About our Blog
Hello, and welcome to Throttle Theory! We’re so excited to welcome to you our blog, where we explain how you can learn how to race. We had a chance to explore sim racing during our senior project, and we want to share that knowledge with you. We wanted to make a blog for people to learn how to race from the ground up, and hopefully help people understand how impressive professional racers are. As you read through our blog posts, the level of difficulty of these techniques will increase the farther you get. We’ll try to cover as much as we can, going chronologically from what we learned during our month.
Firstly, a little setup on our senior project. During the month of May, Mihir and Henry, your authors, elected to explore sim racing due to our love for F1 and a recent viewing of Gran Turismo (we’re nowhere near Jann’s level). We used iRacing as our sim program of choice, as it is a very established software and very easy to interact with. Next, we had to select a track. We wanted a race track that was a challenge and could provide a variety of corners for us to experience and. We decided to base our sim racing journey at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, a historic racecourse in Belgium. We were especially drawn to the mix of high-speed corners, like Eau Rouge and Pouhon, to the very slow and technical La Source and Chicane.
We began with the base set of cars provided when you purchase IRacing. As we went through the tutorial in an ancienct Formula Vee car, we quickly realized that we needed to find a more stable starter car. So we did some research and began running Spa in a Mazda Mx-5, or as it’s more commonly known, a Miata.
We began training our techniques on this car due to its low top speed. The Miata was simple, and worked for the first week and half before we grew bored with it. As most teenagers, we wanted more speed. So, we idiotically selected to jump to a Ferrari 499P.
For those who are unaware, the Ferrari 499P is a prototype car designed specifically for professionals in endurance races. The first day with the Ferrari made us question whether we had learned anything in the Miata because of how different it felt. However, over time, the Ferrari forced us to perfect our control through the corners. The techniques that we learned in the Miata weren’t any different in the Ferrari, it was just that the margin for error had gone down a drastic amount. We continued to race with the Ferrari until the end of the month, and Henry managed to set the fastest time of 2:10.955 seconds.
However, setting a fastest lap and practicing lap times were only one half of our ambitious senior project. We also wanted to explore racecraft under the pressure of a race and the art of overtaking. So, at regular intervals during May, we raced against AI. While we initially kept the range of AI to be the same 10-40% difficulty, we grew out of it and moved on to a harder challenge. At the end of the month, we both were able to race against X-X% difficulty and also participated in a real-time race with other drivers on IRacing. Henry placed X and Mihir placed X in their respective races.
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