A three-camera system and portable design let you use the Approach R50 on the range or at home to collect data or play simulated holes.
Garmin is a massive company that has proven good at creating products that track things. For years, the company has been making Global Positioning System (GPS) devices for pilots and sailors. It makes watches and wearable devices for runners, cyclists, and fitness enthusiasts, and over the last decade, Garmin has made several well-regarded golf GPS devices and laser rangefinders. Garmin also made the Approach R10 and Approach G80 launch monitors, but with the release of the new Approach R50, the Olathe, Kansas-based brand is offering its most sophisticated and versatile golf product ever.
The Approach R50 ($4,999.99) is a portable launch monitor that can provide up to 15 club and ball metrics, indoors or on the range, that is also a fully integrated simulator that comes pre-loaded with over 43,000 courses.
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The Garmin Approach R50 is at home outdoors and indoors. (Garmin)
How does the Garmin Approach R50 work?
The Approach R50 uses a three-camera system to capture each shot in high resolution, frame by frame. This allows the system to accurately track both the club as it goes through the impact zone and the ball’s movement to collect comprehensive swing data and launch data.
The R50, which comes with a carrying case to make it easier to move, is straightforward to charge and its battery supports up to 4 hours of simulator or launch monitor use.
What does the Garmin Approach R50 do?
The three-camera system allows the Approach R50 to capture data and reveal stats like ball speed, spin rate, launch angle, spin axis, carry distance, and total distance. Golfers see that information on a massive 10-inch color touchscreen that can also replay high-speed impact videos. The Approach R50 can provide this information on any club in a player’s bag, from driver to putter, and it can do it on the range or indoors when a golfer hits into either a net or screen.
The Approach R50 collects tour-level data on your swing and the flight of your shots. (Garmin)
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In addition to being a sophisticated launch monitor, the Approach R50 can be used as a golf simulator, again, either outside or inside. Using Garmin’s Home Tee Hero software, up to four players can play and compete on up to 43,000 different courses.
On the range, the 10-inch color touchscreen makes it easy to see the simulated hole and shots you are playing, but indoors the unit can be attached to a projector using an HDMI cable to create a realistic indoor simulator. And, because the Approach R50 gathers such detailed information about the shots you hit, the virtual flight of the ball in the simulator is more realistic.
The device also offers compatibility with third-party simulators like GSPro, E6 Connect, and Awesome Golf, expanding the options for virtual play beyond Garmin’s own platform.
The Approach R50 can connect to a projector to create a high-performance home simulator. (Garmin)
Who is the Garmin Approach R50 for?
The $599 Garmin R10 is a more portable launch monitor and the Approach G80, at $499, is also very small and features a colorful screen, but the Approach R50 is designed for a completely different player. While those units can certainly provide valuable insights and information, the three-camera system of the Approach R50, along with its ability to provide tour-level metrics and information make it a product that could be considered by elite golfers who play and train year-round, college golfers, instructors and deep-pocketed recreational golfers who may have tinkered with the idea of creating a simulator in their basement or garage.
The large color screen on the Approach R50 makes seeing the data easy, and with over 43,000 courses pre-loaded, it should make the idea of “playing holes” on the range easier, which can make practice sessions more meaningful.
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The simulator officially opened on Wednesday, joining others in Hong Kong, South Korea, Minneapolis and Dubai International Airport.
Denver International Airport is a hotbed of activity, as the Federal Aviation Administration has the facility listed as the third-busiest airport in the country, behind only Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth.
And while that can lead to lengthy layovers and long wait times, there’s some good news when it comes to the amenities now available.
Golf DEN is a new golf simulator that opened recently along one of the main concourses in the airport, meaning weary travelers can work on their ball flight instead of simply downing pints while waiting for a connecting flight. (Of course, cocktails are also provided at the new business.)
Golf DEN inside DIA airport is officially open! Turn your layover into playtim. Swing by for a quick golf session and a drink ⛳ Visit us on Concourse A on the Mezzanine. AirportGolf layover golf airportlife denver
According to a story at Westword, a Denver-based alt-weekly, the simulator is affordable as well, especially considering the cost to hit balls at other similar facilities.
Fees are listed in fifteen-minute increments, but people can also pay ahead online for convenience. One session is $20, while thirty minutes runs $34, and a full hour costs $65.
