Team Redline’s Dom Duhan had the one chance any sim racer dreams of – Proving himself in a professional Formula One Team simulator while being watched by professionals and journalists.
Thanks to TopGear Magazine, Dom got to try out the full motion simulator of an undisclosed Formula One team, trying to match the laptimes of racing driver Darren Turner.
His performance managed to impress as Dom was able to post competitive times quickly despite fighting motion sickness on the professional-grade simulator. In the end, Dom was a mere second slower than the Formula One drivers and Darren Turner, proving the driving talent of avid sim racers.
“It was a fantastic experience and great to meet up with a driver of Darren’s calibre, big thanks to the F1 team and Top Gear,” Dom commented. “I hope this paves the way for Sim Racing teams to become a part of F1 testing, providing thousands of hours of lap data for a fraction of the cost of running on a track.”
Dom will be sharing his experience with the VirtualR readers in an upcoming story, in the meantime you can check out Team Redline’s website where the TopGear Magazine article can be found.
Pandamasque
November 17th, 2009 at 03:15
What a surprise! A good simracer turned out to be good at simracing!
Mikkel Gram-Hansen
November 17th, 2009 at 05:00
Good stuff (and good work Dom) nice to finally see something like this done with a real simracer instead of some Playstation kiddo ;)
Shum94
November 17th, 2009 at 09:09
Way to go Dom. I hope i’ll see you in rFactor 2.
commodore
November 17th, 2009 at 15:50
Actually it’s a bit of a disappointment for me. He is a sim racer after all so I think he should have been less than a second behind.
Zenitchik
November 17th, 2009 at 16:05
Darren Turner, haven’t shared his setup
would be interesting to hear the differences between the high end sim and lets say IRacing or rFactor
henbrleape
November 17th, 2009 at 19:24
Way to go Dom! Show them the potential
pleb
November 17th, 2009 at 20:55
“Actually it’s a bit of a disappointment for me. He is a sim racer after all so I think he should have been less than a second behind.”
Yeah, because driving on your home computer, and driving on an F1 teams simulator that has forces acting upon your body, against real F1 drivers, is the same thing.
Pandamasque
November 17th, 2009 at 22:09
Forces on your body? You were not reading carefully. There’s no such thing on earth as F1 simulator with real forces acting on the body. It’s not actually possible without going anywhere. FAIL!
…and Luca Badoer
AndreasT
November 18th, 2009 at 00:35
Of course there are forces although no “real forces” you would feel in an F1 car and for sure nothing like 5g. But still it’s a full-motion system as you can see better in the pdf article, which is only 2 klicks away…
michael
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:53
> “proving the driving talent of avid sim racers”
Lol. Let’s be serious now.
You have to smile when the article basically says the guy has hardly any driving experience blah blah blah. Yes, because what he’s doing doesn’t need any and doesn’t require any great skill. D’oh.
“Slower than the great F1 driver Darren Turner” Err, WTF is he? We saw a test driver try out F1 for Ferrari this year. He’s still finishing one of the season’s earlier races. Any buffoon can be a racing driver, just lay down the cash (or have a dad called Nelson)
Being genuinely F1 standard though…that actually requires talent.
“nice to finally see something like this done with a real simracer instead of some Playstation kiddo” – Whassup Mikkel, can’t get your crappy code to run on it?
Pandamasque
November 22nd, 2009 at 16:02
Darren Turner is a works driver for Aston Martin Racing at Le Mans. He’s good.