ISSUE 1 | VOLUME 1 | YEAR 2018

THE EX ‘STIG’ BEN COLLINS HAS SEEN THE FUTURE

NIC HAMILTON ON RACING LEWIS,RACING HIMSELF, AND RACING CLIOS

As “Ready Player One” recently demonstrated, sim racing is the

gateway to Virtual Reality. In the movie, the players sped through

a world populated by scarier curves than the Monaco Grand

Prix while dodging a giant Donkey Kong who was trying

to pulverize them. I grew up playing Pac Man and Eye

Spy …

Spielberg’s futuristic vision of VR is already here. The Games Industry, led by a few notable visionaries, has spurred in-novation on to an unprecedented level. Who would have imagined that a graphics card company, Nvidia, would pioneer the Artificial Intelligence inside the robots that will be driving the cars of the future. Or that games would become so vivid that they would evolve into professional sports. I became addicted to speed at an early age when I convinced my Dad and my cousin to push my ped-al kart until they were sprinting, and then let go. After that anything with a steering wheel was fair game in my view. READ ON

From racing Lewis on sims (was Nic faster?) to carving out a career in motorsport, beating the odds is what Nic Hamilton’s been doing since the day he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Now racing in the hyper-competitive world of Renault Clios in the UK, Nic looks back to the future…READ ON

Project CARS GO is Go Slightly Mad Studios has teamed up with US-Korean developers GAMEVIL to bring the Project CARS franchise to mobile devices. The game will be called Project CARS GO.

“Alongside GAMEVIL, Project CARS GO puts players in the driver’s seat to experience the adrenaline pumping racing game in a whole new way,” said Ian Bell, CEO of Slightly Mad Studios. “The racing genre has a large, dedicated fan base, who are going to be stomping the gas pedal and burning rubber very soon.”1

SlightlyMAD W rld

NIC HAMILTON LIKES THE ODDS―BECAUSE HE KEEPS BEATING THEM ... Page 1

“THE STIG” BEN COLLINS HAS SEEN THE FUTURE—VIRTUAL REALITY ... Page 1

KEEPING SANE WHILE WORKING FROM HOME―AVOIDING THE PITFALLS ... Page 2

HOW WE ENGINEER VIRTUAL CARS DOWN TO THE VERY NUTS AND BOLTS ... Page 2

Pay it ForwardSlightly Mad Studios backs 10-year-old Mil-

la Sjorstrand’s racing dreams as she follows

in the heavy bootsteps of many Swedish

aces that have come through the self-same

school of hard-knocks

So Milla, how did a 10-year-old racer get into motor racing and how?

I drove rental karts when I was on vacation with my family and it was fun, and when I was sev-en-years old, I tested a racing kart. I really loved the speed in the racing kart so I got a racing license and then a race-kart and started practicing. I did almost a full season just prac-ticing and this is my second full season doing races.

What does sponsorship mean for your racing ca-reer?

It means everything to me. My parents have ordinary jobs and racing is expensive. They can support my racing at the current level, but a crash or a broken engine could stop my season. When we leave the kart or engines for bigger services at the workshop and telling the mechanic what is wrong or needs fixing, he al-ways seems to find a lot more stuff that isn’t working! My sponsors help me find a buffer for unexpected happenings to keep racing. READ ON

“I love my dad and he

does everything for me,

but he isn’t exactly a

trained mechanic!”

Project CARS 2 has been selected to be the plat-form for the first ever “Renault eSports Series.”

This competition is owned by Renault and operated by Events House, one of the com-panies responsible for 2017’s F1 eSports Series.

Online qualifying rounds for this competition are already underway in Pro-ject CARS 2. Our game was selected due to the variety of Renault cars available in the game, and our experience in hosting top level tourna-ments.

Players’ skills will be tested in Renault tour-ing cars, rallycross cars, Clio Cup and Formula Renault. The top players will compete in a live final at Renault’s mar-keting zone at the 2018 British Grand Prix, and the winner will receive a full day of training at the UK’s Palmer Sport race school, including seat time in Clio Cup and For-mula 3000 machinery.READ ON

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RENAULT BRINGS eSports TOPROJECT CARS 2

How to cyber-

engineer race cars

Within the racing game genre, engineering artists such as Casey Ringley are in high-demand—it’s a role that takes years to master (Casey got his start back in the late 1990s), incorporating a passion for mechanics, a deep knowledge of both engineering and physics, and—perhaps most crucially—a test-driver’s ‘feel’ for how a car is reacting on the limit. This is how he engineers the feel for in-game cars from the most iconic automakers on the planet.READ ON

