Driver Performance - Motorsports vs. Traditional

...and now for something completely different.

As I briefly hit on in the first post, I'm a research geek. In particular, I'm interested in driving performance and distraction. I have a psych background, anchored in skill acquisition and visual attention. More recently, I've picked up some computer science and a bit of engineering in an effort to make my knowledge of human performance more marketable to industry.

Some of the issues that I consider in my research include military operations, law enforcement, and driver interactions with secondary devices. I have access to a fabulous driving simulation laboratory. But my first love is still motorsports.

What is interesting to me is that the Driving Simulation community is strongly oriented toward the driver... whereas the growing motorsports simulation realm is most assuredly not. The one exception to that that I know of is iRacing.com, which is a pretty awesome deal. A racing simulator based on real vehicle dynamics on real (laser-digitized) tracks. A number of professional drivers have accounts, and VW is using it as a qualifier for their SCCA-sanctioned series. It's a place where you and I can race against the real deal.... if we prove ourselves at the lower levels enough to not be a hazard (just like the real deal).

But in the end, when I talked to iRacing about my work, they didn't see the connection. Cellular phone conversation? Motorsports? Nothing there.... radio chatter? oh. Hmmm.... (condensed/paraphrased version).

Motorsports is all about the CAR. Tire engineers know what temperature is best for traction, what air pressure is best for what track temperature. Suspension engineers know camber vs. toe, what the insertion of a spring rubber means to damping rate.... but if a crew chief and a driver can't communicate effectively? Shuffle the deck and start over. (See RCR's 2009 season for examples). Human factors research just hasn't made its way into the domain... and there's good reason for that. I'd still like it to change.

For 'standard' road vehicles, driving simulation is often used to simulate high-risk situations and measure human performance. Most current simulators are designed to allow for parameters such as suspension, curb weight, torque, acceleration, etc, etc to be adjusted to affect vehicle performance. But the focus, due to limited resolution, is how the DRIVER reacts. In motorsports, where precision is everything (think how much happens in a tenth of a second), there's really no room to consider what's "between the steering wheel and the seat". They can tune a car to a driver; tune a driver to a car? Or a TEAM to a car? The limited resolution of a simulator could mean disaster (or at least a poor finish) on the track.

Drivers have been taking advantage of simulation (of a sort): drivers use both iRacing and video games to learn track layouts, this is becoming more important as testing restrictions are tightened. Still, there's a lot more that the simulation and human performance communities have to offer to motorsports... and that gives me something to talk about for the next couple of days.