PaddockSpy-Grand Prix Blog

If you had the chance to drive and experience an A1GP Powered by Ferrari car, you’d jump at the chance, right?

Well, so would I.

There might even be a few vital organs in my body that I’d happily relinquish if, through some bizarre sequence of events, this actually led me to getting behind the wheel of one of the 600bhp nation-versus-nation racers for half a day’s running.

Fortunately (for one of my kidneys anyway) I don’t have the experience to safely turn a wheel in anger in one of A1GP’s Ferrari-powered babies. The merest suggestion of me fitting my 5 foot 11 inch, slightly lumpy frame into a racing seat would have many A1GP technicians reaching for tissues just to wipe away the tears of laughter.

The closest I get to experiencing an actual race car is constantly speaking to all the drivers about their feelings throughout every race weekend. You see, I have been editor of A1GP.com for two years now, and have written more than 1500 stories through interviews with drivers about their races. I cockily feel with my knowledge assimilation that I could be part of a championship-winning team if I was only given the chance, but it’s just five-time Grand Prix winner John Watson is allowed from A1GP’s media and TV staff to actually get in a real car.

But thankfully there was another answer – A1GP’s simulator in Italy. Given the ultimately static nature of a simulator compared with a racing car, I knew couldn’t do any damage to myself there.

But I was wrong.

A station for simulation

I was a little surprised standing outside the building in downtown Modena because this didn’t look like the NASA-style research facility I was expecting. However, on climbing the stairs and being presented with my first sight of the machine, any notions that this was just going to be fun ride in a souped-up video game were abandoned quickly. Stood before me was an A1GP monocoque, carefully mounted on complex electronics and special actuators, complete with real harness and carbon-fibre steering wheel. It was facing three large high definition plasma screens.

For a half a car on a motion platform, there was something about this that now seemed very real.

The A1GP simulator has been built at vast cost to allow teams and drivers to aclimatise themselves quickly with the advanced electronics and technology on the A1GP Powered by Ferrari car, introduced for the 2008/09 season. It also makes it possible to test something, in a series that has a strict ‘no testing’ policy between race events.

The aim of that is to increase competition and not waste money on an expensive practice that the public neither sees nor benefits from. It’s is normally a moot point anyway, because for environmental reasons cars are transported directly from one event to another without going back home.

However, A1GP is also all about developing young talent and allowing drivers from developing nations and with limited experience to compete on a level playing field, so any extra track time and acclimatisation drivers can do, is going to allow them to compete when the real pressure of their nation is on them at an A1GP weekend. This led to the introduction of the Friday morning rookie session in 2006/07, which has now gone a stage further and become the simulator.

The simulator has every major A1GP circuit programmed into it, and drivers can simulate every aspect of a race weekend they want to. One major part of the system that differentiates it from a moving games console is that the system outputs telemetry in exactly the same way as its real-life counter part. Gear ratios, wing and damper settings can all be trialled and tested, and graphical feedback generated to be able to give accurate accounts of the run for careful analysis.

My mouth salivates as the machine whirrs into life and is taken through a ghost lap of Gauteng’s Kyalami circuit, the track I’m going to be driving and host of the latest round of A1GP. The car lurches forward and back turns left and right, with everything looking perfect. Except there is no driver in it yet.

It turns out that this was no ghost lap, it was the actual movements and performance of Portugal’s Filipe Albuquerque, the current best driver around this virtual Kyalami.

“The teams are very serious about this,” explains Anton Stipinovich, A1GP’s lead consultant on electronic development and my host for the day. “The parts that are available on the simulator, the springs, the anti-roll bars and so on are the same ones that teams would have available for them at the track. We’ve got the proper tyre model from Michelin, we’ve got the proper engine map from Ferrari, we’ve got the electronics from Magneti Marelli, we’ve got the same vehicle dynamics, we’ve got the right aerodynamic performance. It’s a fantastic training tool and can be used on 200 tracks.”

Stipinovich is highly regarded in motor sports circles for his work on racing car electronics and simulators, having spent several years in Formula One including McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull Racing. He is also a jolly nice bloke, especially when considering he is letting a 28-year-old test a rather expensive machine.

