From gamer to athlete: Why your simulator is a high-performance training device

At SimUl­ti­mate, we have a clear stance on this, one that is sup­port­ed by the real­i­ty of mod­ern motor­sport: Who­ev­er sits in a sim­u­la­tor today is not play­ing. They are train­ing.

It is no coin­ci­dence that world cham­pi­ons like Max Ver­stap­pen or tal­ents such as Lan­do Nor­ris and Raf­faele Mar­ciel­lo spend hours in iRac­ing or Asset­to Cor­sa Com­pe­tizione. They do not do this to pass the time. They use the sim­u­la­tor to sharp­en their sens­es and auto­mate cog­ni­tive process­es. But how exact­ly does this trans­fer from the vir­tu­al to the real world work? The answer lies in human per­cep­tion.

In a real race car, phys­i­cal forces bom­bard five sens­es simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. In the sim­u­la­tor, in most cas­es, we lack G‑forces, the smell of gaso­line, and phys­i­cal fear. This means: a sim rac­er must train the remain­ing sens­es (see­ing, hear­ing, feel­ing) to an extreme­ly high­er lev­el in order to com­pen­sate for the miss­ing infor­ma­tion.

Let us take a detailed look at this sen­so­ry work.

Hap­tics
The sense of touch is your most impor­tant con­nec­tion to the physics of the car in the sim­u­la­tor. In real life, you feel decel­er­a­tion under brak­ing with your entire body; your head nods for­ward, the belt tight­ens. In the sim­u­la­tor, this feed­back is com­plete­ly absent. This is where a fas­ci­nat­ing neu­ro­log­i­cal repro­gram­ming takes place.

You must learn to con­trol brake pres­sure pure­ly through mus­cle mem­o­ry in your leg. This is why we repeat­ed­ly talk about load cell brake ped­als. It is not about gim­micks, but about teach­ing your brain to apply 80 kilo­grams of pres­sure blind­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, with­out your body receiv­ing feed­back from decel­er­a­tion. Devel­op­ing this fine motor con­trol is pure train­ing.

The same applies to your hands on the steer­ing wheel. A high-qual­i­ty direct dri­ve sys­tem is not a lux­u­ry, but a com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool. In a real car, you often feel through the “seat of your pants” (the vestibu­lar sys­tem) when the rear starts to step out. In the rig, your hands must take over this infor­ma­tion. You feel the reduc­tion in resis­tance in the steer­ing wheel mil­lisec­onds before you see it. Sim rac­ers there­fore train their hands as high­ly sen­si­tive sen­sors that inter­pret nuances of road sur­face and tire wear that would com­plete­ly escape a nor­mal dri­ver.

Visu­al
In sim rac­ing, the eye is more than just a cam­era lens. It is the instru­ment for speed per­cep­tion and posi­tion­ing. In a real car, periph­er­al vision and spa­tial depth help us enor­mous­ly. In the sim­u­la­tor, we must recon­struct this three-dimen­sion­al­i­ty on (most­ly) two-dimen­sion­al screens.

The train­ing here lies in adap­ta­tion and pre­ci­sion of vision. An expe­ri­enced sim rac­er does not stare at the hood. They con­stant­ly scan the hori­zon. Cor­rect­ly set­ting the “Field of View” (FOV) is cru­cial in order to align speed per­cep­tion with real­i­ty. You train your eye to pre­cise­ly cap­ture ref­er­ence points — a crack in the asphalt, a shad­ow, a dis­tance mark­er — at 280 km/h.

Since mod­ern tracks are laser-scanned dig­i­tal twins of real­i­ty, this visu­al train­ing is trans­fer­able 1:1. Who­ev­er learns in the sim­u­la­tor exact­ly where the turn-in point for Eau Rouge at Spa-Fran­cor­champs is will know it in real life as well. The eye learns to read the track long before the car gets there.

Audi­to­ry
The sense of hear­ing is often under­es­ti­mat­ed in rac­ing or reduced to the pure enjoy­ment of engine sound. But for a sim rac­er, hear­ing is an ana­lyt­i­cal tool. In a real GT3 car, it is loud, the wind whis­tles, the gear­box howls — many sub­tle sounds get lost. In the sim­u­la­tor, how­ev­er, sound design is often mixed in a way that gives us crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion with crys­tal clar­i­ty.

You hear the “singing” of the tires long before the car actu­al­ly slides. So-called “tire scrub­bing” pro­vides acoustic feed­back about the lim­it of grip. The same applies to the rat­tling of ABS or slight over-revving of the engine dur­ing down­shifts. A sim rac­er uses their ears to feel the lim­it. You learn to hear vehi­cle states. This audi­to­ry sen­si­tiv­i­ty sharp­ens your reac­tion time, as the acoustic sig­nal is often processed faster than the visu­al con­fir­ma­tion that the car is slid­ing.

The cog­ni­tive lev­el
In addi­tion to the sens­es, sim rac­ing is mas­sive train­ing for the brain. The cog­ni­tive load of dri­ving a vir­tu­al vehi­cle at the lim­it con­sis­tent­ly for 60 min­utes is enor­mous. It is about deci­sion-mak­ing under pres­sure.

Pro­fes­sion­als use the sim­u­la­tor to turn con­scious actions into sub­con­scious automa­tisms — so-called pro­ce­dur­al mem­o­ry. If you have prac­ticed a thou­sand times in the sim­u­la­tor how to catch a step­ping-out rear in a spe­cif­ic cor­ner, you no longer have to think in a real sit­u­a­tion. You act instinc­tive­ly. In this moment of con­cen­tra­tion, the brain no longer dif­fer­en­ti­ates between real­i­ty and sim­u­la­tion. The stress you feel while defend­ing your posi­tion in the final lap trig­gers real phys­i­o­log­i­cal reac­tions.

So the next time some­one asks you why you invest so much time and pas­sion into your rig, the answer is sim­ple: You are train­ing your sens­es to a lev­el that is not required in every­day life. You com­pen­sate for miss­ing phys­i­cal forces through increased hap­tic, visu­al, and audi­to­ry pre­ci­sion.

You are not play­ing a game. You are prac­tic­ing motor­sport. And that is exact­ly why, at SimUl­ti­mate, we pro­vide you with the nec­es­sary hard­ware.