Equipment rental is included in the price, but Golf DEN encourages people to bring their own clubs or putters if they’re traveling with them. Additionally, comfortable clothes and real shoes that allow for a full swing are encouraged.
Golf DEN is located on the top floor of Concourse A. After passing through security and emerging from the trains (or walking across the bridge), simulator patrons must keep going to the third level. According to the Golf DEN website, the company is working to register with Google and Apple Maps to provide walking directions.
The simulator officially opened on Wednesday, joining others in Hong Kong, South Korea, Minneapolis and Dubai International Airport.
And more are on the way. The company that built Golf DEN has a similar project scheduled to open at Los Angeles International Airport in the future.
Want to improve your game this offseason? Check out this list of best home golf simulators and launch monitors.
Even though we don’t want to think about it, winter is quickly approaching. That means some golfers around the country are about to be stuck inside thanks to low temperatures and snow. To make sure you can still get some practice in this winter, we’ve created this list of some of our favorite golf simulators and launch monitors.
Whether you’re looking for a device to put in your garage or basement, or something you can also bring with you to the range once spring rolls around, we’ve included it in this list.
Some of the brands included below are Foresight, Garmin, Bushnell and Rapsodo.
Why you’ll love it: The Launch Pro from Bushnell is both an at-home simulator and a driving range tool. It works perfectly outdoors and in and is powered by Foresight, one of the biggest names in the launch monitor space.
Why you’ll love it: This device from Garmin is perfect for players who want a launch monitor for range sessions, or if they have a space at home they can practice. The Garmin Approach R10 is small enough to fit in your golf bag and comes at a very reasonable price for a launch monitor.
Why you’ll love it: Like the Garmin R10, the MLM2PRO from Rapsodo can fit right in your golf bag. One of the best parts of this device is that it can pair to your phone and take videos of your swing, while providing all the data you want to know.
Why you’ll love it: The SC300i from Voice Caddie is a great choice if you’re looking for a tool to use during your next range session. It connects to your phone so you can keep track of all your data and voices your stats after each swing.
Why you’ll love it: This is a new product from Uneekor and is another great option if you’re looking for a launch monitor for your garage or basement simulator area.
Why you’ll love it: Like the Bushnell Launch Pro, the KIT from Full Swing can be used at the range or at home in your simulator space. It provides 16 key pieces of data with each swing and is backed by Tiger Woods.
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Foresight – GC3 Essentials Plus Bundle
Foresight GC3 Essentials Plus Bundle (PGA TOUR Superstore)
Why you’ll love it: The GC3 from Foresight is perfect for at-home use or the range, but you get a lot more with this bundle including FSX Play software, 25 golf courses and much more.
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Last summer, a tweet from NASCAR driver Landon Cassill shed some light on how simulation lays the groundwork for what happens in the real world. It was something we covered here at RACER at the time, but with simulation being such a major part of …
Last summer, a tweet from NASCAR driver Landon Cassill shed some light on how simulation lays the groundwork for what happens in the real world. It was something we covered here at RACER at the time, but with simulation being such a major part of motorsports today — particularly in Formula 1, where a car may change entirely from race to race — we wanted to delve even deeper.
To do that, I headed to Bristol in the UK, where Dynisma Limited is based. Dynisma is the class leader in simulation technology, with Scuderia Ferrari among its clients.
It was founded in 2017 by former McLaren and Ferrari F1 simulation lead Ash Warne, and in an era where real-world testing is confined to a few days a year, the company provides a vital service.
“It’s the main tool now to be able to allow them to develop the cars, and automotive companies are doing the same,” Warne tells RACER. “They want to make fewer prototypes. They want to be able to go straight to the production line without having to spend time and money building mule cars, building prototypes.”
Dynisma aims to blur the lines between virtual and reality by developing the most accurate simulation technology around.
“Simulators have been around for a while, but what we’ve got is a step change in the technology that allows drivers to feel the movement of the thing that we’re simulating and how that’s moving more accurately,” Warne says.
That’s been done by reducing the latency — the delay between what a driver inputs and what they experience. It’s been simulation’s key weakness in the past.
