Adventures in Sim Racing

Alex

So, this also might have happened. 🤣

I decided to go down the route of the curved ultrawide and plumbed for the LG Ultrawide 34″ which I got in the black Friday sale. I got the stand today and got it setup. It will still require some more tweaking but had a quick go and am pretty happy with it.

Glad to be free of VR for now. As I said above my main goal this time around is to have a much more relaxing experience. I cannot be doing with all the stress!

Jogort

Looks bigger than 34″, nice setup

Brave

Very similar to my setup except my curved ultra is just on a big monitor arm as it needs to be swung out of the way when it’s not in use

I’m now on a 6 week hiatus before my next MA module so I’m finally going to get the direct drive wheel installed next week.

Alex

Last tiny purchase, last one for a while (honest), I got this little keyboard with the touchpad. There was no way to use the keyboard/mouse from the rig so this seemed like a required addition. The touchpad is not as good as you’d expect from say a decent laptop, but it’s good enough for this. Definitely worth the 23 squid.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00XJ3LVPI

Brave

Alex ha. I’ve got the exact same one for the exact same reason 😄

Brave

Finally got the direct drive base installed. Now I get it.

It took me a while to realise just how much more control I had with it. I’m simply not getting as many surprise snap oversteers as I did previously, or at least I’m getting much more feedback that it might happen, well in advance.

I can genuinely feel a lot more of what’s going on with the tires as well.

Bonus benefit: it doesn’t seem to chuck out anything near as much heat as the old wheel did.

Alex

Yeah. it’s a very smooth feeling, especially attached to a stable rig like the trophy.

I have my setup tweaked pretty nice now but mainly waiting for time to play it.

In their wisdom the bosses at work agreed to a 6th of January completion date for this stage of the project, so we’ve been in full crunch mode over Christmas. Tomorrow is my last day before the break though, so I’m looking forward to two weeks of playing vroom vroom cars and Indiana Jones and not giving a shit about trading systems. 🙂

Alex

Did my first iRacing race in a couple of years just there. It was the F4 at Snetterton. It went reasonably well, although it turned out to be a 3.5K strength of field, which meant that even though I did a pretty solid quali lap I was only 14th. I ran pretty well until about lap five where I had a little spin and it was very hard to recover from that, given the strength of the other competitors.

I was pretty happy with my pace overall, I definitely didn’t feel like I was slower with the ultrawide than the VR. The one place where I did definitely miss VR was at the race start in the melee of cars. There was a definite difference in situational awareness that I noticed. This was the first time I’ve missed VR but I think it will probably just require a bit of a mental recalibration.

Brave

Alex I find I’m stuck between liking the ultra and vr equally. Things like being able to see rotary dials on my wheel or even just using a button box are much easier with the monitor but the situational awareness of VR can be a massive benefit, as you say.

The thing that used to put me off was simply the heat that my old rig put out. But the combination of my new PC being at my feet rather than my laptop being right next to me and the t818 wheel base putting out zero heat (or noise for that matter) have made it much more bearable. I might get VR up and running again just so I have the option.

Alex

Brave Oh yeah, VR is awesome, and you definitely get a different experience with it. That said, it comes with a lot of downsides as well. I think the ultrawide is a really nice compromise between VR and flatscreen. It’s like a nice half-way house. It’s especially good as a lot of sims don’t have a great VR experience, or rather VR is so demanding that I could never really get it running well on my PC. It’s really nice to be able to just crank all the settings up to ultra and still get 100fps in these games. Maybe when the 5000 series RTX cards come out I will re-mortgage the house and give VR another go.

Alex

I’m also really liking how with my new setup I can just jump in and start driving. I don’t have to shift things about, move the seat into place, or setup the headset. I have a 3m display port cable that lets me plug the rig into the PC without shifting anything about.

Brave

Alex yeah. Same. It makes it much more likely that I’m going to fire it up for a couple of hours.

Although, that said, my wife does quite often use it as a temporary storage space for random crap in the office. I have to use it just to remind her it’s not some kind of weird misshapen cupboard.

Alex

Been messing around with different pedal positions, now I can actually adjust them. It was interesting how much more confident on the brakes I got once I’d moved them into a really comfortable position.

Brave

I took a punt on a new set of load cells (they also have hall angle sensors too). I decided to try something non-Thrustmaster as I’ve never mixed and matched before. So I got the Simagic P500s (no clutch just for now) and the P-HPR Neo haptic add ons (these are just 16 quid per rumbler).

