Anyone here practice their kart driving skills with proper racing games?

The main two games that I've been on lately are Live for Speed and rFactor. rFactor also has karts but they really don't feel like proper karts yet, for that I think we'll have to wait for KartSim to come out.

The great thing about the games is that you can go online and race against hundreds of other drivers, and there are also organized league championships, which is where you find the best racing.

Both games can be downloaded and purchased online, at http://www.liveforspeed.com and http://www.rfactor.net.

Of course to play the games properly you absolutely must have a steering wheel, with decent ones starting at about US$100.

Many will argue that a racing sim will do absolutely nothing to help driving in real-world racing. I feel that it can really get a newbie to grips with the racing line and general understanding of understeer/oversteer and for experienced drivers it can help in staying concentrated, because with a computer game you lose concentration easier than you do in a real car. The good thing is that it adds almost nothing to your racing budget.

Sims helped my son. He always wanted to race and karts were the cheapest to start. I knew even karting costs a lot to win at top levels and that even lower levels were more than we wanted to spend if he changed his mind in a year like kids often do.

One day he came to me about sim racing. He found there was an amateur world championship (actually several) and a professional world championship was starting that year. I told him if he could win those, we would buy him a kart.

He entered a hotlap competition but none of the pros or top amateurs bothered with it. He worked his butt off and set the fastest time at every circuit on the F1 calendar. Often another driver would top him and he put his head down and eventually was back in front. A pro team "hired" (no money, LOL) him as an extra test driver because of his determination. They put him in an amateur team for the 2001 season. He podiumed his first 2 races and won his fourth and continued to win until the title was clenched, at which time a struggling pro team bought out his contract to substitute for a driver they lost.

He was on a pro team in 2002 but struggled against the top 20 in the world. He was 13th after 6 races. But after that he was the top performer and ended 4th for the season.

In 2003 he was hired by a top team and had Coca Cola, EA Sports and other sponsorship. He won the championship with close to double the points of the 2nd place driver. He put a lot of his prize and sponsorship money into formula car and kart racing schools.

I didn't chose my words well when I told him he could have a kart if he won the sim championship. He chose a used 125 shifter!

But he won his first club race from pole in the last race of a season. A new dealer saw him and offered to sponsor him in TaG for the next season. He practiced and tuned and won both the state shifter and TaG championships as well as a STARS (spec racer) 2nd place championship in his 1st season of karting.

Long story but he and I have no question that sim racing was more valuable than 4 or 5 years of real karting because he probably got 30-40 hours of seat time every month which wasn't going to happen in anything that wore out real parts and could only be driven when a track was open, not to mention the huge diversity of tracks to drive on.

Kart Champions is supposed to be coming out eventually as well. I'm not sure when because there is kind of a lack of info on their site. It looks sweet though. Apparently, they'll make sequels and if you win a major karting championship in real life, they'll add you to the next game.

www.kartchampions.com

Hoosier that's quite a story! I can't remember the name of the guy but there's a top Swedish driver that swears by pc simulators, and then just the other day watching porsche supercup the commentator mentioned that one of the drivers had been a pc-gamer that won a drive in a renault cup or something like that and this year is doing supercup quite impressively.

I also remember a story about a guy that was really good in Grand Prix Legends and when he went to a driving school he impressed the instructors enough for them to not believe he hasn't driven a race car before.

There are many that doubt that pc games can do anything to improve real life driving but I'm one that feels it can do a lot more than most realise.

The kart champions game LOOKS really cool. The screenshots have the Macau track! They even have the ugly factory across the road in the screenshots. They've definitely got the branding and realistic graphics to it, it remains to be seen if they get the handling into it. Kart sim's main focus seems to be handling while kart champions are looking for a nice looking game - handling realism wins every time.

Starting this thread made me get out my wheel again and I signed up for a league Live For Speed race as well! I don't know of many in the area but www.australasianleague.com for example lets anyone race as long as your internet connection is good enough.

For those that have never tried a proper PC racing game you might be really surprised at how good they are! You can download the live for speed demo on their website but to get a real idea you have to have a wheel.

Racing online can be absolutely awesome as well - especially in a proper league because you won't get any people that crash on purpose, in fact the racing is probably cleaner than most kart race meetings.

Have you tried International Karting?

I don't follow sim-racing much anymore but a few years back, there was huge differences between the leagues in how realistic they were and therefore how beneficial they were for learning real world skills.

The best leagues extensively customized the software for reality (and also to stop/detect cheating). If its still that way, and I have to assume it is because the "game" makers don't have those things as their top priorities regardless of what marketing says, its worth finding leagues that do customize the software.

Also, I don't think there are sims yet that act like karts in driving or setup, but rather just slap a kart body on a car sim. If true, I'd recommend racing formula car sims instead of karts. My son would have raced kart sims if there had been realistic ones and a proper world championship but found some unexpected benefits (for karting) in sim-racing Formula 1 cars.

The first was that hour and a half races teach concentration and risk/reward assessment MUCH better than sprint kart length races do.

The second was that after racing at Formula 1 speeds, when he started karting in 125 shifters he found them relatively undemanding mentally.

The wheel is an important part of sim-racing.

The best mass produced wheel was the Logitech Momo Force which has been out of production now for years. Every professional F1 sim-racer used this wheel unless they were sponsored by another wheel manufacturer. And at least one top driver that was sponsored by another wheel maker secretly used a Momo Force for championship races. The Momo Force pedals were not the best available though and a few pro sim-racers used other pedals. The wheel/pedals retailed for $199US.