“Our first major contribution is about latency, and we’ve got that latency down to less than five milliseconds, which is basically imperceptible,” Warne says. “Typically, with other simulators, you can’t drive them the same way as you can drive our simulator, because you have to put in more understanding to deal with the latency. So that’s kind of critical.
“If you’re suddenly increasing the human reaction time by 25, 50 percent then — especially in the context of an elite athlete — this vehicle is going to completely wreck the simulation.
“In a simulator where the latency is too high, what basically happens is the driver gets frustrated because they’re saying, ‘Well, I can’t get around a lap. I would be able to drive this on the track, but I can’t drive it here. So I’m going to take out two turns of front wing to make the car more stable. I’m going to put a softer rear bar on to give me more grip, to make the car more stable.’ So now all of a sudden, you’ve got the wrong baseline. You’re not carrying out the experiments you wanted to.”
Dynisma’s Warne explains to Wilde how the system lets drivers feel as well as see how their sim efforts are going.
Couple that vastly improved latency with motion technology unlike any other, and Dynisma’s simulators can give drivers the sort of seat time that almost mirrors the real world.
“Fundamentally, our Motion Generator technology allows the driver to feel the car in a way that other simulators don’t,” Warne says. “That means the driver is able to drive the simulator in the same way as they are the real car.
“If you imagine the recent world champions and everybody on the current F1 grid and F2, F3, all of those drivers have typically been driving cars or karts of some description since they were really, really young, and they learned to be at one with those machines. They’re connected to them directly, and they feel every little movement, every vibration that’s going on in that car. And even if they can’t describe how they’re responding to it, they have learned to respond to all of those stimuli.
“They hear it, but they also feel it. So the driver really feels the feedback from the motion system in two ways. One is through touch; a bit of pressure or vibrations they’re feeling through their backside, and then the other is through the vestibular system – these are the organs in your inner ear that help you balance, but they also help you detect movement.”
Dynisma’s technology means that simulation is at a near-perfect level, to the point where it serves as the intermediary between two physical elements: the wind tunnel and the track itself.
Results from developments prototyped with scale models are replicated in the simulator to validate them before the car hits the track. Once it does, the real world performance is back-to-backed with the expectations from the sim to correlate the data, ensuring that all lines up as expected.
“Basically, the wind tunnel is only ever an approximation,” Warne says. “So the simulator is a tool that brings together all the data that the team has about the car and allows the driver to drive it and to do experiments on what’s coming up next, or look forward to next year.
“But it can only ever be as correct as the data that’s put into it, and that’s why teams will have tens of people in the aerodynamics department, tens of people in vehicle dynamics departments and vehicle modeling, and a big part of their role is to understand the physics of the car, understand how it behaves, and in part, to be able to put that in the simulator.”
As costs continue to rise and prying eyes aim to peek at any advantage they can see a rival working on, simulation is becoming an increasingly vital tool in motorsport. Its advantages for drivers – giving them near endless seat time ahead of events …
As costs continue to rise and prying eyes aim to peek at any advantage they can see a rival working on, simulation is becoming an increasingly vital tool in motorsport. Its advantages for drivers — giving them near endless seat time ahead of events to learn tracks, cars, and procedures – are obvious, but simulation has a much wider use aside from letting people log laps.
NASCAR’s Next Gen car, now in its second season, was of course the product of countless real-world laps at a number of tracks, both on and off the Cup Series schedule. But while it was turning laps on track in late 2019 and early 2020, Landon Cassill was turning laps in the virtual world. Simulation has been a key component of NASCAR for over a decade now, with Cassill describing it as “absolutely fundamental.”
“The simulators are running all day, every day,” he tells RACER. “The only teams that aren’t using simulators at a large scale are the teams that aren’t factory backed or manufacturer supported. The largest teams like Hendrick, Joe Gibbs Racing, Stewart-Haas, those guys are probably in the simulator every single day. Maybe it’s not every driver every day and every team every day, but there’s probably some sort of team representation in that simulator seemingly every day.”
Such reliance on simulation is far from unique. Virtually — if you’ll pardon the pun — every series does it with track testing either outlawed or deemed too expensive to do on a regular basis.