Keeping sane while working from home...Ana Vahia Tiza’s role as HR manager at Slightly Mad Studios is a challenging one, complicated enormously by the studio’s unique, award-winning, and pioneering Distributed Development System that sees staff working remotely on four continents and dozens of countries around the globe. That remoteness―phys-ical as well as cultural and linguistic―can lead to complex issues when communication is reliant solely on emails, Skype calls, HipChat, and no actual person-to-person contact. Ana has been with the company for many years, and has seen and experienced many of the pit-falls―and has also found the solutions through the years to finding a happy balance between home-life and home-work. READ ON

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The first racing games felt a bit like ‘Pong’ by comparison to the real thing. The first ‘sim’ racer that had any value was ‘Grand Prix 2’ by Microprose. The tracks bore some resemblance to the places I was frequenting in a Formula 3 car, and the degree of discipline to sit there for hours shaving a few tenths off a lap time was familiar too. The game-changer was when my teammate linked our computers and we had a three-way race between ourselves and Juan Pablo Montoya, who was extremely fast.

There was an interminable pause in quality between Sim Racing then, and now. F1 teams spent millions creating rigs that lifted and shook you all around, while you steered and pedaled to the vid-eo on a multi-screen. The experience split the drivers right down the middle: those that threw up and those that lied about being sick. The irony was that despite the diabolical handling references these machines produced, the teams were able to extract useful data about different car setups.

Here’s where Ian Bell at Slightly Mad Studios stepped in. Ian’s vision was to re-create, down to the last bolt and fiber of carbon, every car that would appear in his vision for the ultimate sim racing game: Project CARS. Realism was the goal. Assimilating the varying weights and measures of the cars provided a solid foundation, but the holy grail lay in recreating something almost intangible: the tyre model.

The way a tyre behaves is organic and it’s what makes a real car so intuitive to human beings because it responds to every touch. After a painstaking development process, we round-ed on an intuitive handling environment. No more driving by Morse code. You could feel the road through the feedback flickering through the steering wheel. You became one with the car.

That’s where my role developed with the studio. A car either feels right, or it’s really wrong. A mi-nor flaw in the handling or a delay in the resolution is like rubbing sand into your contact lenses. It kills the reality. I worked with the development team to slay these undesirables and chase down the dream. With Project CARS 2 we rounded on a mode of handling that was gradual. The feedback loop between losing and regaining control felt natural, and its that connection that makes it so addictive.

The reality of racing involves a degree pain too. In England, we call it weather. At Le Mans you race for 24 hours come rain or shine at speeds of up to 230mph. In my first race there, it remains etched in my memory for all time. It was an experience we wanted to share with Gamers.

Real racing drivers rarely get the luxury of practicing in the rain because Team Managers generally don’t like sweeping up fiery wreckage. So for those looking to learn how to drive like a Ninja, this is definitely the sim you’re looking for.

Factor in the laser-scanned tracks, depicted in 4K resolu-tion, and you become deeply immersed into the world of speed. Every bump and kerb is reproduced and accurately placed, which means that you learn the rhythm of the track and can carry that over into the real world.

Last year I was asked to do a project at the Nurburgring, and I had to get up to speed before I arrived. The best and only way to learn 170 corners in the two weeks I had avail-able, was to climb aboard a GT3 car and boot up Project CARS. For my line of work, it’s become as routine as going to the gym.

Logitech is probably the big-gest supplier of plug-in steer-ing wheels for racing games and of gaming paraphernalia in general. During a visit to their HQ in San Francisco, I was blown away by the scale and professionalism of their eSports program. Their spon-sored players work in an envi-ronment as advanced as a For-mula One team; with coaches, dieticians, tacticians and ana-lysts pressing for an advantage wherever it can be found.

While you might expect that level of elite performance from a corporate-backed op-eration, the secret to the suc-cess of eSports is the way that it has democratized the Sport. Real racing costs somewhere

between the tens of thou-sands to the millions. For a few hundred dollars, you can hook your steering wheel

into a virtual Nascar, Le Mans or F1 car and drive it like you stole it. The mental skills are broadly the same, as my heart rate told me during a live race at GamesCom. Physically, you get chucked around a lot more in real life because gravi-ty is elusive like that.

