All of that data creates what is known as the “vehicle model.” And since we’re talking about sims, you might assume they mean a literal 3D model much like you’d see in a video game. But no, the reality is the “model” is a list of numbers that are put into the system.
“This is the bit of software that describes exactly how the car works,” Warne explains. “How stiff the springs are, how much downforce you get off the rear wings, how much drag the car creates. So not the literal 3D model, but the sort of under the skin, mathematical model. A description of everything that matters to car performance about the car, how downforce changes with the ride height of the car, when it goes over bumps or when it gets compressed due to downforce, how the downforce changes and how the drag changes, how the balance of the car changes.
“F1 teams are right at the forefront of how to do this, and they’ve had their vehicle models, their mathematical description of how the car works, for several years. So every year it’s an increment — they start with the model of this year’s car and they do a lot of correlation work where they compare the results that they get out of the simulator with the data that they get on the track.”
Naturally, building upon last year is a logical step. We see it every season when most teams unveil an evolution of the previous year’s car that can be seen, felt, and driven. But for seasons like 2022 — or the upcoming 2026 campaign — where there are wholesale changes to the regulations, you can’t evolve. Or can you?
“It’s still the same methodology, but you’re taking bigger leaps,” Warne says. “They’ll start with the aero data — they would have their wind tunnel model of the previous year, and they would have their wind tunnel model of next year’s car. Early on it wouldn’t be very representative, and the downforce level will be really low.
“But fundamentally, they’re still doing wind tunnel testing. They know from historic data what their likely rate of development in the wind tunnel is going to be. So they will actually bolt that benefit onto a less-mature car so that they can predict what they’re going to be like at the start.
“There will always be a difference between what you measure in the wind tunnel and what you get in reality. And there’s lots of reasons for this. One of them is that the wind tunnel model is a scale model. It’s smaller, and it’s run at constant wind speed. Also, just by virtue of the fact that you can’t have curved flow as you can in a real car — you’re going around a circle, going around a high-speed corner on a real car, the angular instance of the the oncoming air at the front and the back is different, whereas you can’t actually do that [in the wind tunnel]”
Before a driver climbs into the simulator — which is usually built using a genuine car monocoque for absolute authenticity — the car model theoretically laps a track without a real driver, not just as another data collection exercise, but as a cost-saving measure as well.
“It’s actually relatively expensive to run a simulator session, because you need a driver, you need an engineer to run it, you need the simulator, and so you can only run that for 10 hours a day,” Warne says.
“They have offline simulations, which may have a virtual driver, or they may have an optimization algorithm that’s working out what the right driver inputs are to drive the car around the track.
“So typically, before a test has got as far as the race driver in the simulator, the week before that, it was being tested in the simulator by a test driver. But in the time before that, it was probably being tested by engineers in the office using offline simulation tools.”
The words simulation and development go hand-in-hand, but the tool doesn’t fall to the wayside once the car arrives. Of course, it is used to continually refine the car over a course of a season, but it is also used on a race weekend and during its build-up to prepare for a grand prix.
“Typically on race weekend, and more often than not starting the weekend before, the race drivers will have been in the simulator to prepare for the next race, or, if it’s a flyaway, maybe they would have been in it preparing for the next two or three races,” says Warne, who was McLaren’s simulator test engineer and simulator team leader in the early 2010s before heading to Ferrari to serve as Ferrari’s senior vehicle dynamics engineer.
“They will have sat and worked in the simulator with their race engineer, much as they would work with them at the track. They’d spend a day in the simulator going through a run plan, trying out different setup options that are well suited for that specific track, or they might be evaluating an upgrade package.
“Come the Friday, the first thing that will happen is that you’re waiting for data to start coming back from the track, and that’s as soon as the first run has ended. That data will immediately arrive back in the factory, and engineers will immediately be overlaying the data that’s come from that first run with the data that they generated in the simulator session before the driver flew out.
“For most of P1, what the sim team back at the factory — including the third driver or the simulator driver — is doing, is just checking correlation against what we found at the track. So the first session, the practice session, is all about ensuring that you have correlation.
“Then you’ll get towards the end of the session, they’ll do a debrief at the track after the first session, and the driver and the engineer will be saying, Okay, well, these are the problems that we’re faced with. How are we going to fix those? Then those questions will go back to the factory and then in the simulator, the simulator driver and the engineers will be carrying out experiments, as requested by the various engineers at the track to work out how they can improve the setup — maybe for P2 but there’s probably not enough time, so they’re more likely looking forward to the Saturday morning at that point.”
Warne says the reliability of modern F1 cars means that that sort of simulation is more important than ever.
“Improved reliability has made every small improvement you can make so much more important, because there was much more of a lottery effect in the past that somebody might just drop out,” he explains. “Whereas now, especially when the rules are a couple of years old and everybody started to converge on similar sorts of pace, every tenth of a second, even every millisecond is so critical.
“It’s those very small differences that turn out to deliver big, big differences at the track, and yet they’re still very closed with regard to what they will reveal about how they do things.”
Behind the wheel…
An element of simulation that we’ve not yet covered is that simulation provides rookie drivers the opportunity to get some seat time, forgoing the huge costs of renting a track and running a car. The writer of this article is a rookie driver… You can probably guess where this is going.
As well as learning about how simulation is used in Formula 1 today, I was also put in the simulator for two sessions. Firstly, I drove at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, F1’s go-to test track. But simulators are just glorified video games, right? How hard can it be? Well, as we’ve established, that couldn’t be further from the truth. And I can now vouch for it, too.
I was thrust right into the deep end, driving a representative 2019 F1 car, and after gradually dialing up the power and dialing down the grip, I was let loose for a handful of laps with the real (virtual) thing. Far from being a game, it was incredibly demanding, both physically and mentally, with the tiniest of mistakes taking several laps to recover from.
There’s no rewind button either, and because gratuitous use of the curbs or spins (only a couple, thank you) deliver physical feedback, they require a full reset of the sim to protect the machine — and the squishy organic thing sat in the driving seat — from damage.
Barcelona looks relatively simple on paper, but there’s a reason it’s used for testing. The mix of high- and low-speed corners and long and short straights provides a good bank of baseline data. And for someone who writes about cars because he was never rich enough to race them, it provides a well-rounded feel of what an F1 driver goes through.
Interestingly, though, while I absolutely won’t be giving Max Verstappen a run for his money any time soon, I found the sim much more accessible than a console game. It sounds ridiculous, but the immediate feel, the visual and physical feedback means that you aren’t just using your hands and eyes — your entire body reacts. The simulator gives you much more, but you have much more of yourself to put to use.
I got out of the sim physically spent, aching all over, wishing I’d slept more the night before, not gone to McDonald’s on the way there, and not given up playing football while I was at university so I had better fitness levels. Curling up under a blanket might’ve been a good idea at this point, but the Dynisma team had another idea: Spa-Francorchamps.
But while it was a daunting prospect at first, after a couple of laps I was way more comfortable — and that was despite running with the full complement of power and lowest amount of grip from the start this time around. Eau Rouge was flat out by lap two; Pouhon the same a few laps later, and by the end of my session I was around 1.6s off last place on the 2019 Belgian Grand Prix grid. Not bad for a journo whose only previous race car experience had been from the passenger seat.
I was proud of my effort, but I think I’ll stick to writing for the time being.