For Landon Cassill, plugging into a simulator yields valuable seat time as a driver along with the vital data for the teams and manufacturers. Motorsport Images
“There’s been an evolution from on-track testing, which is really the best way to test a car but not necessarily the most efficient or cost-effective way,” says Cassill. “Racing series years ago put limitations around testing in an effort to control the costs that were spent on R&D, but if that money’s there, it’s going to get spent and smart people find a way to work around it, so that’s where simulation was created.
“But even before we were driving driver-in-loop simulators, the teams and manufacturers were building their cars and building their setups in simulation programs,” explains Cassill, who first tested with Chevrolet in the early 2010s. “Essentially (they were) preparing a virtual version of their race car and evaluating the potential data of that car before they ever put those setups underneath the real car. So NASCAR’s been pretty far along for a decade when it comes to engineering and simulation.”
It’s not all about cost-saving and efficiency, though. In series where regulations are tightly policed, simulation gives the opportunity to find sneaky advantages.
“In our sport, our cars are intended to look the same,” Cassill notes, “and so we don’t have the visual control of a wing of change or an underbody change that F1 has, where you can see those changes right in front of you and it’s easy to talk about. The teams have no choice but to talk about them or, or acknowledge them. As proprietary as the technology is, they can’t avoid it.
“In NASCAR — unfortunately for the sport, in my opinion, and for the fans — the teams are able to hide a lot of their technology around this stock body. And for years and years, there’s a lot of ingenuity that doesn’t get talked about because we don’t have to talk about it.”
NASCAR sampled Le Mans virtually before the Hendrick Motorsports Garage 56 Camaro took to the real track. Nikolaz Godet/Motorsport Images
The incognito nature of simulation also came in pretty handy for NASCAR’s recent foray at Le Mans. Before the Garage 56 project even got off the ground, Cassill may have — unknowingly, at the time — laid some of the groundwork while helping develop the Next Gen in its early days, as he divulged on Twitter back in June.
“I got a call from NASCAR — I’ve been in the sport for a long time and know a lot of the guys in the R&D center — and so got a call from them to come do a test, which to me wasn’t too unusual and I was happy to help with the Next Gen,” he explains. “They had a couple things that they were working through that I had known about, just being a full-time Cup driver at the time. I had known that they were testing and solving and developing that car to get it ready for us to race in the Cup Series.
“So nothing was too unusual for me, but they did ask me not to share much of the test plan when they sent it to me and showed me what we were doing — and the fact that we had Le Mans and the Daytona road course on the test plans. They had asked me to be prepared to run laps at Le Mans.”
For Le Mans, a baseline was needed. That was done with the help of iRacing laps in a Mercedes-AMG GT3 racer, and the previous generation of Cup Series car.
“It wasn’t super in-depth — it’s not like we were really turning big knobs, but they wanted to see a baseline of where we are at on this car at Le Mans. I wouldn’t say at the time that I had any specific knowledge or indication to myself that this was a potential Garage 56 entry and from that point on, I didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you.”
In fact, despite what NASCAR’s interest in Le Mans would develop into over the next three years, the simulator laps on Daytona’s road course drew Cassill’s attention more.
“I was, at the time, more interested in the fact that I ran laps on the Daytona road course as well because, being a current NASCAR driver, Le Mans seemed so far out there,” he says. “To me, I was more thinking, ‘Oh man, I’m probably going to end up racing at the Daytona road course’ and I hadn’t heard anybody talk about it. Obviously, that came into fruition pretty quickly because the Cup Series raced at the Daytona road course in short order after that.
“So the Le Mans thing wasn’t even really on my radar in the immediate future, other than I thought it was very exploratory. It didn’t feel random — I did feel like there was a purpose that NASCAR wanted to see some data of that car at Le Mans, how fast did it go down the straightaway and what the lap time looked like, the braking zones and what a general lap data would look like. So I knew there was a purpose. I just didn’t put too much thought into it like, ‘Oh, this thing might actually race.’
The on-track benefits of simulation to prepare cars and drivers might be relatively new, but the reasons for it are apparent. But now we’re also seeing engineers get their start in the virtual world as well.
“I’d say it’s happening a lot,” says Prescott Campell, an Oxford Brookes University student currently working as a structural engineer at the Williams F1 team, but who is also an engineer for Williams’ Esports division. “A lot of the other students I study with work part-time as engineers for various Esports teams, and they develop these skills that you don’t really learn during university — how to set up a race strategy, that’s not really a course that’s taught.
