I’ve dreamed all my life of driving a Formula One car. But I never dreamed that when it finally happened I would drive it to a room hidden in an anonymous industrial estate on the outskirts of Bristol in the west of England.
It started exactly as I imagined, exactly as I’ve seen it on TV a thousand times: clinging tightly to a carbon fiber tub that hugged my hips, grabbing a butterfly ruffle adorned with brightly colored buttons. Pirelli stands on my knuckles as I look down the track. A voice crackling in my helmet: “Radio check.”
“I’m listening to you.” I have a relentless, industrial-powered drone in my ears, the sound of a 1.5-liter V6 turbocharger idling at 5000 rpm. “Okay, you’re about to leave,” the voice says. “It’s best to put the accelerator on for the first four gears. Otherwise, all you get is skating. “
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“Good.”
Full Disclosure: I’ve always found driving games endlessly boring. No matter how sophisticated their answers, no matter how realistic their images, they are a poor substitute for reality.
No one has ever given me, not even for a moment, the quiet satisfaction, the simple joy I have of driving a real car on real roads in the real world. Even when this trip has been nothing more difficult than going to the shops for a morning coffee.
However, the Dynisma DMG-1 simulator is different.
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All these seat experts who say that current F1 cars are too easy to drive? They don’t know what they’re talking about
It may look like high-end gaming hardware, but the Dynisma DMG-1 is a serious vehicle development tool. An improved version of what I’m driving, since its installation in Maranello in mid-2021, has been helping the Ferrari F1 team to perfect the dynamic performance of the scarlet F1-75 Grand Prix cars that Charles drives with great prestige this year. Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr.
Simulators are nothing new in F1, especially since teams in recent years have been restricted to a handful of days of actual test sessions on the track. So what makes Dynasma different from the rest? And different from any driving game you’ve ever experienced?
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First of all, speed. “Our simulator has a latency of three to five milliseconds,” says Dynisma CEO Ash Warne, “while our competitors have a latency of 15 to 50 milliseconds.”
Latency is the delay between a simulator system that records an input, either from digitized externalities such as the road surface, tires or suspension, or from the driver in the form of steering, braking and acceleration, and then generates a relevant and precise movement output for the driver to experience. It’s the fault of all driving simulators, whether you’re at work for a Formula One team or sitting at home trying to ride the Mount Panorama at Gran Turismo 7.
Warne says Dynisma’s ultra-fast motion generators mean its simulators can be made to accurately replicate the dynamics of real-world F1 cars. “From asking our motion platform to indicate oversteer and to feel that it takes between three and five milliseconds,” he says. “It’s imperceptible.”
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And it’s not just the F1 machinery that benefits. Putting a wheel on the sidewalk and on the grass at the McPhillamy Park exit can make your teammates laugh as your digitally rendered 911 GT3 sinks into the sand of the kittens and bounces off the impact barrier. In real-life racing, the consequences of bad weather and misjudgment can be much more significant.
“If you have a latency of 50 milliseconds or more in a simulator, that can increase the driver’s reaction time by 50 percent, which in the context of an elite athlete is ridiculous,” Warne says. “There is no other athlete training where you would tolerate forcing your performance to be 50 percent worse on the training tool.”
But it’s not just speed. The bandwidth of the Dynisma system, which up to 100 Hz or more on all axes is five times better than any other system, means that it can put vibrations and movements through its platform that contain more information than other simulators. “When you drive it, you can easily see why it’s relevant,” Warne says. “Every time you walk down a curb or a strip of noise, for example, you feel the vibrations.”
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Right now, though, I’m just trying to get my eye-hand coordination to the point where I can place the front tires somewhere near the tops of the curves approaching me at a bewildering speed.
I’m driving a digital avatar of a 2019 generic F1 car, its acceleration, braking, grip levels and steering weight are accurately reproduced. Just keeping up with the sheer pace of things is exhausting.
