A look at the Strakka Racing Simulator

Fans of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and the World Series by Renault will undoubtedly know the name Strakka Racing.

Strakka Racing was founded by Peter Hardman and racing driver Nick Leventis. The team is based at Silverstone in the UK running a Strakka-Dome S103 LMP2 sports car in the FIA World Endurance Championship. Back in 2010 Strakka Racing became the first team in Le Mans Series history to achieve an overall win in an HPD ARX-01C LMP2 class car.

To prepare the team’s WEC and World Series by Renault drivers, Strakka Racing has installed a private racing simulator that uses a Dome sportscar chassis as a cockpit. The simulator is powered by the famed rFactor software enabling the drivers to learn tracks in different weather conditions, at day or night while the engineers can set up the car before they head off to the track.

In the video, Brittish racing driver Danny Watts and Strakka’s technical director Jay Davenport explain why the Simulator sessions are a cheap and beneficial way to get drivers prepared before a race.

 

One little curiosity.

While it is exciting to see the simulator hardware and watch the sim sessions of the real world racing teams, we still wonder what is going on with the field of view settings? We often notice that in a majority of the racing team simulator video’s the FOV is highly exaggerated making the car appear 4 meters wide. After going trough the trouble of building a very accurate cockpit, one would expect the field of view to match the cockpit environment.

Usually, big curved projector screens are used to enhance the immersion of a sim session while on the other hand the exaggerated field of view does exactly the opposite. We can only guess that the engineers were not able to set a correct and realistic FOV because of the ultra-wide screens used, so we wonder if big projector screens are the right way to go.

 

Webpage – www.strakkaracing.com