Years ago a racer tried to use the guardrail to get a faster drive through the turn.
He crashed.
At the after race interview he said: "Well you could do it in the video game!
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Maybe we have better video games now.
The value of a virtual chicane
iRacing
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Kelly Crandall | 10 hours ago
Steve Myers and the team at iRacing knew NASCAR was going to have to do something with the Daytona road course. Even before NASCAR entertained the idea of an additional chicane, Myers and company were already playing around with ideas.
How? Why? Simple:
Myers jumped on his iRacing sim and drove the track himself, and found that the speeds and braking points were less than ideal.
“When I was driving the Cup car, I was having to start braking at the start/finish line to make it into Turn 1 without being completely out of control,” Myers explained to RACER. “So right off the bat, we knew that something was going to have to change.
“But honestly, we also figured out before we heard they went to the high downforce package that if they had stayed with the low downforce, I think they would have done something coming out back onto NASCAR Turn 4. It was scarier to go into that backstretch chicane than it was Turn 1, in my opinion, because you were over 200 miles per hour going into that chicane with the way it was configured with the low downforce package. When we heard they were doing the high downforce package that immediately was like, OK, we don’t necessarily have to worry about that chicane too much.”
NASCAR announced on July 8 that the three national series will run on the Daytona road course. Initially, the course layout was the same 12 turns used during the Rolex 24 each January. By July 30, officials had decided there would be the addition of a chicane off oval track Turn 4, leading to the start/finish line. And, NASCAR Cup Series teams will use the high downforce aero package.
iRacing had laser-scanned Daytona into its simulator quite some time ago, which helped limit the amount of work needed to add a chicane. For instance, when NASCAR went to running the Roval at Charlotte, iRacing had to scan the track multiple times because it was a new course, and the layout underwent numerous changes before a final design emerged.
With Daytona already on the iRacing platform, all Myers needed to do was get the technical data to add in the chicane. That is where Ben Kennedy came in. Kennedy, NASCAR’s vice president of racing development, has been a big advocate of iRacing and has helped the team many times over the years.
“I said, Ben, the Cup guys, some of them are going to get simulator time, but we know that the Truck and Xfinity guys aren’t going to get any time in simulators, most likely,” said Myers “The only option they’re going to have to practice for this race is iRacing. He immediately got us all the technical data they had come up with to put the chicane together. He gave me that (on a) Sunday, and by Tuesday evening, we had released it onto the member’s site.”
iRacing has the advantage in its ability to iterate different ideas and concepts for what NASCAR needs. Plus, iRacing can immediately create an idea and and jump into a virtual car and drive it, which is what Myers and Greg Hill, the vice president of product development, were doing before an official announcement of the new chicane. But Myers believes that had there been more time, iRacing could have come up with some ideas that might have potentially worked out better.
“I’ll be honest with you, I still think this chicane is going to be a little sketchy when they actually start racing, because they’re so close to that inside wall when they get to the apex of the corner,” said Myers. “Any kind of failure or incident that goes into that braking zone, there’s going to be some impacts with that inside wall.
“Yeah, Ben got us the data, and we immediately got it plotted out because, from our perspective, it was just figuring out where they were going to put the curbs. Since they have that data precisely mapped to give us those measurements, we were able to turn it around very quickly.”
Myers knows drivers have already been using iRacing to practice. They might not be talking about it given the cat and mouse games in NASCAR and no driver wanting to give away what they’re doing, but there have been plenty of laps logged.