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Feature: How to Succeed in Racing (without
really trying)
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Page 2
My theory
of the magic keys to instant racing success was rapidly dissolving.
Then,
it got worse.
 I
started getting upset. At the end of one particularly nasty
wreck, I slammed my open hand against the steering wheel.
Damn! I still had not made it once around the track. OK, maybe
my best time was a 1:07.06, but at least it was a completed
lap. Going the way I was going I would never even have a time.
I was going completely in the opposite direction. The wrong
direction.
Beating
the steering wheel was a sure sign of frustration. Frustration
because I was running out of things to blame my crashes on.
The very best proximate causal factor I had found was my neighbor’s
car washing, and I had already yelled at him to be more quiet
about it.
Frustration
in my case often leads to talking to myself.
“What
the hell is wrong with you?” I asked out loud with
no one else in the room.
As I
sat behind the wheel of my beautiful CoffeeMaker Porsche GT3
with the crumpled front end, I looked over my right shoulder
back at the track, at the ugly black circular skid marks I
had left. They were still smoking. I had almost run out of
answers and I thought for a moment. For the first time, I
tried keeping my fragile ego out of the process.
My golf
analogy had some applicability, but to be honest, it’s
a pretty flawed comparison. First, real life golf is a game
almost anyone can play. Rent a set of clubs, find a course,
pay the fee, play the course.
How many
of us ever will get a chance to drive a real race car on a
real track? Not many. But I knew how to drive a car. I had
been driving cars and trucks since I was fifteen and a half.
Just not like this, not anything like this.
Nearly
any golfer of any experience or skill level, can hit at least
one shot as good as anything Tiger Woods has ever hit.
Just by sheer chance, if nothing else, their club comes through
the impact area on the right trajectory, with the right speed,
and impacts the ball perfectly.
If you’re
a golfer you know this is true, whether it’s a 150 yard
approach shot that rolls up to a couple inches of the hole,
or a 75 foot putt over a tricky undulating green that finds
the bottom of the hole, somehow the magic happens.
And it’s probably part of the reason why some of us continue
to play this very frustrating game.
 But
the difference between the hackers of this world and Tiger
Woods is that he does those good shots nearly every time.
It’s
not akin to auto racing, except that to be really good, you
have to do it consistently well, lap after lap. Imagine doing
that, keeping your concentration that perfect over something
like a 500 mile race. No chance to relax, never a time to
put the car on autopilot. Driving in traffic, dealing with
the unexpected, your competition, having mechanical failures,
tires wearing, the heat, the humidity.
Racing.
And so
it came to me: This was a high fidelity auto racing simulation.
It was not easy, and although you could configure it with
different cheats to make things simpler, at it’s highest
fidelity it was pretty darn real. And pretty darn hard. It
would not make sense, given this fidelity, that a relative
newbie could jump into it and be anywhere’s near as fast
as an experienced, skilled driver.
All the
tricks in the world, all the secrets, all the setups, all
the videos would not change the reality of the simulation.
In order to get better, be faster, be consistent, I had to
work at it. Practice, just like the real drivers do. That’s
where the challenge was, and ultimately, the reward.
Not in
some quick fix, but in the process of learning, of trying,
of improving little by little.
In auto
sim racing, as in a lot of things, even real-world golf, knowledge
without applied technique gets you nothing. An expensive set
of golf clubs will never make up for a lousy golf swing. In
racing, it’s not enough to know that you want to be in
a certain gear or speed at the approach of a certain turn.
Not enough to know that you want to be smooth, or that you
shouldn’t mash the throttle in the middle of a turn.
Not enough to have that magic setup you’ve been hoping
for.
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