20,000 feet. That's a long way from the ground. Isn't it strange that being crammed into this sardine tin with wings feels normal? Tell someone you are flying somewhere and nobody looks at you weird or questions your sanity. Odd.
Looking out the window, I cannot help but think about racing. Sim racing, to be exact. What it is, where it's going, why, what, and how. Constantly thinking about how to be involved. How to help it grow. Creating plans for the team, brand, series, products. So. Many. Thoughts.
Somewhere on this airplane is someone who spends every weekend chasing a white ball around a field of perfectly manicured grass. Someone else may wake up before sunrise to sit silently in the woods, waiting for a deer to walk by. Another may spend their time outside of work training, dieting, and running extraordinary distances because some Greek did it once.
We understand those things. Maybe not personally, but culturally. Nobody needs an explanation for why someone might care about them.
My writing inspiration, Sam Smith, once wrote, "We have a staggering amount in common; the deltas between us are mostly window dressings of tribe and culture."
— Sam Smith, In the Moment: To believe you’re the best , Hagerty
I think about that a lot.
We understand obsession. Competition. Craft. The unwavering desire to improve. That strange satisfaction that comes from becoming slightly better at something nobody actually needs you to be good at—except that thing is what makes you tick.
Our obsession just so happens to involve pixels. And pixels seem to make people disengage. Dismiss.
Why?
The car is not real. The racetrack is not real. If I have a lapse of concentration and slam into a tire barrier, I don't have to think about medical bills. I don't feel the g-forces pull at my body or feel the heat radiating through the cockpit. No one has to rebuild the car overnight because I pushed it beyond what my abilities could support.
Those are real differences. Meaningful ones. Pretending otherwise does not help anyone. But it is easy to assume that because the race car is simulated, everything surrounding it must be simulated too.
Codswallop.
The preparation is real. The frustration is real. The mental fatigue is real.
The hours spent turning laps, changing setup parameters, trying to figure out how to gain two tenths of a second in one sector without losing three in another. Frustratingly real.
The feeling of knowing your team is depending on you to do your part and bring the car back after your stint. The silence after somebody makes a mistake and the weight comes crashing down. Tens, sometimes hundreds, of hours spent practicing suddenly sitting on your chest. The time off from work. The weekends planned around a race. The family time rearranged to make it happen.
The friendships built between people who may live hundreds or thousands of miles apart but somehow know exactly how their teammates are feeling from the tone of a few words spoken over a headset.
The brutal exhaustion of surviving a 24-hour race at the Nordschleife with one teammate. That's right, 24 hours of just the two of us passing the car back and forth, with only a few hours of sleep and enough time to contemplate our sanity. And then the accomplishment, joy, and pride of finishing something that forever changed us, but was so taxing we vow to never attempt that feat again.
This stuff is real.
None of this disappears just because we are dealing with pixels on a computer.
Sim racing should be understood on its own terms. Not as a replacement for racing real cars. Not as an imitation desperately asking to be taken seriously. As its own form of competition, built around many of the same obsessions we've apparently agreed are perfectly reasonable everywhere else.
The cars are digital. The reasons we care are familiar.