Inside the Virtual-Racing World, Where a Forklift Driver Can Race—and Beat—the Professionals

From the August 2016 issue

For a journalist, covering a race at Monza usually involves flying to Milan, renting a small Fiat, and driving to the circuit on the edge of the city. We’ve touched down instead in Munich, where we’ll drive an Opel about 20 miles to the nondescript town of Landshut. There, in an equally unmemorable building, we find three of the most successful racing drivers in the world qualifying for the first round of the Blancpain GT Series World Championship. Not the actual series, but the iRacing version, a video-game simulation that shadows its real counterpart.

You almost certainly haven’t heard of these guys, though they’ve competed against and even beaten some famous ­racers. Bono Huis is from the Netherlands, Aleksi Uusi-Jaakkola is Finnish, and Kelvin Van Der Linde is South African. Each competes in top-flight sim racing for Team ­Redline, one of the virtual world’s most successful racing organizations. Yet this is the first time any of them has met; Huis is a ­student, Uusi-Jaakkola has a day job as a forklift driver, and, in an interesting twist, Van Der Linde is an actual racing driver ­competing as a works pilot for Audi.

More for our benefit than theirs, this trio has gathered to contest this GT3 endurance race at the headquarters of its main team sponsor, Fanatec, a manufacturer of high-end virtual-racing gear. The showroom is filled with “rigs,” or structures that look like roll cages fitted with proper race-car seats and steering wheels and pedals. Drivers face one or more high-resolution monitors, giving our surroundings the feel of a video arcade. But this is no glorified Pole Position; virtual motorsports has grown in sophistication and stature such that it is now attracting talent from the real racing world. Redline made headlines last year when it announced that it had signed Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen, who has since gone on to become the youngest-ever Grand Prix winner.

Sim racing is part of the larger trend of competitive video gaming, only recently emerged from Midwestern basements and the smoky cyber cafes of South Korea to find legitimacy as “eSports.” Last year a championship tournament in Seattle for Dota 2, an online battle-arena game, handed out more than $18 million in prizes. That’s big business, the likes of which virtual motorsports is still chasing. Online championships have been held for years, with iRacing claiming 65,000 active users worldwide. But sim racing has so far been spared the taint of professionalism by a simple absence of money, making the iRacing Blancpain GT Series novel in that it has a $25,000 prize fund. This purse is enough to draw the cream of online racing, with 1600 drivers and 400 teams entering the qualifying series last fall. Only the top 40 teams were invited to compete in the championship, which begins with this Monza race.

Audi factory driver Kelvin Van Der Linde, top left, competes against Bono Huis, bottom left, a student. That sort of thing doesn’t happen on the real GT3 grid.

Embedding ourselves proved to be a challenge. Online racing is the sort of solitary activity that, like certain other solo passions, is normally pursued in the privacy of bedrooms or dens. But our needs led Redline to gather its stars in Germany. The team competes in practically all forms of online racing, from Gran Turismo on up, and enters all the iRacing championships, including Formula 1, NASCAR, and now GT.

Although Verstappen isn’t competing today, the team is ready to race. Uusi-Jaakkola and Van Der Linde are teammates, driving a pixel-perfect Audi R8 LMS GT3. In practice, their best times at the virtual Monza track are separated by just a tenth of a second. Huis, a five-time Formula SimRacing world champion, pilots one of Redline’s other cars, a Mercedes-AMG GT3. His teammate, Christian Szymczak, competes from California, where he’s had to set his alarm for five in the morning to make the grid.

We’re surrounded by Fanatec’s expensive rigs that tilt and even pivot their seats to relay g-forces and yaw. However, none of the three drivers here actually compete with those systems switched on; they grew up in sim racing where they are used to responding to what they see rather than what they feel. We notice that both Huis and Uusi-Jaakkola also prefer to use single monitors rather than the triple array of the more expensive systems. Fanatec CEO Thomas Jackermeier says it’s possible to spend up to $25,000 on one of his company’s rigs, meaning that many customers are in their 40s or older. “Lots of the guys who want this stuff have pretty nice cars already,” he says, “or even go racing.”

You don’t need to spend seven figures to go iRacing, though. Huis, who competes on a tight budget befitting his student status, figures it takes about $500 for a decent steering wheel and $1100 for a top-spec computer. Beyond talent, it doesn’t take much to compete at the highest level here. The iRacing software is pitched as a simulator rather than a game, costing only $99 a year for the basic package that includes some cars and tracks, with others available for more money. It’s popular with both amateurs and professionals, as evinced by Audi’s Van Der Linde.

Part of sim racing’s appeal is that it gives fans the ability to compete against the sort of star driver who likes to unwind from racing with a little more racing. “I raced this NASCAR champion once,” says Uusi-Jaakkola in an understated, staccato English. “Dale Earnhardt Jr. He was on pole. I was fifth, maybe sixth. It was a road course. Lime Rock Park. I passed him. I went on to win.”