Nearly busted myself getting it swapped in but that’s more because my rig is in a fairly tight spot and I had to turn myself into a pretzel to get at the bolts of the old TLCM.

The brakes seem great. I’m going to swap in a stiffer spring that comes in the kit as the default is too easy to compress, but already I’m noticing I’ve got a fair bit more confidence under braking. I was able to chip away at my braking points in LMU lap after lap in a way that I didn’t feel able to before and even found myself late trail-braking past AI in LMU in corners that I wouldn’t normally try.

The haptics are really interesting. I’m going to get it going in Simhub this week as it apparently has more robust and comprehensive settings but even just using Simagic’s app I was able to get feel in the pedals for when I was locking the wheels, spinning them, activating ABS and TC and a bunch of other helpful feedback.

I reckon I took about 6 seconds or more off my best time around lemans in the hour or so that spent mucking around in LMU.

Alex

Brave I’ve been interested before about having some kind of feedback/rumble on the brake pedal, but heard mixed things about its usefulness in the past. That set of pedals looks pretty good though, so might be worth giving it a try. I was looking at the MOZA SR-P, as they are pretty reasonable at £139, although no option for haptic. I’d be interested in hearing how easy it is to configure as needing to fiddle with things is definitely something that would put me off. My CLS pedals are now the oldest part of my rig, so I am considering an upgrade at some point.

Alex

Some tweaks to the sim rig. I’ve moved the CSL DD back a bit on the little plinth. The bolts aren’t in quite as good a place as before, I had to use some washers to get it to fit, but it should hopefully be good enough.

Moving the wheel back has allowed space to lower the monitor, and also to have better access to the monitor’s controls without having to move it. The power/settings button on the ultrawide is right in the middle, which is actually not super-convenient on a sim rig.

One side-effect is that I now feel a bit more planted in the car and the real wheel now replaces the virtual one. So much so that I had to turn in virtual wheel off as it was making things feel weird.

Obviously still scope for endless tweaks but definitely feels like better overall positioning.

Brave

Alex I’ll be able to give you more info after next weekend hopefully. I haven’t been able to use it at all since that first couple of sessions just because of MA stuff and things being quite hectic here. I definitely want to change the spring in the brake to a stiffer version and add a little rubber stopper thing that comes with it to give me even more feel.

I think some folk might not gel with the brakes as they have two phases. One is the Hall effect phase where you have movement and then the other is the load cell where it’s mostly pressure and feels quite defined and different. I actually liked that as it feels a bit more like a normal brake pedal as it loads up, but changing the springs and adding a squishy rubber stopper should make the phases feel less distinct. At least that’s what I’ve read.

I will say configuration of the haptics is dead easy through the simagic app. I’ll be trying simhub next time though as I think that’s more flexible (not that the simagic one isn’t).

I got a decent amount of realism and immersion out of it personally. Neat little touches like feeling the gear change are great but it’s stuff like feeling the tires slip through the throttle and lock up through the brakes as well as getting feedback when ABS and TC kick in. You can change the intensity, frequency (I think?) and duration of each effect which means you can actually dial it in a lot both to suit your needs and also make it more immersive. The lock up and slip effects are invaluable imo.

I’m going to be swapping the springs either tomorrow or next weekend so I’ll report back after that

Alex

Also be interested to know how easy it is to adjust the load cell pressure, as one thing I really like about Fanatec is that you can adjust the pressure on the wheel itself, which means it’s really easy to adjust when you jump from car to car.

Alex

Yeah, I moved to a very hard shore on my load cell early on, it does give you more finesse. It’s way stiffer than a road car brake, not sure how it compares to a real racing car, but I hear they have very little brake movement, just a few mm.

Brave

Ok. I managed to change the spring. I went to second hardest spring out of five options and shoved the rubber shim inside it. It took five minutes at an absolute maximum. Very very simple to do, much easier than my TLCM pedals.

What a difference. I have no hesitation in recommending them now. I’m not feeling those two phases anymore, it feels like the pedal is loading up over 20mm of travel and then a little bit of extra pressure takes you to 100%. This is perfect for me. I think if you want to cut that travel down even more then the hardest spring will probably take another 5-10mm of travel out based on how much travel I had originally with the softest spring. With that first spring I could push the pedal all the way to the base and then I’d be in the load cell phase. With this it’s just a smooth transition of load over the 20mm of travel.

I never felt that degree of control with the old set. At all. Even though the TLCMs were way better than the original g29 pedals I started with. This is now a similar jump forward.

It’s transformed La Sarthe for me. All those braking zones at the end of super long straights. I didn’t want to stop driving tonight.

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