing” bit is exactly the same between sim and real life. Its actually harder to race in the sim due to limited senses that you get. Your opponent are also harder as they can practice more and have no fear of death so they likely to go all out where some might chicken out in real car.
So sim may not improve your driving but it definitely will improve your race craft.
Think about it, between the GP Hamilton did not participate in any races,
Max probably had at least 20-30 races in the top professional sim racing league and it shows…
Hamilton is done.
Have to agree. It's no coincidence I am sure how insanely quick Max is to get up to speed in any real life session. I'm almost surprised he doesn't confuse real life with the sim sometimes, lol.
"Hamilton is done" LOL you're saying this about the 37 year old that took Max to the last race in Abu Dhabi and would've had his 8th and retired had it not been for FIA incompetence? You say this when you have the eyes to see the obvious superiority of the RB car to every car in the field? If you weren't short sighted and potentially foolish you'd know that we don't even know what Leclerc would do to Max if he had a similarly performing car and competent team. Try being just a bit more objective and rational.
@@Melon623 objective and rational? Like accepting the fact that he lost the WDC to Max in 2021, had a winless season in 2022 and is now having difficulties beating his own teammate in 2023?
Yes, Lewis Hamilton is done both objectively and subjectively.
@@Melon623 Also note, Lewis Hamilton lost WDC in 2021 while driving a *CHAMPIONSHIP WINNING CAR*
@@tonamg53 Mate, they were BOTH championship winning cars :'D (both capable of) How else did Max manage to challenge for the win? You don't do that in a backmarker. And they both had their share of human mistakes but what actually lost Lewis the WDC was a literal non-racing interference (Masi).
Lewis is from an era where Sims were not used often and it was on track testing. Max is from an era where Sims are common. I'd like to see how often Kimi or Alonso use Sims.
Alonso is the exception. He is on the sim as much as the young guys.
Just leave Kimi alone, he knows what to do
When simulators came to the stables so that the drivers could familiarize themselves with the tracks, Räikkönen's interest in simulators was completely zero. He said that he learns a new track in a few laps.
I guess he didn't need a sim when he was driving a car that was 0.8s faster per lap than the rest of the grid in Q3 and Mercs were finishing with 40s between them and the 3rd place, wouldn't hurt to use one now tho
I've been playing Racing sim since Gran Turismo 3. GT4 and GT5 are my favorite racing sim games ever. What I learned about Racing Sim is that it gives you the knowledge of racing. You cannot gain the real-life experience of racing. GT4 was the biggest skill advancement for me because driving with sim cars became more better. I learned how to take lines, how race against bots, what happens during under and oversteer and etc. Eventually I maxed out my racing skills on GT4 and GT5 so it was time for track racing. Which I went to the tracks with my 92 Civic as I experienced everything from G-force, rolls, understeer and so on. With real-life racing, you can feel the tires, the tire pressure, the brakes, the steering wheel feedback, the engine and especially the vibrations.
Having both is crucial to stay on top of your game. There are a lot of days where I cannot go to the track so I just play GT5 for 1 hour to keep my racing skills consistent. The great thing about Racing Sim is that you can drive on tracks that you would never be able to unless you have a lot of money. You can race with sports cars that you will likely never own. And you get to crash without major consequences. The bad thing about Racing sim is that all cars drive the same no matter what brand or how much horsepower it has. A FR will drive like an FR and an FF will drive like an FF. No matter if its a Ferrari or S2000, they will drive the same in a Racing Sim because there is no real-life physical limitations to them. Other than that, racing sims gives majority of us people the ability to race on tracks that we will never be able to do in real life.
He hardly ever drive a simulator, and he hardly ever wins any races now lmao Verstappen does both wonderfully
With how Mercedes has been off pace the past 2 years and Russell has been beating Hamilton consistently. I think there is an argument to be had that, he really should be in the sim. Maybe if he used the sim more he would be able to adjust to the new car better or find something that they are missing to give them that edge they need.
At this point in time a professional racing driver not using the sim is like professional golfer not going to a driving range or professional baseball player not going to a batting cage.
Simulators help to train yourself in understanding a wide range of cars.
And it showed. Now everyone knows Lewis is a limited driver in general, great driver in great cars.
However, a “GOAT in F1 in great cars” is not the same as a GOAT in F1 in general.
Lewis choosing to not use simulators destroyed his legacy, all documentaries in the future will show his weaknesses, will show Russell joining and matching his pace straight away. And outperforming him in equal sub-optimal machinery. It will show Lewis saying “I cannot connect with this car” while Russell loved driving it and connected perfectly fine.
Back in the days without simulators Lewis was great in suboptimal cars. Now with the new generation the level raised and Lewis is no longer average at all. He’s far below par.
Dutch commenting and you could already tell what was coming..
@@sadikurrahman4833 Because you pay attention. If Lewis would pay attention to how suboptimal cars drive he could have seen the issues coming.
But he has no interest.
It’s all the same mechanism.
It’s like how I notice you don’t give arguments and reply accordingly.
@@valkenburgert how is Lewis “far below par” ?
@@valkenburgert 😂😂😂😂riding max so hard. The delusional comments are towards the bottom no wonder yours is one of them
Tell me who has max had as a competitive teammate?
Who’s ahead in points between the Mercedes’ drivers? I thought max fans said ‘excuses such as experimental setups and anything else cannot be used’ like last season. What’s the excuse for Russell being behind this year? Go on let’s hear it
It’s only a matter of time before you will use your last resort which I can hear it coming
@@valkenburgert I pay attention. That’s why I’ve got a job and don’t beg it 24/7 and just comment my whole life like an armchair expert thinking they know more than everyone else.
Your status must be ‘unemployed but a UA-cam armchair expert’ because you’re doing a very good job with that
Who are you to say that a ‘7 time champ’ is ‘below par’ 😂😂🤣🤣🤣that got me honestly.
Schumacher was schooled by rosberg 3 times yet there’s always excuses for him.
Max was beaten by ricciarso yet there’s excuses for him.
Max fans just use the ‘car’ excuse when it can also be applied to their ‘goat’. Your driver has always had weak teammates throughout his career. It’s easy to have so much confidence and be ahead with weak teammates always alongside you to make you look better than you actually are.
It's the same with flightsims. I love DCS and I fly the Yak-52 in the sim at times. After having had a real aerobatics flight in an actual Yak-52 it felt completely different. Feeling the plane wobble in the air and feel the G-forces when doing a looping or tight turn, it's almost impossible to replicate that :)