TTAC Reader Pits Simulated MX-5 Against the Real Deal [with Video]

Ur-Turn
by Ur-Turn

My company, Force Dynamics, builds full-motion driving simulators. They work by tilting you as the simulated vehicle corners or accelerates, so your brain is tricked into feeling lateral or longitudinal accelerations.

Sometimes people who watch our machines in action say, “This is moving way too much!” So when we started racing a Mazda Miata in the ChumpCar World Series, I decided to conduct an experiment.



We wrote an accelerometer application for Android (the existing ones weren’t useful due to their lack of adjustable damping) and mounted it in the car during my stint. Later, I put the same device on our motion platform, and recorded the same section of Watkins Glen in iRacing.

The result: a comparison of the forces you feel while driving a race car with the forces you feel while driving our motion systems. The phone, like your inner ear, can’t tell the difference between being accelerated or tilted. What you see on the phone in each half of the video is what I was feeling in the real car and in the simulator.

How do the two experiences compare? Practicality limits the simulator’s sustained force to about .6 g. Luckily, your perception is enhanced a bit: in the simulator, the force keeping you in the seat gets lower as you tilt, whereas in real life that force is always 1 g, so you feel more “oomph” for a given load in the simulator than you do in real life. There’s also a psychological component. You’re seeing yourself cornering, and you’re getting other secondary cues, too: in the 401cr, your rate of rotation; vibration; sound and fury.

How do the two differ? Well, the real car is easier: your positional awareness is better, and the onset cues are sharper, so it’s easier to read the car on turn-in. Those differences aside, however, I was almost immediately comfortable making the transition to real driving. Shifting, braking, cornering, and handling the car on the limit all made nearly direct transitions to the track; for example, I was immediately comfortable holding the car at small slip angles through long, fast corners, because it behaved exactly like I expected it to.

What this means is while the simulator can’t fully match the sustained accelerations of a real car, the overall feel can be very good, and a high-quality motion platform can help immensely in the transition from simulator to track.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Submitted by David Wiernicki. You may know him as B&B member PeriSoft in the comments.

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  • Signal11 Signal11 on Jul 21, 2015

    Two words: that is super cool.

  • PeriSoft PeriSoft on Jul 21, 2015

    Hey guys - I'm the guy from the article there (and the Chump in the car). If anyone has any questions, fire away! As for the ones already asked... yeah, it's more expensive than a Chump Car, though I have to say it's probably not THAT much more than all the costs of a few guys running Chump for a couple of years. As for pricing, think about a 5-series. Not the one with pleather and manual mirrors; the one you'd actually drive. So yeah, it's not super cheap. But like I said, if you take running costs into consideration, it starts to look reasonable again, especially if you're comparing it to something like running SCCA regionals: Good luck pulling that off (in most any class) for under fifty grand a year. And then there's the thing I tell people on YouTube: You can crash a simulator more than once!

    • See 5 previous
    • Ryoku75 Ryoku75 on Jul 21, 2015

      @Ryoku75 I'm surprised you guys don't lease pre-built units. Not complaining though, I prefer the old "buy here, pay here, enjoy" formula.

  • MaintenanceCosts People who don't use the parking brake when they walk away from the car deserve to have the car roll into a river.
  • 3-On-The-Tree I’m sure they are good vehicles but you can’t base that on who is buying them. Land Rovers, Bentley’ are bought by Robin Leaches’s “The Rich and Famous” but they have terrible reliability.
  • SCE to AUX The fix sounds like a bandaid. Kia's not going to address the defective shaft assemblies because it's hard and expensive - not cool.
  • Analoggrotto I am sick and tired of every little Hyundai Kia Genesis flaw being blown out of proportion. Why doesn't TTAC talk about the Tundra iForce Max problems, Toyota V35A engine problems or the Lexus 500H Hybrid problems? Here's why: education. Most of America is illiterate, as are the people who bash Hyundai Kia Genesis. Surveys conducted by credible sources have observed a high concentration of Hyundai Kia Genesis models at elite ivy league universities, you know those places where students earn degrees which earn more than $100K per year? Get with the program TTAC.
  • Analoggrotto NoooooooO!
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