The qualifying session is broadcast live on YouTube, which confirms that online racing still has a way to go to match the real thing. The graphics are good but don’t have the perfectly rendered slickness of megabudget console games. Cars stop on the track or sometimes disappear when drivers opt out of noncompetitive laps by hitting the reset button.

The emphasis is on the modeling of the cars and their physics, so tracks are laser scanned to millimeter accuracy. Over the course of a race, the surface changes as ­virtual rubber is laid on the most heavily used lines, increasing grip. “It’s close, really close,” says Van Der Linde, who is almost uniquely qualified to compare the real with the virtual. “If there’s a big bump on the track, then it will be in the game.”

Cars are modeled with similarly obsessive focus. For the Blancpain championship, teams can choose from four GT3 cars. Besides the Mercedes-AMG GT3 and the Audi R8 LMS GT3, there’s a BMW Z4 and a McLaren MP4-12C. “When the R8 was launched in ­iRacing, I still had a setup sheet from a test session we’d done the previous week,” says Van Der Linde, “so I put it into the game, absolutely identical, and it was a winning setup out of the box.” Van Der Linde raced the real R8 GT3 at the real Monza last year, and his best iRacing lap is within half a second of his real time.

Qualifying takes place just 15 minutes before the start of the three-hour race. Uusi-Jaakkola qualifies the R8 in a disappointing 19th place. Huis does better, placing the AMG GT3 ninth. The pack is tight; the two cars are within two-tenths of a second. But the race is somewhat anticlimactic from our vantage point, with near silence in the room itself.

Van Der Linde and Huis are driving the first stints, staring intently at their monitors and wearing headsets to talk to other team members who are acting as spotters and crew chiefs. There’s some mumbled talk over the team’s communication channel, punctuated by louder swearing in both Finnish and English as things go wrong—or possibly right. But the most noise comes from the ceaseless clacking of the gear­change paddles. We feel more like voyeurs than spectators.

The racing is surprisingly sensible. You might imagine that a lack of physical risk or repair bills would create the sort of consequence-free environment where anything goes. The reality is anything but, as there’s a penalty system that gives competitors demerits for making contact with another car or for transgressing the track limits. Much of the practice session seems dedicated to discovering just where those are. Tallying enough demerits triggers an automatic black flag, and online race officials also scrutinize controversial moves with the ability to award further penalties. The largest outburst of the day comes from Huis after he collides lightly with another car, earning four penalty points.

The result is a race with lots of strategy and relatively few passing moves from the equally matched pack, certainly for the cautious first hour. Fuel conservation is also critically important, causing Uusi-Jaakkola to spend a decent chunk of his first stint drafting other cars rather than fighting for position. The drama of real endurance racing does play out, with Uusi-Jaakkola and Van Der Linde dropping as low as 29th after a 15-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane before fighting their way back up to finish 11th. The Mercedes, running even higher, crashes passing a backmarker and suffers damage, finishing 15th.

It strikes us that there needs to be a way to simulate a fixture of real GT3 racing: the kamikaze Russian billionaire who wants to treat the whole thing like a demolition derby. As it is, there are few crashes, and the ones we do see are, frankly, disappointing. A BMW Z4 half-rolls as it leaves the track sideways and then hangs for a moment in midair. Impact modeling is clearly considered frivolous at this point. If it’s explosions you seek, play Call of Duty.

Unquestionably, sim racing is more fun for participants than spectators, and this will only become more true as the simulators evolve. The next big thing, according to Fanatec’s Jackermeier, is virtual reality, with drivers wearing headsets to produce a far more immersive experience. “We’ve had people try it and then try to take their racing gloves off when they get out of the car,” he says.

With sim racing’s low risk and high reward, it’s easy to see the appeal. Even if spectating isn’t so different from watching real motorsports on television, it certainly beats watching someone make a ­wizard chase an ogre through a castle. And it’s refreshing to have ­discovered that rarest of things: an almost pure meritocracy. When forklift drivers can go head to head with works racers and beat NASCAR champions, that’s good racing.

Keeping it real

Ever since Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo game made its debut on PlayStation in 1997, software developers have been making big claims for the accuracy of their modeling. Nowadays, they are closer to reality than they’ve ever been.

In the case of iRacing, the car models are based on either a manufacturer’s original CAD files or laser scanning. Scans are done with the bodywork both on and off, then augmented by using thousands of photographs of every visible surface to create scalable textures. The models start with millions of polygons, the basic building block of 3-D modeling, and are reduced to around 130,000 polygons for the cars you see racing.

iRacing’s virtual physics are even more comprehensive. The simulation mirrors many variables, including the size and shape of the suspension components and how they interact, with the solutions of this “multi-body model” calculated up to 360 times a second. If a chassis setting can be changed on a real car, it’s usually possible to do so on its virtual equivalent. Tire modeling considers the outer dimensions, the construction, and the compound, with wear factoring in according to track temperatures and driving styles. There’s even a simulation of the way the track “rubbers in” as material is shed, complete with marbles off the racing line.