But don’t presume that gam-ers aren’t fit.

Be ready for the next gener-ation of Player One to walk onto the grid and surprise you.

THE EX ‘STIG’ BEN COLLINS HAS SEEN THE FUTURE

The game-changer was when my teammate

linked our computers and we had a three-

way race between ourselves and Juan Pablo

Montoya, who was extremely fast

We don’t come from a motorsport background at all―far from it, we were just a poor black family when Lewis was born. My dad back then did what many dads do―work hard to provide, and then on weekends find ways to hang out with his kid. He kept coming up with cool things to do with Lewis, and that’s how they began remote control racing.

Lewis had a natural ability at it, which was immediately obvious, so he joined a championship―he was six, maybe seven-years old―and was racing against grizzled old pros in their 20s and 30s. Didn’t matter, of course, because he won the British Championship when he was like, seven! It was pretty clear he had amazing hand-to-eye coordination and people suggested my dad get him to try karting. He won his first time out, and from there my dad bought him an old kart, a real banger, to go racing with. It was more for fun back then, you know, just dad and Lewis hanging out on weekends―until Lewis immediately started beating everyone in that old banger, won his first race, and just kept on winning.

By 10 Lewis was British Champion, and then things got serious ―my dad had to work three jobs to keep Lewis in racing, but at the same time his talent was clear, and I guess my dad also saw it as a way to get us, as a family, out of the gutter. That was about the time―I’m eight years younger than Lewis―that I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. I wanted to be a part of it, of course, and mot-orsports became our lives as a family, following Lewis up the ladder, but it was all pure chance that it happened this way, you know? Watching Lewis in motorsport fed my love of the sport growing up. When I was seven-years old, I persuaded my dad to give me a go in a kart, but I was too weak to operate the brake and ended up having an enormous accident―that scared me a lot. But the love of motorsport endured, and as I grew older, I became more-and-more fascinated by sim racing. At first, I used only the buttons, but with GTR―the old SimBin game that was created by Slightly Mad Studios’ CEO Ian Bell―I started using pedals and a wheel and really got into racing big-time. My dad, he used to give me a hard time: “Nic, read a book or do something constructive!” But I just loved racing games. And it became part of my story. Mine and Lewis’s.

Back in the day Lewis and I would spend days playing GTR―I remember I’d set a time and then head off to school and Lewis would spend the whole day trying to beat my time and wouldn’t allow me to have a go again until he beat my lap by a considerable amount! I remember once, I set a time at Monza with a Ferrari, and he finally, after a whole day or something, beat it, and I came home from school and beat his time in two laps!

Lewis and I spent a a lot of time playing sim racing games together when he was driving in the feeder series, working his way up. Aside from GTR, we’d play Crammond’s Grand Prix games, Grand Prix II and III and IV―and we were really serious about it all, you know, we’d update it with all the latest patches and download community packs and what-not, and we’d literally spend ages getting it all to work―hours and days!

NIC HAMILTON ON RACING LEWIS, RACING HIMSELF, AND RACING CLIOSNic on: Growing up with Lewis

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We were playing games like TOCA as well, and he taught me how to use manual gears and stuff like that. By then he was getting really good, but I would always be there or thereabouts. Then, as his career developed and he hit Formula 1, he moved to Switzer-land, and so the gaming time that we used to have together at home was not the same because he lived so far away from me. That was the time when I was big into gaming, big into GTR, and we got the same set of computers and racing rigs, and we would play together online with guys like Kovalainen and so on. Those were great days.

Nic on: Carving a Career in Racing

Working on Project CARS as a consultant, that is an integral part of my story. I was fortunate to stumble into the project―I had a contact at another gaming company who told me about this new sim, Project CARS, that was in development, and Ian Bell and I, we just hit it off, you know, and suddenly I went from lov-ing games to actually developing a game, which really was some-thing so unique and special. Even more so that the developers were the same studio who made GTR, which changed my life.

I put my whole life and soul into it and everything I do, and I al-ways wanted to work on games and actually doing it alongside my motorsports―that’s very special.

As part of the promotion for the franchise, I had a great oppor-tunity to showcase what the game can do and what I can do, and being featured on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and in all sorts of media, that was important to me, as it allowed me to tell my story, and I hope inspire people to just keep fighting, you know, keep chasing their dreams because anything is possible.

That’s my story―and sim racing is so much part of that in that it allowed me to train and prepare for my career as a real-world driver.