“So they can build these skills by being engineers for Esports teams and the software that’s used to analyze data is the exact same software that’s used in real life, so you get familiar with software that they need to use to get a job after graduating.”
Williams has found useful synergy between the engineering requirements of real world motorsport and Esports, which can help prepare young engineers for racing. Zak Mauger/Motorsport Images
The idea of an “engineer” in a virtual world might seem baffling at first but, as with driver and car prep, the reasons behind it are straightforward.
“With anything that’s extremely competitive, you need as many tools and people on the case as possible to efficiently find every advantage you can,” says Campbell. “It’s possible, but it requires a lot of work for a driver to converge on setups and they might not have the skills to use the software and the tools available in order to exploit these advantages that they might never come across.
“So it takes an engineer that has experience with data analysis and the tools they need to extract data from the driver running, then sweep through it, working with the driver — who might also pick up things that the engineer might not notice — and then try different things when the driver’s complaining about something or saying the car can be improved in a certain way.
“It’s the engineer’s expertise that can tell them what sort of setup change and direction they can go in. That’s not something the driver might know unless they have so much experience with setup changes.”
The virtual world also gives engineers — either working exclusively in the virtual world, or preparing for the real world — more time and space to figure out solutions.
“In real life, often the engineer has to make informed decisions on what not to look into, and to decide just based on their own experience, different aspects of the car to ignore or keep the same while they try and converge on a precise setting on a different aspect of the car,” Campbell says. “While in sim racing, you can basically sweep through all of these things because you have as much time as the drivers are willing to spend online.”
That being said, for drivers, the idea of “just pressing the reset button” feels like less of a luxury.
“Even just the process of resetting the lap if you make a mistake or crash still takes time — the time it takes to reset, but also the time it takes to start that lap over,” explains Cassill. “If you’re doing that, not even on a warmup, on a run change that you make in the car so that they can compare the data after the fact, you’re trying to get a clean lap for every single change.
“If you keep making mistakes or if you keep crashing, you’re kind of muddying up the data and resetting and that time compounds on itself. Just like any line of work — racing isn’t really that special when you’re trying to think of time over productivity, right? Just like anything, you get to the end of your shift and you’re like, ‘Man, have two more runs to get through — where did we lose that time?’ So I always try to be as efficient as possible in my feedback and how I get up to speed.
“To me it’s very similar to the final hour of a practice session. It’s like a two-minute drill for a quarterback. I try to approach the sim sessions as seriously as I would a practice session and be as efficient and diligent as possible.”
Because saving time, ultimately, is what results on the racetrack are all about.
Fifteen years ago, Sebastien Bourdais had his first experience with a racing simulator. Not a video game, mind you, but a complicated, computer-driven simulator similar to those used to train airline pilots. The experience was both positive and …
Fifteen years ago, Sebastien Bourdais had his first experience with a racing simulator. Not a video game, mind you, but a complicated, computer-driven simulator similar to those used to train airline pilots.
The experience was both positive and negative, Bourdais said.
“It was the real car, pedals and steering,” Bourdais said. “But right away, I felt like I was missing the main part, which is the vibrations of the car and the sense you get from the seat through your butt. There are some unquantifiable cues that are not visual or steering related. You only really get that from the car on track.”
That experience in 2008 in a Formula 1 simulator during his time with Red Bull is far removed from the experience Bourdais gets today in Cadillac Racing’s “driver-in-loop” simulator. Bourdais has spent hundreds of hours behind the wheel of a modern simulator — wearing shorts, he notes with a laugh — and the technology and realism have vastly improved in just 15 years.
Simulators serve as realistic and important tools in motorsports, and they’ve improved vastly in recent years. But they still can’t fully replace the real-life experience.
“It’s proven incredibly valuable as far as setup work and correlation and everything else, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not quite the same,” Bourdais said. “I can turn 500 laps on the simulator and get to the track and still feel like it’s different. It speeds up our preparation a bit, but when I get in the car, I hit the reset button.”
In less than two decades, simulators have moved from a novelty to an essential tool — if not the most essential tool — for the teams in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. The complicated, expensive machines help drivers stay sharp when they can’t be on track, certainly, but the primary benefit of simulators lies with the strengthening of feedback between the talent that propels the car and the brains who make it work.