“Some racing simulators have very big motion platforms that make drivers sick because they have so much movement,” he explained to me. “But our simulator was supposed to be a thing that the drivers could sit in for about four hours. It’s still very tiring mentally, and the concentration needed to drive electronically is much more demanding because in real life you get more feedback from the track. The screens are harder than real life on the eyes too.

“The most accurate thing about the simulator is the engine mapping, for example, when you get a chance to use the PowerBoost button you will find it is as close to reality as you will ever get.

“Our drivers are saying it’s about 60 to 70 per cent accurate when compared with real life, and that’s a huge figure let me tell you.

“The one item that drivers always say is difficult to reproduce in a simulator is braking because when you brake you get a lot of feedback from the track. We have tried to replicate this as much as we can and we have put in a lot of effects, like for example, we show smoke coming from the tyres, we give force feedback on the steering wheel.

“I am sure as we go along you will learn a lot. The first thing we have to do now is get you seated and comfortable.”

Dreams are made of this?

You know what I said earlier about Anton being a nice guy?

“It’s ok, I expected anyone with your level of experience to be as bad as you Tim,” he uttered, evaluating my performance.

Rodi Basso, Stipinovich’s partner in putting the simulator together and my data engineer, concurred. He did his best to help, taking me through the data to explain specifically why I had spun for the seventh time in the last ten minutes.

It had been an enlightening time in the car.

I have always clung on to the belief that if I had just had the necessary breaks, I would have been able to lead my native England to World Cup glory in 2006. Similarly, had I just been spotted up on stage at school by the right Hollywood mogul, it would be me acting opposite Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith. And until that moment, I always thought that it would have been possible for me to have been a motor racing star, if only I had started motor racing earlier in life.

But that illusion stood no longer. I was, as it turned out, a bit rubbish.

A normal racing driver could complete about 22 clean laps in the half hour time slot I received, setting lap after lap at blistering and consistent pace.

But I just managed three. Well, clean laps anyway. The rest of the time I spun, slid sideways, put it in the gravel, changed gear wrongly, crashed into the retaining wall, or generally made myself look slightly foolish to the ever growing simulator staff members gathering behind me.

Now, let’s focus on the good points. When I did complete a lap at pace I managed to put in a time within about nine seconds of Albuquerque, which for a complete novice which I still think is pretty good.

Despite the lack of clean running, the experience felt amazing. Changing up through the paddle-shift semi automatic gearbox was clean and precise and turning at the right time was difficult yet rewarding. Feeling the seat belts push themselves into my torso under braking felt as if it should be real, and having to carefully control my throttle input on cold tyres so as not to spin at every corner was the tightrope drivers constantly tell me about.

And boy did it feel quick, so much quicker than anything I had ever driven before. The three screens may look a bit bizarre in a still photo of the simulator, but I can assure you, you forget about that in what is a truly immersive experience. You focus solely on the central screen with the left and right screens enforcing a sensation of speed in your peripheral vision.

The car pivots and moves as you would expect and the throttle and brake pedal have the seemingly right amount of sensitivity. The engine notes change and the tyres screech when you brake too harshly.

In terms of learning a circuit, it was effective. By the end of my stint I knew where I should turn in, brake and change gear. The fact that my hands failed to heed the advice of my brain was neither here nor there. For any new driver learning a circuit, I could see how invaluable time in this machine could be. Why waste the first few laps of Friday morning on a race weekend learning the place when you could already be dialling in race set ups? If you spend a day in the simulator and it’s already mastered.

If I have any complaints, it was that it was too realistic, but I think that feedback will fall of deaf ears. It shouldn’t be easy to drive an A1GP car, whether real or otherwise, so my inability to keep it in a straight line much of the time reinforced my gladiatorial opinion of the 22 talented individuals who race for their nations at every A1GP event.

Not just for drivers

The bank of screens and computer servers in a room next to the simulator visually demonstrates that this is not just a tool for drivers, but for engineers too.

It is here that I can take the time to study my best lap (or least worst lap), and over lay it with data from other real drivers.

This is a bit of a privilege for me compared with other teams. Those nations that choose to come to the simulator are guaranteed secrecy from one another on everything they do from the technical changes they programme in and how they perform, so as not to give any advantage to the competition.

However, Stipinovich insists there is a big correlation to those who have run well in the simulator to those who have run well in the real life A1GP cars.

“I am so impressed with A1 Team Malaysia and how they used it before the start of the season for example,” he says. “They were very proactive in using the simulator, the way they do it is quite amazing and they results they got, well, I wasn’t surprised.

