The Experiment: Race Day

Regular readers will know that I've been preparing for an experiment for past month or so. Well, as it turns out, yesterday was, for lack of a better name, Race Day. So here are the results.

One of the bikes I used on the day.

For those who don't know what I'm banging on about, it's this. I was bought an afternoon's track riding with the Ron Haslam Race School for Christmas. The day itself takes place on the Donnington Park Grands Prix circuit using track prepped Honda CBR600RRs and ex (and sometimes even current) racers as instructors. So it was a bit of a dream come true for the biker in me, something akin to being taught to drive by Damon Hill if you're a car nut.

As a gamer with a long time love of racing games, the whole thing presented something of an opportunity. After all, how many of us have wondered, after winning the battle with Laguna Seca's infamously difficult Corkscrew in Gran Turismo, if we could master the corner in real life? I certainly have, and as an owner of SBK X, the official game of the World Superbike Championship, now I could. So here's how I went about it.

First of all, I had to make sure that Donnington Park was even in SBK X to start with. A curious quirk in the race calendar during that season meant the British round of the championship was actually held at Silverstone that year. Thankfully, the game went out on general release before the change could actually be made in game, so Donnington was still there. Another stroke of luck arrived when I found out that a reasonable facsimile of the bike I would be riding in real life was in the game too. So, I had the bike. Next thing to do was turn off the racing line. Generally in racers, it's a helpful feature, but here it gets in the way of what I'm trying to achieve, namely, learn the track. You see, if the racing line is on, you just end up following the line, braking, turning and accelerating when it tells you, rather than actually figuring all that stuff out for yourself. So with full simulation mode on, manual gears and zero knowledge of the circuit, I set about turning out laps.

A month or so later, I wound up at Donnington for real. So, did my countless virtual laps around Donnington help at all in the real world?

The circuit, so you know what I'm harping on about below.

 

In a manner of speaking, they did. But mainly in the most obvious way. Learning where the track goes. More subtly, my time on the game illustrated how ridiculously late the turn in point for Redgate is. Get it wrong, tip in too early and you run out of road and wind up in the gravel. Not something you want to do, since Redgate is the very first corner on the track. Something else that was helpful was how I could take note of where the bike became unsettled under braking at Maclean's. Obviously, in real life, I wasn't nearly as fast as I was in the game, but it meant I wasn't too surprised when the back end started to slide on the brakes when I approached the corner for real. It's still a pretty unsettling feeling though, like you're at the very limit of what the laws of physics will allow you to get away with. The worry that you might crash in a game is very different to the worry that the bike might spit you off when you're actually sat on one.

What didn't the game help with? Let's get the obvious out of the way first. It's in no way like riding a real motorcycle. No matter how good the game's physics engine is, it simply cannot communicate how physical riding at high speed is. The bike tries to throw you off the back under acceleration, tries to spit you off the front under braking, 140mph windblast tries to tear your head off, and you hang off the bike to such an extent during cornering that if you're good, you can touch a knee to the road. If you're amazing you can touch an elbow down. If you're a lunatic, like one of the instructors, you can corner one handed, striking sparks from the knuckle armour on your glove off the road with your free hand.



Donnington Park from the sky.

The game didn't prepare me for just how steep the section between Redgate and Maclean's is. It genuinely felt like a rollercoaster on my first session. As the speed builds with confidence, the track starts to feel narrower as the bike begins to dictate the line out a corner rather than yourself. The whole thing becomes an exercise in lining the bike up at the apex and firing it out on the throttle, rather than just riding around. It's a difficult thing to explain, and something you have to experience for yourself. The game doesn't give any sensation of how close the road feels to your face as you hang off during cornering, or the way that the red and white stripes of the kerb take up most of your peripheral vision as they flash by. The game gives no indication of how the opposite kerb and the gravel trap behind it seems to come at you in a way that's way too quick for comfort the first time you really hook up a corner and fly through it as it's creator intended. Nor did it give any indication of the jarring dip at the apex of the right hander in the Fogarty Esses, which really caught me by surprise the first time I found it. It raised a grin though. It was the first indication that I was getting faster.
 
Most of all, the game cannot match the buzz. I was so high on adrenaline at the end of the day that I couldn't fill out the survey when we were finished. My hands were shaking too much to make my handwriting legible.

So in conclusion, is the game anything like the real thing? Let's put it this way. It's like building a rollercoaster in Theme Park and thinking, these things look like fun, then going to Alton Towers and riding the Nemesis for three hours. It looks like the real thing, and it might give you some ideas of what to expect, but by the time you're done in real life, you'll be an aching, gibbering, adrenaline addled wreck.

Try it sometime!