“The magic of the simulator is the driver-engineer relationship,” said Brian Pillar, Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport’s technical director. “Sports car racing is unique in that we have two drivers in the car, each with their own strengths or weaknesses or things they like in the car. Getting in the simulator and working with the drivers and optimizing the setup to make both of them happy or get to a compromise, that’s played a big role for us (in the simulator) that we really didn’t see before.”
Racing simulators aren’t new — Lotus used them as early as 1965 and even sold their original version of a simulator to other race teams — but simulators have advanced significantly in a short period of time.
Located in large facilities at team or manufacturer headquarters, the machines look like something from a science fiction film: A large metal pod mounted above ground on legs that use computer simulations to manipulate the pod in precise, incremental motions replicating the car’s motion over specific racetracks.
They’ve developed rapidly in recent years, providing realism for drivers and accurate data for engineers.
“Part of it is how much it’s improved mimicking what happens in real life and also just knowing what work you can do on it to get something accomplished with it,” said Ricky Taylor, who works regularly on Honda Performance Development’s simulator outside Indianapolis with WTR Andretti co-driver Filipe Albuquerque.
“When we go to the simulator now, you fill a day with so much work,” Taylor said. “It crosses so much off your list. Since I’ve started, simulators have come a long way. … We’re doing all the setup changes, lots of things that you would be able to try only on race weekends in the past.”
A simulator’s applications are realistic, their impact immediate. After BMW M Team RLL finished second last month in the GTP class at Long Beach, Nick Yelloly was praised for his work in the BMW simulator leading up to the race and the 2023 season.
Yelloly’s contribution even warranted a nickname.
“I’m lucky I have the ‘Sim God’ as my teammate,” co-driver Connor De Phillippi said. “He’s been developing our simulations back in Munich. You would not believe the amount of days he puts in there; he should be given a raise. The correlation we’re able to get from the sim now is really impressive. They’ve put a hell of an effort into that, and that’s helped us a lot for this weekend.”
Team members in Germany frantically rewrote computer code throughout the Long Beach weekend after the BMWs encountered difficulties in the opening practice session. That’s become one of the most significant contributions of simulators — the ability of race engineers to make on-the-fly adjustments based on data generated from sim sessions.
And the technology improves as fast — or faster, even — as the cars.
“It’s interesting how everything has grown,” Pillar said. “As a team and drivers, we’re pushing it to the next level that doesn’t exist. There’s a current project going on that has gotten to the point that we’re requesting the actual steering wheel (from the race car) start to be used (in the simulator). The controls of the GTP car have become so complex… that the drivers have to adjust now when they get back to the track.”
What began as a rather rudimentary simulator that Lotus experimented with in the mid-1960s has evolved far beyond racing video games or even the F1 simulator Bourdais stepped into in 2008.
“In the past five to 10 years, the way simulators have progressed is phenomenal,” said Ben Barnicoat, who joins Vasser Sullivan Lexus teammate Jack Hawksworth on the Toyota Racing Development simulator every week in Salisbury, North Carolina. “Formula 1 and NASCAR teams hugely rely on them. Our sport isn’t like tennis or soccer where you can be out on the field or the court every day practicing. That’s our equivalent of being able to practice between events. It’s hugely valuable.”
Aside from providing needed repetition and assisting engineers in gathering data, sims help drivers learn unfamiliar tracks. Barnicoat, who joined the WeatherTech Championship for the 2022 season, spent hours familiarizing himself with realistic replications of tracks he’d never seen.
As the season progresses, drivers who are unfamiliar with it will learn Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s 14-turn, 2.439-mile road course in preparation for the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks on Sept. 17.
While close to the real thing, experienced drivers immediately point out the subtle nuances in the differences between the two, even as the technology of simulators improves.
“What’s changed a lot are the models, which are getting really close to reality,” said Bourdais, who now frequents the Indianapolis simulator of Dallara, chassis maker for Cadillac. “It’s just hard to get there because you’re going in only with your eyes. But in terms of pre-event and post-event and correlation, it’s gotten much better. It’s quite incredible to see how close the data is between the real thing and the sim. You can’t really tell which one is which. It’s a great tool.”