“When we got to the first test of the year, I said to everybody that Malaysia would be one of the best prepared teams on the grid. It was. Look at Zandvoort.

“They came here with their rookies, they came here with their drivers, and their engineer came here with a test programme.”

Looking at the data telemetry, I studied exactly how I could have improved and what I was doing wrong, and with a bit of time and concentration, I probably had the chance to knock a few seconds off my time, simply by understanding why I was making the same mistakes over and over again.

Honing ability on just one circuit, using exactly the same race timetable mirrors a weekend’s pressure characteristics. It’s not useful if you flip from one circuit to another on a whim.

Stipinovich continues: “If a team hasn’t done their preparation correctly, in other words, if they don’t do a simulation and find out the right gear ratios you could start lagging behind in sessions. If you get to the first session and you have the wrong gear ratio, that session turns into a waste of time so then you sit that out and you have to run in the next session.

“Everyone else who had their ratios right moves forward so it’s massively important for a team to hit the ground running. There is no team in the world that sees a race or a season as the start or end of the job. Constantly gathering data is important, so you go back to your notes and see what you did wrong here…”

Likewise, if the driver makes a mistake in the simulator, the best way is to also treat it like a real weekend to mirror the consequences of making a mistake. While I could press the reset button and instantaneously return to the pits for the sake of training me out of my muppet behaviour, a real driver would most likely get out of the car to study in detail what they had done, before simulating the next session that weekend.

“Teams have come back after a race weekend and tried different scenarios on what they should have done to help them learn from it better. What if on Friday they instead run different ratios, or tried soft instead of hard dampers. Maybe they shouldn’t have put that new set of tyres on in free practice and saved it for qualifying.”

Welcome to the real world

A few weeks later, I went down to the Portuguese pit to find Albuquerque and to learn what he thought of the machine. Turned out he wasn’t that proud about being nine seconds quicker than me, just amused.

“It’s very useful for getting to know the car’s controls,” he told me. “Some tracks are really accurate – Sepang for example is awesome. You can be consistent and be more focused and really pushed for times.

“Ultimately it’s a very good simulator, but it is not the real car. You can learn exactly what gear settings you should have and the shifting you need and where the bumps are on a course. You learn about the blind corners, which are key to a good lap time.

“In terms of feeling it’s slightly different, because it’s hard to get the feeling of locking the wheels whether the car is moving under braking, or whether there is oversteer exit. But that’s the difference between real life and the virtual life, you don’t quite have the feeling on your fingers.”

A1 Team Italy’s Edoardo Piscopo raved about it, saying it effectively gave him back the rookie sessions he lost when he became ineligible for them after competing in more than six races.

“They have worked hard on continually improving it,” he said. “When I first drove it felt really light but now they have added much more weight to the steering wheel and it is much more accurate.

“It is so useful to learn tracks. It gives you an advantage of about one or two sessions. When you go to a new track you know the braking points and new gears for each corner.

“You feel the downforce and the minimum speed, and you can feel how much speed you can bring into a corner. I drove the simulator in Donington, and it was really close to what we ended up doing in the test there.

“It’s not perfect, after all, it is not an actual car, but it gets really close. For example, in Zandvoort the difference between the lap times was just a couple of tenths different. It’s amazing how close it can get.

“We have tested several different solutions at Sepang with aerodynamics. We tried low and high downforce set ups which gave us some tips for the race.”

The future

Mother Nature’s delicious tapestry of changeable and variable climatic conditions combined with humans and machinery that degrade and tire mean that it will never be possible to exactly replicate what is real in a virtual world. However, the simulator comes pretty close to it, enough for the real race drivers to find it a valuable tool in their preparation, and to tell the less talented drivers (like me) where they need to improve.

It makes so much sense. Why spend thousands running a different car around a circuit to get mileage, when much less can be spent on hiring an A1GP simulator to be so much more useful?

Stipinovich, Basso and the team continually work on the simulator, and every race in real life gives them yet more information to improve its accuracy and make it even more useful for the drivers.

I would have suggested that the only other improvement needed was to include some driver aids such as traction control to give people like me a fighting chance, but it transpired that I already had them on. All of them.

The last resting place of my pride is somewhere in Italy.

Opinions expressed are those of the au