Brockles wrote:

The talent and mindset required to drive a racing car well is clearly being well modelled with modern racing games - proof being that the truly good at driving reflect just as well on racing games as vice versa, and they have become suitably hard for normal people to be good at. All my drivers use simulators such as Gran Tourismo, Forza Motorsport, RFactor and a few others and it IS good training. Learning the rhythm of a track and also learning how to learn that rhythm is important.

People that gravitate toward racing games and become obsessively good at them are precisely the same people that gravitate toward racing and become good at it. In current racing, you have to have oodles of money to get far enough up the ladder to be noticed and make a living, with this kind of exposure, it opens up the legitimacy of simulators as training. Simulators of various forms have been used (including driving simulators) for a fair few years in racing, and over the last 3 or 4 seasons, it has become apparent that the next crop of new talent will have just as likely honed their skills on racing simulators as on years of karting (the traditional path). Once they get used to the physical demands of actually driving and prove they can retain the mental focus they had without that and show the resistance to pressure they need, they have crossed the divide.

My driver of two seasons ago learnt all the tracks he raced on on RFactor on the internet as he lived in a different country from where he was racing. He was consistently quick on all of them except one (interestingly, the most bumpy and so hardest to relate to simulation) and for one example went to the Indy GP support race and utterly dominated qualifying - after just one 30 practice he went into qualifying and did 6 laps - 5 of them were good enough for pole position in the race.

To put that into context, every single fast lap - except the one he needed to warm his tyres up - was faster than any other driver was able to manage through the whole session. All from learning the track for hours on a simulator. He was 15 years old.