Nic on: Clio Cup Racing

I did that entire season with mixed results, and did 2012 as well, but as you know, motorsport is very expensive, and my father was sponsoring most of it off his own back, and we got to the point where we were all really stressed out about the money and the results and so on, so I said to my dad, “Listen, I want to do it for myself, so you can relax and the pressure is off me, too.” For 2013, I did half a season in European Touring Cars―I was ly-ing 10th when I had to withdraw due to funding issues. But that was a great season for me―against 32 drivers, being able to prove myself, with my first race at Monza being up in seventh, that was just crazy.

But the funding ran dry, and, in 2014, I was fully invested in con-sulting for Project CARS and out of the cockpit. But in the back-ground, I kept thinking about how to reinvent myself, how to find the funding to get back into full-time motorsports. During the development of Project CARS, I learnt a lot about how to market myself, how to work on professional relationships, how to find and keep sponsors, all that stuff which is fundamental to a driver.

At the end of 2017, with Project CARS 2 out the door, I took my-self into my bedroom with my laptop and created a presentation with which I began “knocking” on people’s doors. I sold my story, you know, both behind the wheel and also outside the cockpit―name recognition and my life story. And it actually worked for the first time in my life.

I created everything myself and I’m really excited and proud to be back behind the wheel and to have done it all off my own back. I’m racing a full season in the British Clio Cup Champion-ship, one of the most cut-throat series in Europe. The cars are separated by mere tenths, and some of those guys have been racing 20 years. Honestly, even when you’re down in 16th it’s like being 3rd or 4th in any other series because the margins be-tween the drivers are just so close.

I guess we’ll see what the future brings―the most important thing is to just keep getting out there and trying and never-ever giving up.

My first-ever season in real motorsport was back in 2011―and I was thrown very much into the deep-end! I hardly had any re-al-world training at all back then, and getting into that car, with my condition and no training―that’s where all those years of sim racing really helped, for sure. But that was hard, and being a Hamilton meant so much pressure from expectations, and it didn’t help that I had a BBC crew follow me around the whole season!

Milla on: Training

My local track is in the town Södertälje where I live, and it’s where I have done most of my practice. But I go to other tracks around Stockholm to practice too.

Milla on: Simulators

I use them a lot, especially during the winter when I can’t get any other driving other than indoor rental karting. I use the karts in Project CARS and also the fast cars I want to race one day when I grow up!

Milla on: Karts

I have a CRG kart with a Raket 95 cc engine. In my class the top speed is just below 90 km/h. Next year I will change class to a faster engine.

Milla on: Her team

My dad John is my mechanic. And my coach. And my truck driver. And my whole team!6

Pay it ForwardMilla on: Competition

I race in the Middle-Sweden Kart Racing Championship. It’s a very tough championship. The Swedish F1 driver Marcus Er-icsson used to race there too when he was my age. I also do other races out of the championship when it fits in the sched-ule. I race because it’s exciting and I love competing.

Milla on: Career

Right now we race for fun, but if I can keep racing, who knows where this will go? My dad cheers for McLaren in Formula 1, but I want to race for Ferrari.

Milla on: Girls in Motorsport

In every race there are between 27 and 35 starters in my class. Around 10 of those are usually girls.

Milla on: The future

I want to win and continue to develop as a driver. Racing in the UK would be fun! I also hope to be able to do karting in It-aly, because that’s where the fastest drivers in the world race.

SLIGHTLY MAD news FROM AROUND THE GLOBE— New Zealand insurance company Star Insurance Special-ists sponsor Project CARS 2 eSports. The “Project CARS 2 NZ Championship” is broadcast on Sky Sport on Tuesdays. (Read on in the NZHerald)

— The UK has 630 game development studios, 48 percent working out of Central London, incl. Slighly Mad Studios, mak-ing the UK the 5th largest developer of games in the world. (Read on in ESI)

— The British Esports Association taps Project CARS 2 for its inaugural “British eSports Championships”. (Read on in ESI)

— Influential mobile gaming news site Pocket Gamer—one of the world’s top 100 websites according to the Guardian newspaper, and The Sunday Times’ Top 5 Websites for Gam-ing, tapped Slighty Mad Studios’ forthcoming mobile game, Project CARS GO, in its “Hot 5”. (Read on at Pocket Gamer)

— With the 24H of Le Mans just around the corner, Project CARS 2 fans get the “Spirit of Le Mans” DLC to recreate the world’s most enduring and thrilling endurance race. (Read details here)

Remote working comes with many positives and is, I believe, one of the reasons why turnover of staff at our studio is extremely low. But as HR manager, my role requires that I am also aware of the very real dangers that remote working, over a prolonged period of time, can have on individuals.

