Williams has found useful synergy between the engineering requirements of real world motorsport and Esports, which can help prepare young engineers for racing. Zak Mauger/Motorsport Images
The idea of an “engineer” in a virtual world might seem baffling at first but, as with driver and car prep, the reasons behind it are straightforward.
“With anything that’s extremely competitive, you need as many tools and people on the case as possible to efficiently find every advantage you can,” says Campbell. “It’s possible, but it requires a lot of work for a driver to converge on setups and they might not have the skills to use the software and the tools available in order to exploit these advantages that they might never come across.
“So it takes an engineer that has experience with data analysis and the tools they need to extract data from the driver running, then sweep through it, working with the driver — who might also pick up things that the engineer might not notice — and then try different things when the driver’s complaining about something or saying the car can be improved in a certain way.
“It’s the engineer’s expertise that can tell them what sort of setup change and direction they can go in. That’s not something the driver might know unless they have so much experience with setup changes.”
The virtual world also gives engineers — either working exclusively in the virtual world, or preparing for the real world — more time and space to figure out solutions.
“In real life, often the engineer has to make informed decisions on what not to look into, and to decide just based on their own experience, different aspects of the car to ignore or keep the same while they try and converge on a precise setting on a different aspect of the car,” Campbell says. “While in sim racing, you can basically sweep through all of these things because you have as much time as the drivers are willing to spend online.”
That being said, for drivers, the idea of “just pressing the reset button” feels like less of a luxury.
“Even just the process of resetting the lap if you make a mistake or crash still takes time — the time it takes to reset, but also the time it takes to start that lap over,” explains Cassill. “If you’re doing that, not even on a warmup, on a run change that you make in the car so that they can compare the data after the fact, you’re trying to get a clean lap for every single change.
“If you keep making mistakes or if you keep crashing, you’re kind of muddying up the data and resetting and that time compounds on itself. Just like any line of work — racing isn’t really that special when you’re trying to think of time over productivity, right? Just like anything, you get to the end of your shift and you’re like, ‘Man, have two more runs to get through — where did we lose that time?’ So I always try to be as efficient as possible in my feedback and how I get up to speed.
“To me it’s very similar to the final hour of a practice session. It’s like a two-minute drill for a quarterback. I try to approach the sim sessions as seriously as I would a practice session and be as efficient and diligent as possible.”
Because saving time, ultimately, is what results on the racetrack are all about unless you race in IMSA which is known for juggling and penalizing so as to screw you out of anything which you gained as the result of hard work during a race. IMSA wants everyone to "be equal" and everyone to get a participation trophy since competition is bad.........according to the IMSA liberals.
The glaring example is IMSA holding the leader in the pits until they are so far behing that someone else wins the race instead of those who did it better.(Daytona 24) Another example is presenting the winners trophy months after a race is completed (24 Hours Lemans) , while liberal IMSA officials decide which IMSA liberal that IMSA thinks should have won.
https://www.tamparacing.com/forums/a...w-you-out.html (6,000 views)
Most people believe that by competing, everything gets better for everyone.
Liberals believe that it is unfair to be better than anyone else and that only liberals are allowed to determine which liberal is allowed to be better.
IMSA liberals believe that endless hours of pit stop practice is unfair to teams who did not practice at all..
.and the teams who had faster pit stops "unfairly stole a win away from it's rightful owners."
Liberals want EQUITY OF RESULTS and NOT EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY TO HAVE SUCCESS,
where those who do something better are rewarded for their efforts at achieving more and better results.