I’ve never lapped Barcelona’s Formula 1 track while gripping the wheel as tightly as I do now F1.
The deep rumbling sound and the vibrations that shake the cockpit as the left wheels touch the curb on the straight up to Turn 9 run overwhelm your senses.
Even though a lot has been said about the brutality and speed of driving an F1 car over the years, nothing can quite convey how time flies by when you’re on the edge.
The milliseconds your mind uses to decide how near the pinnacle you got when you turned in have taken excessively lengthy.
In point of fact, I’m far from Barcelona. Driving what is touted as the most realistic simulator on the market, I am in an industrial unit outside of Bristol.
It is thought that Dynisma’s DMG-1 simulator is the second most realistic simulator in the world.
Only Dynisma’s custom-made official Ferrari sim can beat it. Dynisma designed it specifically for the Maranello team. It is an established business.
When discussing realism in racing simulators, graphics and car handling are frequently the focus. Is it appealing, and can I compete effectively against the AI or my teammates?
Graphics, on the other hand, fall to the bottom of the priority list when it comes to simulators, or motion generators, as Dynisma’s founder and CEO Ash Warne prefers to refer to them.
Its latency, or the speed at which information about the car’s actions can be relayed to the driver in order for him to respond, is what makes it a truly useful tool for both drivers and teams that use it.
If a handling model’s rear wheels step out and lose traction, but the driver is unable to react quickly enough, the car will spin out of control.
This information feedback needs to be processed and sent to the driver in milliseconds rather than tenths of a second.
In the past, a latency of 20 to 50 milliseconds was considered acceptable.
However, the DMG-1 has gone one step further by reducing latency to less than five milliseconds, which is ten times better than some of the other simulators currently on the market.
Warne states, “It’s a really important parameter.”
Before starting Dynisma in 2017, he was a senior vehicle dynamics engineer at McLaren, where he led the simulator team and worked on Ferrari’s previous generation model.
The simulator is a system that uses all of the senses to bombard the driver. However, in the end, the goal of any racing simulator, particularly high-performance racing simulators like F1, is to get the driver to behave in the same manner as they would in the real car.
However, you need a really high-end motion system like our technology to get that information to the driver as quickly as possible.
“The driver often attempts to drive the simulator and experiences oversteer because other simulators aren’t as quick as ours. Additionally, they are unable to catch the back end, which causes it to spin out.
“They haven’t had that movement or oversteer cue in time,”
Having figured out how to get a couple of backside slides myself – particularly out of the low-grasp last chicane at Spa, and La Source – I can confirm that there is no postpone in how rapidly that feeling comes on draft.
Jake Hughes, an F1 sim driver and FE racer, has also noticed this while experimenting with the DMG-1.
He tried it out and said, “Instant is the word.” The initial yaw cue comes quickly. Kerb riding is enjoyable and extremely realistic. In fast corners, even touching the apexes feels good, as does the tyre chatter when understeering.”
However, the simulator becomes an even more useful tool for teams that use it, so the real value of this benchmark latency extends beyond the drivers.
Setups can simulate real-world conditions as closely as possible, which can accelerate engineering knowledge.