F1 Simulators Revealed

Racecar Engineering has posted an article online about Formula 1 driving simulator technology at an unnamed F1 team. The team's representative quipped, "Not everyone is as open as Red Bull." (And wouldn't it be rich if it actually was Red Bull?)


Much of interest, including that the sim is produced by Dutch company Cruden BV whose chief technology officer is Ruud van Gaal, author of the open-source driving simulation Racer, and it uses software based on Racer.

Is it coincidence, I wonder, that none of the sim racing titles currently available began with a specific intention to supply Formula 1? Or that those that do are the most open and most extensible? After all, rFactor, with the largest and most vibrant community of any, has a well-documented history within almost half of all Formula 1 teams (actually, more correctly, rFactor-PRO(4) does).

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It's hard to imagine that 25 years ago, when Geoff Crammond first released his Formula 3 Championship game, REVS, for the BBC Micro, he realised that he would be influencing a generation of video games, which ultimately would find its way to the very pinnacle of the sport. But, if you trace a timeline from REVS, through Crammond's GP2, 3 and 4 grand prix series, to Papyrus' venerable Grand Prix Legends, you quickly appreciate the combined role they played in inspiring Racer, rFactor and Formula 1 simulation in general. Ultimately, you might expect that, as time moves on, popular sim racing titles will move ever closer to Formula 1 but, in terms of sim racing, the opposite is true - Formula 1, over time, has moved closer to its consumer equivalent than many would have you believe.