How has Simulated Racing/Driving affected your real life road driving?

Biggest impact sim racing has had IRL is realizing that any car can be fun and how much more you can do with a car than you think. I always giggle inside when someone is impressed with how fast I can take a turn even though I take it twice as fast when I'm alone and even then am still waaaaay inside the limit.

 

Are you the guy that drives me to work every morning......

 

Taught my step daughter to drive in my rig. Clutch and h shifter.... no speeding about.. just calmly driving around a street circuit.. All this before she got in the drivers seat of a real car. She passed 1st time

 

Some great replies here, some have made me laugh out loud, others resonate quite strongly with me.

So many times, glad I'm not alone.

I'd like for you to expand on this if you wouldn't mind. I'm curious as I tend to learn much better on my own than being taught.

You don't feel that you have learnt anything applicable while simracing?

This is most definitely the kind of experience I'm looking for. Luckily for me, while driving for over 20 years I've never had an accident(unlike the hundreds of deaths I've had simracing), nor a close call with a major situation. I would hope though, that if that did occur, I'd have a similar experience to yourself.

I can totally relate to this one.

Brilliant. I've had similar, but on gravel. Instinctually being able to react is a great place to be.

I do tend to drive 'hard' but not so much fast. I won't go over any speed limit more than 10% but 90 degree corners that most take at 20, i'll go through at 50 for example.
So I do push a bit at times while keeping danger to a minimum. I have to attribute this to simracing as I know all so well how easy it is to just go that little bit to far.

 

Yes useful early learning tool for my daughters.pedal graduation .out braking,smooth wheel control are some things ive noticed

 

The Skip Barber regional with cold tires, on a green track feels surprisingly similar to my rwd Ranger on icy mountain roads. I do believe RF2 helped save me some money (and headaches) a few times last winter.

 

Great reading these replies.

 

Oh same here, in my view the stuff I've "learnt" in the driving courses I've done is stuff I was already putting into practice on the road. Personally, I just don't feel anything that I can attribute specifically to racing sims has had an effect on my normal driving on the roads. Sure, I understand trail braking in the sim, so maybe you could argue that it could influence my driving skills on the road, especially when the **** hits the fan. IMO I just find that link hard to come by though.
I'd be more inclined though to read things up in, say, a Keith Code book and then go analyse what I'm doing on the roads to see what I could do differently.

I just see the road as the completely wrong place to be pushing hard and going fast and testing these skills. The skills used for the road for the most part seem unrelated to the skills used pushing to the limits, either on track or in sim. Countless incidents here in NZ with tourists on the wrong side of the road, poor surface conditions, conditions changing quickly, livestock, literal **** on the roads, etc. For me it is just a bit dodgy (not to mention the cops...) why not just go to the track.


But, if this then turns into a discussion about sim racing skills relating to what you are doing on the track, I would be all behind that XD

 

Something that always surprises me is that I've been left foot braking in sims for years (more years than I care to remember!), but if I try left foot braking in real life I have absolutely no feel/finesse at all. Switching to a load cell pedal in sims made no difference either.

I find it odd how it's second nature in a sim but in real life it feels completely wrong and alien. Why doesn't the sim experience cross over to the real world in this case?

 

And at the other end .. I can't left foot brake in a sim, I completely screw things up, I even tried for a whole day but always reverted to braking with the right foot off throttle like in a road car. Maybe as I learned to drive in real life 15 years before I even owned a computer has something to do with it.

 

I learned to drive 23 years ago. Wow that makes me feel old! I was quite late learning too, age 20. Darn, given my age away now!

I'd played plenty of racing games at that point but nothing that could really be called a sim, and then only with a game pad. I got my first wheel in 2001 and I think I probably went straight to left foot braking as it felt more natural given the 2 pedal system that had virtually zero resistance and didn't really feel anything like real pedals.

Every now and again I think I'll practice LFB in real life but after the first press of the brake I decide it's a bad idea and immediately go back to RFB before I have an accident!

 

I can't right foot brake in a sim even if my life depended on it. I'm so bad at it that it's not even funny.

I fear that with all my left foot braking in the sims that I'll have a pretty tough time learning to right foot brake when I get to take my drivers licence.

 

Hmm, I've just remembered I did a single seater track day a few years ago, had to left foot brake... and it felt perfectly natural. Meh, the human brain eh?

 

If my legs are horizontal its no problem, karts and hyperstim. Can't do it in the car or the Obutto which I've set for GT type racing.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

Totally in agreement and just to be clear, for me it's little spurts here and there. It's in places I know with good visibility and even then it's well within the car/road limits.
I like your approach in regards to the book, might be good for me to check out.

Looking back before sim racing, I'll admit I was a terrible driver so I resonate strongly here with the comments about awareness and instinct.

 

Ha, yes, I feel the same and I think it has to do with the fact that your pushing the limits in the sim (and your typical load cell pedal feels a bit different than your standard road car) and not so much IRL so the balancing act is understated IRL because your not at race speeds pushing the limits..... Does this make sense??

 

I think a lot of it could well be down to the feel of the pedal itself. I would guess that if I put in enough practice with one of the more realistic pedal sets around (the really expensive ones!) then I'd find my real life LFB would improve.

I would have thought the fact that I'm not pushing the road car as hard as in the sim would make it easier in real life, but maybe not.

 

Sim Racing has had little impact on my road driving. I have been driving for 30 years and have driven bikes , cars , trucks, tanks, personnel carriers etc etc. I had all the skills I needed before Sim racing , I could double de-clutch and clutchless shift, I could countersteer when the back end broke loose.... it's second nature, so much so that it is entirely possible to drift a Main Battle Tank round a corner with 'opposite Tiller' . There are a few things that I do in Simracing that I don't do in IRL (trail braking) but Sim racing hasn't really taught me anything I didn't know already.

Mind you, back then the Fuzz weren't about as much and speed cameras didn't exist... there were plenty of places to drive like an arse and practice and of course most cars were RWD

 

I am too young in “Sim world” (only about 4 years in Sim age) to share my experience. But like to share some of my thoughts, hope you do not mind.
I think it has to do with our brain. Today, Sim SW is pretty good. rFactor SW is very accurate in terms of Telemetry data in comparison with real car and track. With good HW setup, it can fool your brain to train and affect your real-life performance. After all, most racing drivers today do use simulator.

In terms of real life on the road, again it is all about the immersievness of your sim setup I think. An analogy would be: Table Tennis game vs real Tennis game (Table Tennis analogy to Sim, and Tennis analogy to Real-world driving). Both are official sport games now.
If one likes to bounce a ping-pong ball on the ground in tennis court, one certainly would not feel like playing a tennis game. Vice verse is true, if one likes to bounce a tennis ball on the ping-pong table, he/she would not feel the same, unless he/she makes a ping-pong table is the same size of tennis court with same surface material, etc, --- totally immersive!

 

I'm driving since 99 and simracing since 2003, i gained a little reflexes and focus but the great improvement was my endurance, it increased from 2 hours without fatigue to more than 6 hours.