Time for a little Sim Racing.

Project Cars 2.

Being a car nut I have been in to car racing games since Need for Speed on the Sega Saturn. Over the years I have drifted from console to console but ultimately stuck with Microsoft’s Xbox. For many at the time the racing sim game of choice on the Xbox was Forza Motorsport. Although I did briefly try the Grand Turismo platform I never got on with it like I did with Forza, the game physics just felt a bit odd to me. For me I always used a game pad, mainly because I didn’t have the room to setup a sim style rig. Roll on several years and E-Racing has become a massive thing, especially during this year with people forced to stay at home to protect against the spread of COVID.

Now over the last few years my old Alienware laptop has been slowly dying of old age and I’ve kept putting off replacing it until recently. Now on a modern (for 5 minutes at least) machine with the latest RTX card I’ve been exploring the world of PC sim racing. I’ve downloaded a few titles, Assetto, Project Cars 2, Dirt 2 to name a few. The first thing that strikes me about all these games is the higher level of detail compared to the console games, but then I guess that is to be expected when most are designed on PC’s. When it comes to game play on console sims I nearly always option for the behind the car view, just so I can see what the car is doing and more of the road ahead. As I’ve learnt over the last year of watching some online sim events, nearly all use the cockpit or drivers seat view, obviously it gives more added realism, but with the addition of a wrap around or large screen and a driving seat with wheel and pedals it must really immerse you. With VR really taking off in the world of sim games I thought it was time to give it a go myself. A phone call to my pal Jonny later and we booked ourselves into Rush VR at the Milton Keynes Xscape Centre.

Arriving at Rush VR you are greeted by a two car VR sim rig setup with optional motion enhanced seats. The game of choice by Rush VR was Project Car 2, which handily enough for me was a game I was starting to get to grips with on the new gaming rig at home. We paid for an initially 30 minutes which roughly equated to 3 races at 4 laps long. Rush VR run a weekly or monthly competition where you have to set your best time on a specific circuit (for us was the Redbull Ring) whilst racing against the person in the other sim rig. You’re fastest lap time then gets taken and put on a top gear style lap time board with everyone else who options to try it. Then at the end of the month or week the top 4 times are awarded a £10 voucher to spend at Rush VR. We however decided to start on a familiar track, (Sliverstone GP) which luckily for us was one of the few tracks as a option to choose as this copy of Project Cars 2 is designed for arcade type setups where it I guess tries to avoid giving you too many options and then missing the multiplayer link up timing out. So with this in mind when it came to choosing cars we were again only given 3 options, a Mclaren F1 GT, a Formula X car and a little formula ford type car, which on the tracks available would be very slow. So we both go for the GT and I set about my first time racing with VR. The first thing that strikes me once the car has loaded up is my arms, stay with me here. In my head I know my arms are holding the sim wheel but for some reason looking down at my arms in the VR rig and seeing them in a full race suit holding a race wheel seems mental. With no real practice time or qualifying its straight in to a race with bots set at a fairly easy level I’d say. The thing I really struggled with when we got going, which Jonny picked up on was braking harder and later. Although I was braking late I clearly wasn’t putting anywhere near enough pressure into the brakes. Once I had made a mental note of that I started to get to grips with racing from the view of the drivers seat rather than from outside behind the car which I was used to. I should mention that the equipment of choice there from what I could work out seemed to be the Logitech G290 Wheel and pedals. Back to the racing, the issue with running the in car view in my opinion on a normal TV screen is there’s so much car structure often in the way, and although there is often a button you can press to quickly look over one side or the other, you can’t keep doing that throughout a race. You also can’t turn the drivers head to look in to the corner like you would naturally do in real life, although in Project Cars this does happen slightly on the helmet cam view. By the time that first race had finished I felt a lot more comfortable using that view, no thanks in short to the VR I’m sure.

This is how the sim rigs used to look, they are now side by side and surrounded with a goal post truss with projectors on.

The next race was to be our chance to set a lap time at the RedBull Ring to see if we could get anywhere near the lap times on the leaderboard. A big ask for only our second ever go on the rig but never the less we began the race. A bit of luck was to be on our side with the car having to be exactly the same as the previous race but ultimately we didn’t know the circuit really at all so it was to be more or a voyage or discovery than anything. By lap 4 or 4 we started to get our eye in and set a couple of times split by a second and around mid table on the leaderboard. The final race was back at Sliverstone in the Formula X cars. Neither of us had driven these before, and coming from GT cars we both preceded to brake way to early for nearly every corner on the first lap. The view from the open cockpit was stunning I felt, I was relying on the rev indicator for changing gears as none of the rigs sadly had headphones so it was often hard to determine whos car needed to change gear if we were close to each other. That aside having the extra grip and downforce did make the race very enjoyable with the knowing that you could chuck the car in to the corners at silly speeds and it would stick, most of the time..All to soon the race was over and so was our first 30 minutes. After we headed for a quick lunch and chat about the experience before we would head back for our final half an hour.

Once we had wolfed down some of Wagamamma’s finest noodles we headed back in and decided with the limited car and track options that we would stick with Sliverstone and just rotate between the Formula X car and the GT. Once we had come to the final race Jonny asked about the limited car selection and why there were no other car options. The Rush VR operator then explained that actually all the cars in the game were available, its just laid out this way to, again speed up multiplayer linking and give you 3 different levels of performance. That being said he did then go in to the game settings and allow us to choose any car from the game which was cool of him. So for the final race it was Porsche GT3 RS’s at Silverstone, which was an eye opener coming from the Formula X cars and the higher powered GT car. The final lap came, again well to quickly, although maybe not quickly enough for some eh Jonny…

This experience really has gained another champion for VR in myself. The way you are visually immersed, the graphics and to an extent the seat motion really brings out the best in the game, in our case Project Cars 2. Coming back to the seat motion, we were pretty divided on this. Jonny really didn’t feel it brought much to the game as these particular motion rigs were a few years old and didn’t really do a great job of keeping up with the physics of the game. I must admit in the slow corners it did seem to over compensate which did feel a little odd. Once the car was at speed I actually didn’t mind it and thought it did an ok job. A chat to the guys reveled that these motion rigs were about £9000 each, and although they would love to have more they just couldn’t afford them. This is fair enough I think for a small independent company who has to cater for all types of gamer from the casual to the experienced sim racer. I’m sure there are motion rigs out there that cost double, even triple and will easily keep up with the physics of the toughest sim racers but its just not financially viable for such a small company who doesn’t specialize in just sim racing.

Overall a very enjoyable experience and one I look forward to visiting again in the near future. So no small surprise now that my search history is now filled with VR headsets, sim rigs and the cost of extended a house.