The trick simulator keeping Mercedes ahead of the game

As the last rays of sun bathe Yas Marina on Friday at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, it's a chilly winter midday in Brackley as F1 Racing enters the Mercedes F1 facility. For its newly announced reserve driver Stoffel Vandoorne, it's merely another shift in the simulator that will play an essential role in Mercedes' race effort.

Only the sign outside distinguishes the simulator building from those around it. Upstairs there's a swathe of grey carpet, grey sofas, and three rows of desks with computer screens and intercoms.

These will not all be occupied today; normal simulator procedure only requires three or so personnel. It's only when the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas are in the sim that this room attracts a full house of trackside engineers and a delegation from the Brixworth engine facility.

Vandoorne arrives, bids us good day, then asks if he can briefly be excused for lunch. It's going to be a long day - but not as long as some, as he explains upon his return.

"This race is pretty good," he says, "because we won't go into... the really bad hours of the night, let's say.

"Normally I'll come in towards the back end of FP2. Lewis and Valtteri will have their debrief afterwards, and we'll usually listen in to that, hear all their comments, try to understand what's missing from the car.

"Then we generally start our day after that. I'll get in the simulator, do a few baseline runs to try to match the simulated car to the track in terms of balance, tyres, everything. We try to make sure everything is well correlated.

The halo was fitted at the request of Esteban Ocon, who was determined to keep the cockpit sightlines as near to reality as possible during his season out of actual racing

"Then we'll generally have received a complete list from the engineers at the circuit of the test items they want to try. It could be set-up changes or aero options, anything they're allowed to change on the car.

"Depending on how many options they send through, some races are busier than others. It's an eight or nine-hour day. Today we're starting at 3pm and we'll probably finish at midnight or 1am."

Once the simulator crew's day is done, all their data is fed back to the engineering team at the circuit in the form of a detailed briefing document. Then it's up to them if they want to make changes based on the simulator runs or not.

"You might find something that yields the same lap time but gives the more raceable car," says Vandoorne, "or something that's a little bit quicker and may be suitable for qualifying."

The simulator is a means to an end, and the accuracy of its alignment with real life is the crucial difference between it being a useful element of the race effort rather than an expensive toy. There are still those within the F1 fraternity who view simulation as frivolous.

At Mercedes, any frivolity exists in the margins - such as the task schedule on the main computer screen which lists 'fluffing' as one of the activities to be accomplished. This innocent-sounding gerund has an entirely different meaning in the adult film industry and here, too, it defines a process of - ahem - readying the necessary equipment for action.

After 'fluffing', the baseline runs begin - though on a race weekend these are generally brief box-ticking exercises, for the hard yards will have been accomplished over months and years of scrutiny, measurement and fine-tuning.


For the driver - or, as the sim crew jokingly refers to them, the "carbon-based wheel spacer" - one element of the job is to help identify poor correlation. Mercedes rates Vandoorne highly for his ability to explain differences between the on-track data and the simulation.

"There's a lot of work done pre-event either by me or the other simulator drivers to make sure the car has a really good baseline," he says, "and usually it correlates quite well to the circuit. And then it's more the track conditions we're adjusting to - the track temperatures to make sure the tyres are matching up, straightline speeds, all that kind of stuff."

The simulator itself is on the ground floor, and is a thoroughly impressive piece of kit: an ersatz F1 cockpit, complete with halo, mounted on a sliding platform and facing a curved panoramic screen.

The halo, we're told, was fitted at the request of Esteban Ocon, Mercedes' former chief sim jockey, now on loan to Renault. He was determined to keep the cockpit sightlines as near to reality as possible during his season out of actual racing. Vandoorne juggles his simulator duties with racing in Formula E, which has also adopted the halo, so for him it's merely an impediment to getting in and out.

A rack of projectors above the cockpit transmit the imagery to the screen and there's a speaker in the cockpit, along with a camera and an intercom so the driver can communicate with the operators.

Although the computing horsepower behind it is confidential, the simulator runs the rFactor engine with which many F1 Racing readers will be familiar. It's the gold standard of racing sims on account of its fidelity with real-life tracks, right down to the cambers, and its ability to model tyre behaviour.

The steering wheel approximates that of a real F1 car and the pedals are the same as those in the W10, down to the brake travel and feel. But obviously the forces experienced by the driver are different.

"It's a simulator so it will never be 100% perfect," says Vandoorne. "We simply don't have the g-forces on our bodies to feel everything happening with the car. 
But there are a couple of clever things in the simulator in terms of the cues they give to you, to be able to deal with certain handlings of the car. You feel a lot more through the steering, for example.

Unless the engineering team at the circuit has total faith in the accuracy of the virtual test sessions at Brackley, they won't be confident in pushing changes through to the real car

"Sometimes it's better to have the short, sharp movements through the platform rather than very big ones. A lot of simulators make you feel ill. That's generally when the cues are wrong. Sometimes it's better to miss them rather than have them in there and be wrong."

Michael Schumacher, famously, didn't get on with an earlier iteration of the Mercedes simulator. Many people experience symptoms akin to motion sickness in sims and when playing video games such as Call of Duty, and there are many different theories to explain it, the most compelling being that the brain reacts adversely to a conflict in sensory information: some inputs are indicating movement, others aren't. Some scientific studies have found that symptoms diminish with time - and even that the subject's enjoyment of the sim has an effect. So, this isn't a job for newcomers.

"To find consistency isn't always easy because of the differences in the cues between the simulator and reality," says Vandoorne.


"I've played games since I was very young so I know how to deal with that to get the consistency - but for someone new coming in, they might be able to do one lap but they might not be able to repeat it because they haven't been able to create the feel for it. You need a different mindset compared with a real car."

It's this consistency that's key to effective simulator work: unless the engineering team at the circuit has total faith in the accuracy of the virtual test sessions at Brackley, they won't be confident in pushing changes through to the real car.

Without that explicit and tangible connection between simulation and reality, Vandoorne may as well be sitting at home on his sofa playing Forza, with a cat on his lap...