Slightly Mad Studios has a central admin’ hub in London but the majority of our 150-odd crew log in to work remotely, using Jira, HipChat, Skype and so on to coordinate their productivity.

Our Distributed Development System has won a few awards over the years, and this isn’t surprising given it goes back to the very dawn of the studio, a time before remote access even be-came a ‘thing’ in all of our daily working lives.

In a fundamental way, remote working has grown up with us as a company, ever since CEO Ian Bell founded the studio from his apartment at the tail-end of last century. Our first game was developed remotely back when the studio didn’t actually have an address and as we became more successful on the back of chart-topping titles such as GTR and GTR2, it was somehow ‘natu-ral’ that the best and most crea-tive talent was recruited without their geographical location ever being considered: what the stu-dio needed, then and now, is talent, and we recruit the best no matter where they’re located.

But that presents its own challenges. If you’re not a remote worker, consider your daily routine: catching a train or a bus, buy-ing a coffee or a newspaper, chatting with fellow commuters, or simply getting into your car and sharing (and swearing!) at fellow road-users all of this gets you outdoors and affords you a certain amount of social interaction. For someone working remotely,

this kind of routine is rare: generally, working from home means commuting from your kitchen to your workspace, and while this saves on commute times and hassle, it also means you don’t tend to get outdoors much. 7

KEEPING SANE WHILE WORKING FROM HOME …Ana Vahia Tiza: HR and the Human

Challenge of Remote Working

And that brings us onto Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a harsh reality for many of our Northern-latitude staff, and a se-rious and damaging condition with knock-on effects on general well-being and productivity. Let’s face it: we were not made to be living in the dark! Light beings, right?

Take the time to get out, get some fresh air, and do so before you log-in to work. Frequently, in these busy times, we tell our-selves we’ll just quickly log-on and check which emails have come rolling in during the night, and, three hours later, there we are, at our desks, consumed by work. So, before you log-in, be kind to yourself; get outdoors. If your kid needs to be taken to school, volunteer to do that even if it’s a short walk to the bus stop, you’ll be out, and maybe get to know a few fellow parents. Or take a quick walk to the corner shop and get a coffee and say hi to the guy at the counter. Or, ideally, take the time for some ex-ercise! Your health matters to your family, and it matters to your employer as well; be good to yourself. Addressing SAD is often as simple as changing one’s routine; more concerning, however, are the complicated issues that can’t be dealt with by simply getting some air and sunshine and install-ing some new therapy lights in your home office.

Feeling a little alienated?

From feeling disconnected to the project you’re working on to feeling somehow detached from the entire company, for remote workers, these are quite normal feelings to have. In our studio, many of our talents have never actually met their co-workers or managers per-

son-to-person, and as HR manager, I am keenly aware of how this can affect an employee’s morale.

In an office, one can get a sense of how a project is coming along by having a chat at the cooler or overhearing a conversation in an elevator. With remote working, none of this is possible, and this lack of social contact can be difficult at first; working from home can often mean eight hours―and even more when deadlines are being met―of no physical interaction at all with other people. Just you, sitting at your desk. That’s both a sedentary life and a potentially lonely one.Feeling alienated also takes its toll on productivity; after all, as much as we don’t want to admit it, if there’s a hard deadline to

Talent was recruited without their

geographical location ever being

considered: what the studio need-

ed, then and now, is talent, and we

recruit the best no matter where

they’re located

CALM

These guys are awesome at what they do: they are a char-ity dedicated to men’s mental health, reducing suicide, helping people who have lost someone to suicide, and do wonderful work at campaigning for a man’s right to 8

be met, most of us are far more likely to burn the midnight oil for colleagues or managers who we like and respect. Doing so for someone who we know simply from HipChat or Skype or emails can begin to seem as if we’re taking instructions from a remote HAL-like entity. Add to that the very real misunderstandings that come from text-based-only communications, and you begin to see the real challenges of remote working.

There are a lot of pitfalls here: from lack of social contact and meaningful person-to-person relationships to the toll it can take on family life (the assumption that, because you work from home, you must surely have the time to insert domestic chore―dishes, shopping, cleaning up, babysitting and so on), all of this can have implications on an employee’s productivity, mental health, and physical well-being.

