Tires, check, brakes, check, setup, check, mindset? What? What does a mindset have to do with racing? I never thought I would be this unprepared for a race after so much practice. Lining up to my grid spot with all these different cars around me, I had many things, but was missing the proper mindset. These lines that I adapted for me are a credit to Shivam Kumar who started his racing mindset discussion and how having a Growth Mindset helped (see his great article at https://medium.com/mindsets/a-different-racing-line-how-mindsets-changed-my-laptimes-c4d91900e02f).
When I first got into sim racing, the only thing I really thought about was going fast and finishing P1 (or as close as I could to P1), but I did not think about the driver (or the strategy for that matter). I very quickly discovered that racing is hard and frustrating, that is, depending on the simulation level and the assists you use (in my case I was trying for no assists and bots or leagues at high levels).
I am pretty certain that you have, like me, done your sim racing practice for two or three hours to start a well anticipated race and got wiped out in the first lap, or spun because of cold tires after a pit stop. Or, probably worse, you were in the lead, in P1, had done a wonderful or very acceptable race to date, and then spun-out on the last lap to find yourself ending P11 or DNF without any points!
With the wrong mindset, those events just make you want to quit, to believe that things like this are not for me. But if you love racing and are ready to accept the following three premises: first, that racing is hard (racing line, trail braking, strategy, weather) and two, realize that a racer is making very important split-second decisions while driving at a mind blowing speeds, and three, that there is still some ways to go before the robotic cars (if you are racing computer controlled opponents) really emulate human driving behaviours (more on that later), then you could find that you are… very good.
I mean, as sim racers, we are trying to emulate the best drivers in the world. Those who are the top of this game, who know all the rules, and this, those who have gravitated the echelons to be where they are, and we have not, and nor have we been measured to be part of this elite class. To become an F1 or F2 driver, years of racing have made their ways under the belts of these champions, they have participated to more than many races, and they have coaches, bosses, trainers, and a team who pushes them, and who in turn have tools and experience that can be leveraged by these drivers, and we do not have (well maybe the eSports drivers).
Let’s talk about those damn rules for a moment. Why so many? Why can I get penalized for a car that drives into me. To boil it down, the rules exist primarily for safety reasons. Well, penalizing individuals (or teams) for infringements is merely a statement of how important it is to be safe. Things in that category include speeding in the pit lane, causing accidents, passing your opponent in a safe way, letting those faster than you by (blue flags), submitting to delta time under VSCs or SCs, blocking the pit lane, and leaving enough room for the one beside you. And then, as for any game, it is about fairness, so this includes rules around track limits, having to use two different tire compounds, only having a certain number of tire sets, etc. It must be said that, because you and I have not evolved through the car racing ranks, many of those rules are obscure and we unfortunately learn the hard way.
Another aspect is how the computer drives those computer-controlled cars around you. The computing power, the graphics, and the artificial intelligence (AI) has gone a long way, but trying to emulate humans, is still a challenge in many domains for the information technology (IT) world, and again here, in cars that are travelling very fast with many other cars around them. It is hard to accept that considering that the graphics are now so realistic, then why are the bots not as realistic. I am an IT guy, and yes computers are faster than they were, but imagine the calculations that need to be done for each and every bot car and each and every human car around one of these machines arriving at a corner at 200 km/h. It is not the computing power that is lacking, or the graphic abilities, but the algorithms that programmers must draw to get the AI to calculate the possibilities and make split-second decisions like the ones you do without causing ill effects. Like me, most of you are using off-the-shelf software at a reasonable price, not some million-dollar simulator (that likely only focuses on one car, like the ones they have in F1).
Finally, the easy flashback and restart options in the sim racing games is, in my mind, a double-edged sword. I have not tested many games, but one great feature that I would like, is to run a season, with no possible session restarts in solo mode to provide a more authentic feeling of the real-world challenges. You crash your car in practice, well practice is over my friend, and you move on to the next session, sorry. This in my mind would prepare those who race online and in leagues to quickly realize that they cannot “go for it at all costs”. I mean the game I play has engine utilization over the career with limits on the number of engines and so on, certain that the “no possible restart session” feature is possible, and this would give sim racers a better sense of what it feels like to race in a league or online, and give you the sim driver, a better sense of how well you would fair over the course of a racing season (be it 6, 12, 18 or more races).
Anyways, I felt like sharing those thoughts, to hopefully allow you to realize that, although you get frustrated sometimes, that you are better than you think! Now go racing, having fun, and maybe another time we can talk about racing strategies.
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