This weekend I had the chance to take some time for a little holiday in London. One of the places I wanted to visit definitely was the F1Arcade simulation center, announced a few weeks back, but still quite unknown to the masses. I didn't manage to book my session online, so I went straight to the venue, where I found out it will officially open to the public next week. The employees were really kind to grant me the possibility to have a first view of the place and a test drive of the simulators, which still had some things to finetune. Let's take a first look at the venue. And here's the very first test drive. The game starts with a QR code to scan from the screen. You login and then your name appears on the screen. You can then select the different driving modes in the typical arcade fashion, using the steering wheel and pedals. Even if I chose Pro mode, the majority of driving aids were enabled. Force feedback was set to quite a low level, which is understandable considering the wide variety of people will have to drive. Having worked for a simulator company in the past, I know how people simply doesn't brake in these simulators, so it's nice that the put an emphasis on this during the loading screens. Some basic informations: steering system was provided by Moza pedals were from Heusinkveld motion is provided by DBox (not working in the video) opponents were driven by AI in the video it was possible to change the driving visual, but I discovered it only in the next race as it was not mentioned on the UI cars had a generic shape and official F1 liveries there was no mention to hybrid system Every simulator consists of the screen where you drive and one at the top with the livestream of the race. At the end, a summary with points is displayed. Even if damages were disabled, I had to skip a race because the car had to be "repaired", so there might be some penalty system in place. From what I understood (I'm no 100% sure about this), drivers can get points to be converted into food and drink to spend at the bar (my hamburger was very good ). The location is placed just behind St. Paul, so if you are in London it is worth to book a session.
Indeed it was not the only one, as I wrote in the first post. Unfortunately the summary mentioned only buttons for other commands, but not for this one: all the simulators were using the t-cam, but judging from the average result I can definitely say that this was the least of the problems for the average driver.
