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Bring The Race Track To You |
| For most of you visiting this site you probably have a great passion for cars and maybe for racing too. Although people can start racing at any age most of us don't have the means to actually go out to a real race track and put our own cars at risk. Although we all have the need for speed it's just it's just not feasible for everyone to suit up and go racing.
I was recently at world famous Bruce Nomura's shop and he showed me a Gran Turismo 4 simulator that he had built. I played it for about half an hour and man I was impressed. I couldn't believe how real the vehicle felt and how in the right conditions it feels like you can really improve your driving skills. Unfortunetly I don't have pics of his setup but his is very professional and takes up a whole room.
I know a lot of the hard-core guys are saying that there is nothing compared to the real thing but the simulators out these days are getting very realistic. These companies are using actual GPS data to recreate real life tracks so the track is as detailed as possible. The tracks have all the small ups and downs and left and rights found on the real life version.
Vehicles can be tweaked to perform any way you want them by adjusting suspension, cambers, limited slips, tire pressure, horsepower etc.
Who knows if using a simulator will really help you at the track but in my opinion I think that it will be very helpful. If your goal is to be serious and try to beat your track time every time it will teach you how to line up the car correctly, braking force to use and what speeds and gear to be in. Of course there are a few things that the simulator can't give you (that i've seen yet) such as rev matching etc. |
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How do you bring on the realism? |
| How do you bring on the realism? The best way to get a real feel for the game is to have a steering wheel with foot pedals at the very minimum. I decided to take an old Driving Force steering wheel and make my own sit down system. It was very easy and took about 30-45 minutes to build using only 3 8 foot 2x4's. I then took a removable seat from my Toyota and put it in place. Within an hour I had a fun system to work with. My buddy doubted me but after he tried it out he wouldn't get off of it. |
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| At first I had hooked up my PS2 with Gran Turismo 4. I set my track record at Tsukuba with the concept NSX-R at 1:02 flat and my buddy tried hard to beat it, but he never did :). I thought Gran Turismo 4 was the most realistic simulator out there but then a few of our forum members turned me on to some PC games that are just as realistic and actually more fun because they have online capabilities. I will talk about those later on in this article. |
GT Cockpit by Sparco and Logitech available at http://www.gtcockpit.com |
The Playseat available at Walmart, Best buy etc.
http://www.walmart.com |
And the King of them all from
http://www.hyperstimulator.com |
Driving Force Pro by Logitech |
Logitech® MOMO® Racing |
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The Simulators |
| I say simulators because although these are on gaming systems they are technically simulators. The console version are very fun but you have to buy them. Gran Turismo 4 is for PS2 and Forza is for the Xbox. Both of these games are very good. For the PC I found two great simulators that are actually free to play. If you like them you can purchase a license to give you more cars and tracks. You can't beat free and you can play online with other players 24/7. |
Gran Turismo 4 for Play station 2 |
Forza for Xbox |
Live For Speed |
Live For Speed. This simulator is extremely fun. You can download it for free from their site at http://www.liveforspeed.net/ . With the free version you get 1 race track and 3 cars to choose from. You can tweak the cars as you please. You can also play online versus other players via their servers. If you find you do like the game you can purchase a license key for $25 from their site which will give you access to many more cars and tracks. It's the most fun we've had so far for a free item. It's only a 15MB download. This one gets an A+. |
GTR "FIA GT Racing" |
The next simulator is GTR. I played it and it has all the bells and whistles of real life. You can hear people talking in the pits etc. It is very detailed.
SimBin Development has released a new demo of GTR - FIA GT Racing Simulation, allowing you yo try out this racing game which contains 10 officially licensed real world tracks, 68 officially licensed team specific GT and NGT cars, two completely different game modes (simulation and arcade) and multiplayer with LAN and Internet support.
It is a 210MB download. Feel free to try it by getting it at their site.
http://www.10tacle.com/gtr-game/ |
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