Soon after they discontinued the Momo Force, Logitech brought out the confusingly named Momo Racing Force which was mostly plastic instead of metal and prone to breaking with frequent use. This model is all gray and has a stick shift in addition to the paddle shifts. Logitech did sell a LOT more of these though because they cost about half as much as the Momo Force did.



Recently, Logitech has released a new high end wheel called the G25. It has much better pedals and may be more "fun" to drive because it has better force feedback. The wheel's feel and reliability is equal or better than the discontinued Momo Force but it has a real downside in that it has only two buttons on the wheel instead of the 6 of the Momo Force. Logitech instead put a lot of buttons on the separate stick shift controller that comes with the G25. This is a very serious flaw for Formula 1 simulator racing. You've all seen real F1 wheels, The Momo Force's 6 buttons weren't as many as a driver would want and cutting the wheel buttons to 2 makes the discontinued Momo Force wheel still the best option for F1 sim racing. The new G25 wheel lists for $299US, a huge jump from the Momo Racing Force's $99US price. If you have that much to spend on a wheel, it is by far the best wheel in production today. And if you sim-race a lot, it may be as cheap as the $99US Momo Racing Force in the long run because it will probably last 3 or 4 times as long.

Yup, I think I'm on my third wheel now. First one was a Thrustmaster with the pedals on the wheel where you find the paddle shifters now, very few steering wheels back then had pedals. I think the most realistic games were Grand Prix 1 and Grand Prix 2. That wheel got left in Finland when I moved to Malaysia.

I then got the Logitech Wingman Formula Force:

This lasted a while until it got fried by lighting and I was without a wheel for a while again. Mainly played Grand Prix Legends with it.


I've been using this wheel for a few years now without any problems at all except the pedals which I was able to fix by opening them up and putting a bit of tape where they connect to the base - it's been flawless since then for hours of driving. The pedals are actually almost guaranteed to break after a few months of use.. but the fix is very easy and pretty much permanent it seems at least from my experience.


If my Momo Racing breaks I'll find the money to get this.





Games like Live for Speed do need real skills to drive, the F1 car is probably still a bit lacking in realism but any other cars such as V8 formula-cars and saloon cars and GT cars really do teach a lot about driving technique... if you can't drive you're a few seconds off the pace.



For a game maker with the realistic aspect as their top priority you have to look no further than the guys behind Live For Speed, unlike the big-name F1 sims etc. that might come out with one patch to fix things these guys come out with a few patches a year... almost always to improve on realism. This is probably the only game which allows almost 0 customizing and that is what makes it very good for online racing. Then there is rFactor which has some very good mods(customizing), but it's also a bit difficult to keep up with all the new mods that appear. Ea-sports and similar type F1 racing games are considered as "games" by most.

The problem with LFS is that they don't have real-world tracks. rFactor and Grand Prix Legends for example are good with this because of a massive community that customize the game.


Yeah I think KartSim is the first one that will aim to simulate chassis flex kart-style.


Yeah long races online are great because it is actually more difficult to stay concentrated than in real cars. I've done a few long online endurance races, sometimes in teams.

elljay I had a look at International Karting but it felt like just another "game"... they don't have interest in making it really realistic since their target market don't really care or know if it's similar to real karts.

Oh hey I just noticed that Charlie is selling his Momo Racing wheel in the classifieds section here. For anyone in KL thinking about getting a wheel you might want to consider it. I can vouch for it being brand new - I was there when he tested it that one and only time.

How about GTR2?

Those were the controls my son started with too, both were definitely the best at the time. I think he also used a Wingman (no force) for a while between the Thrustmaster and the Wingman force. Looked the same as the Force but yellow instead of red. He still has a brand new Wingman Force (his backup that was never used)


Its good if Logitech has fixed these. When they first came out, there were also problems with springs breaking in the pedals and the wheel and pedals had very cheap "pots" that soon started giving erratic signals. Most game players didn't notice that but it drove serious racers like you nuts. And the wheels would usually have a mechanical breakage between 40 and 80 hours. I should have said that the problems I mentioned were from when the wheel first came out years ago. It sounds like they improved it a lot.


Just to clarify, I wasn't saying any particular sims didn't require skill, only that the skills required by a game/sim can be different than for real cars/karts. The more realistic, the more the skills transfer to real life racing, which is the subject of the thread.


I need to check that out. When there is a good kart sim, it'll teach kart tuning as well as driving and be even more valuable.

The problem with the pedals didn't actually seem to be the pots just the way they were mounted - the plastic wore down a bit and you wouldn't get full throttle anymore - like you said I was wondering why I was suddenly down on power and lap times a few seconds off - only getting 80% throttle! About 10cm of clear tape fixed the problem - a fix that someone online discovered only a few months after mine went bad. I think I do have one of the very early ones although they probably arrived a bit later in Malaysia, the wheel so far has not given me any probs... fingers crossed. So far it has been good value for money at least for me.. I did read some talk about logitech beefing up the pedals a bit sometime after I bought mine.



Yup I think we're in complete agreement here... I was just pointing out an example of a realistic game. . Many drivers mistakenly feel that racing sims can't help at all... but they just haven't tried the proper ones.

To get the maximum experience from racing gaming, I think a full rig is needed.

I wanna get that!!! How much?