I remember the time when I tested a McLaren Senna at Silverstone, thinking about leaving the Abbey-Farm left-right curve at the end of the 200km / h start-to-finish straight, flat in the quarter, which I would never have connected a couple of apexes so quickly. When I got out of the car, I had felt like a racing god.
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Then I learned that Lewis Hamilton had gone through there in eighth gear the year before on his qualifying lap for the British Grand Prix.
All these seat experts who say that current F1 cars are too easy to drive? They don’t know what they’re talking about. And this is only in terms of getting your brain, your eyes, your hands, and your feet up to date with the speed with which things are going, no matter how physically brutal it is.
Maximum braking loads of 5 g are common. How do you feel? It looks like driving a car against a wall at 16 mph. How to have a mini car accident every lap, says Mark Webber.
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No simulator can replicate the loads g (sustained or not) you get from an F1 racer. But what the Dynisma simulator can do is make your drivers feel like the real-world car that has been set up to replicate will respond to any particular input. Action, reaction. In almost real time.
Beyond feeling a little understeer deliberately started in the second-speed to low-speed laps and the contraction of the tail if it made me too ambitious with the throttle at the exit, my F1 avatar felt totally nailed to the track .
At no point, not even on the eighth-speed curves, did I approach the digitally defined limits of aerodynamic and mechanical grip, that mysterious event horizon on the edge of the dynamic envelope of an F1 car that only the best pilots in the world explore with confidence.
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I had a better idea of the level of feedback from the DMG-1 driving what Ash Warne described as a generic GT3 mid-engine racer with tires with grip levels roughly halfway between a performance road tire and a slick of race and a happy tail chassis. up.
My awkward braking on the GT3 avatar: I struggled to accurately modulate my brake inputs without the correlated factors of g loads on my body and inner ear, would result in what looked exactly like a wheel lock later, my bum feels the tail break instantly to the left or right, depending on the direction of the corner and the slope of the track.
Through the fast corners I could feel the tires pounding the edge of the grip through the steering and the seat, and I could feel the rear drop if I wasn’t careful with the accelerator to keep the car balanced. Once, under the brakes, I clearly felt the left front wheel lock, a touch of the suspension, and a pull on the steering wheel.
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The carbon tub broke and bounced if it took too high a sidewalk for a chicanery. Passing wide along the sawtooth sidewalks of a corner exit produced a tremor in the direction and seat of my pants.
Aside from the lack of g-forces, I found it surprisingly real, the sensations very similar to the ones I experienced driving both the Mercedes-AMG GT and the Lamborghini Huracan GT3 a couple of years ago.
The carbon tub broke and bounced if it took too high a sidewalk for a chicanery
Dynisma was founded in 2017 by Warne, who previously directed simulator development efforts at both the Ferrari and McLaren F1 teams. His leadership team includes Nik Garrett and James Golding, both of whom also worked on developing simulators for the Ferrari F1 team, and mechanical engineer Matt Bell, who led the jet engine development teams. Rolls-Royce.
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Building simulators that help make Ferrari F1s go faster is glamorous. But the Dynisma team believes that building simulators that can help manufacturers build better road cars is a much more profitable business. Especially in the current era of electric vehicles.
As more and more vehicles have almost silent electric motors with almost identical power and torque curves and batteries that weigh the same, along with autonomous control systems with almost identical response mechanisms, even subtle differences in driving, the handling and the NVH will be converted. most notable. And that’s where Dynisma comes in, says Warne.
To get an idea of how a Dynisma simulator optimized for road car testing could be used in the vehicle development process, the screens on the screens around me are replaced by a digital replica of an area of typical special surface tests in a test field.
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And while the interior projected on the screens looks like a Volkswagen Golf, as it was, a bit confusing when driving the digital GT3, Warne says the DMG-1’s carbon fiber tub is now an avatar for a large sedan. rear-wheel drive.
He won’t tell me what it is. “What size wheels?” I ask. “Eighteen inches,” he admits.
I drive at 60 km / h on embedded metal strips ranging from 5 mm to 20 mm in height, on small slopes and ledges like the ones you find on the concrete slab …