Train Like a Pilot

Question: would you feel safe flying on a plane if the pilot had zero experience and had never practiced in a flight simulator? Flight simulators are a huge part of how pilots learn to fly. They develop their flying techniques in a realistic environment many times before they're even allowed to step into a real cockpit. So why don't we apply the same idea in motorsports?

The Pilot Training Model

Before they ever fly a real plane, pilots spend hundreds of hours in simulators. They practice everything: takeoffs, landing, navigating through storms, even handling engine failures, all in a safe and controlled environment. And it's not just random practice—there's a structure to it. Beginners are supervised by experienced instructors who guide them through different scenarios. They practice specific techniques over and over until they become second nature. And by the time they get into a real plane, they're ready for almost everything. That's why flight simulators are now a standard part of pilot training worldwide.

The Current State of Racing Simulators

In motorsports training, racing simulators are relatively recent. And because of that, there's a lot of people who still don't know how to actually benefit from it. I've seen way too many drivers having a bad first impression of simulators because they were either not properly set up or because the drivers themselves didn't know exactly how to use it or even what were the actual benefits of a simulator.

Without supervision or preparation, it's like throwing pilot students in a totally new flight simulator without teaching them what to do with it. If you're spending time in the simulator working on things that are not actually going to transfer to your on track skills, you're just wasting your time.

Benefits of Simulator Practice in Racing

So how can we benefit the most out of simulator practice in racing? The first main benefit is car handling dynamics. You will learn how to feel understeer and oversteer and how to induce understeer and oversteer in the simulator. The realism and precision is so good that you will develop a subtle, precise technique and improve your reaction times.

Key areas of improvement include:

• Vision technique

• Track learning processes

• Breaking references

• Breaking traces

• Setup knowledge

• Track knowledge

• Muscle memory foundation

By the time you get on the real track, you save a lot of track time and money by skipping some of these processes and going straight to the important things that can only be worked on the real track.

Enhanced Sensory Awareness

With the lack of G-forces in the simulator, you become more sensitive to the steering feedback to sounds and to the visual aspect, how the world rotates relative to the car in understeer and oversteer. You also become more sensitive to elevation and camber changes visually. When you get back to the track, the extra seat of fencing formation and G-forces makes it even easier to feel what's happening with the car.

Common Mistakes: Using the Simulator Wrong

There's a big chance you've been using the simulator wrong and not actually benefiting from it. Let's talk about that. I noticed that racing simulators are not being used in a way that will bring a real benefit to real life technique, which is why we still have some drivers saying that it just doesn't work for them or they can't feel it or they can't really use it to improve their technique.

Now that I had the opportunity to work with many real life drivers who were struggling with this exact problem, I figured out what was happening.

Key Differences Between Simulator and Real Life

The main differences between the simulator and real life motorsports are:

• The speed sensation

• The physical intensity

• The fear of real consequences

This different emotional environment puts us in a different mentality when driving in the simulator compared to real life. And because of these differences, there's a much higher chance that you will drive much more aggressively in the simulator than in real life. In other words, you tend to overdrive way more in the simulator than you would on the real track.

The Problem with Overdriving

And this is where the big problem lies, because if you're driving away at the simulator that you would not do in real life, then you can't transfer some of these skills from your simulator practice to the actual track. Driving is a complex set of skills that requires many of them to be on automatic mode, our muscle memory. So if you build a muscle memory of being extremely aggressive in the simulator, but you end up having a completely different driving style in real life, it becomes more difficult to unify simulator driving with real motorsports and transfer over the skills and processes from one to the other.

The Solution: Unified Driving Process

But if you try to develop one single process to find the limit that you can apply in both simulator and real life, your simulator practice hours will finally make a difference in your driving style. So whenever you're practicing the simulator, try to mimic the mentality you would have in real life and follow the same system of understanding the grip of the tires and building up from there just like you would do on track.

Try your best to never crash or spin unless we're practicing intentional spinning or exaggerated exercises in the simulator. This way you will be more conscious about finding the limit in the right way.