And that is where I come in.

The first and most important thing here is communication, which is a word I actually hate―I much prefer the old-fashioned word “talking”. There is, for me, a difference; some-times you don’t want to communi-cate, you just want to talk.

Being in HR means I serve as a point of contact for our employees; and when they approach me, my reply is always the same one―take that step and start the conversation with your

colleagues and manager. Ask for help when you need it. People who care about you will be supportive. So trust them! And you can offer help to others too. This doesn’t just cover the practical things like giving someone technical ad-vice, it can be as simple as asking your colleague how they’re do-ing. And if someone asks you how you are doing, have the cour-age to be honest.

This is one of the reasons why we always organise a yearly Christ-mas party where all our employees are flown in to the UK for a few days to meet-and-greet their colleagues and managers.

Finally, there are many resources out there to help you if you feel you need it. Remember, you matter, to your colleagues, friends, family―you matter. Reach out; that’s the first step, especial-ly when you’re working remotely: the lack of person-to-person contact does mean even those who are closest to you won’t al-ways be able to see that you may not be in the best place, but that failure is not because they don’t care―it’s just the reality of remote working.

“Your health matters to your family, and it

matters to your employer as well; be good to

yourself”

ask for help without fear of judgement. https://www.the-calmzone.net/about-calm/what-is-calm/

Our mental health should be a top priority, which means being proactive and embracing the three golden rules of mental health practice―repeat, repeat, repeat.

Also keep in mind there are tricks to trick our mind and help our body:

Know Your Triggers

Self-observation and the ability to acknowledge what bothers you will help you immensely in anticipating de-pression and act accordingly.

Swap a Negative for a Positive

Has a negative thought or feeling popped up? Swap it for a positive. Just try it. For example: “I hate getting up when it’s dark out” to “I love being awake for the sunrise”.

Eat Well, Drink Water, and Exer-

cise

Make time for yourself.

Breathe Well

Stop breathing automatically and introduce deliberate breaths, or mindfulness! Take a deep breath in through your nose. Yes: all the way in! Fill your belly with air so it expands. Hold it. Count to three. Slowly breathe out through your mouth. And yes again: all the way out! Relax your shoulders.

Make Sleep a Priority

Get off the phone at night. And get off the phone first thing in the morning. That urgent email? It can wait half an hour. Do take phone-free and computer-free breaks during the day. Get away from your electronics for lunch: find a park, go out on your balcony, have a quick nap. As one researcher in this area, Dr. Michael Britt puts it: “Naps truly are important. What we find is that 15-20 minutes of downtime through either a nap or a walk allows the brain to consolidate memories. These breaks help our neurons to solidify the things we’ve learned.”

Keep a Routine

You should find a routine that works for you and stick with it, even if you are working outside conventional working hours. Structure is of crucial importance.

Do Something Kind for Someone

and Do Something Kind for Your-

self

Depression tends to avoid those who have found ways to be happy, so take good care of yourself!

Remote working should be viewed as the chance to be creative in shaping our working reality.

RESOURCES AND MINDFULNESS

HOW TOCYBER-ENGINEER

RACE CARSCasey Ringley is Lead Technical Vehicle Artist at Slightly Mad Studios; he leads the engineering process on all vehicle art production and in-game visual-effects systems—in other words, building them and then ensuring that they handle correctly.

For those who are interested in his day-to-day job, Casey gave a fascinating interview with Honda, which you can read here.

Creating a car for a high-end simulator is about more than simply inputting raw numbers into the physics engine; no matter how accurate the engine is, there is always the ‘hu-man’ touch that is needed to ensure the car handles as it does out in the real-world. The same, of course, applies to laser-scanned tracks: you can scan a track to ensure it repli-cates the real-world track to almost the millimetre, but only a driver with experience can pin-point why one turn will have just a little less grip than the rest of the track, for reasons no-one will ever know.

During the lead-up to the release of Project CARS 2, a series of videos were produced (#BuiltbyDrivers) highlighting this close working relationship between auto manufacturers, drivers, tyre manufacturers, and the studio. For Project CARS

2, drivers were not simply endorsing the product; new motorsports such as rallycross needed the sure-touch of professionals in order to lead engineers such as Casey to-ward unrivalled accuracy.

The simulation engineers at Slightly Mad Studios need to get it all right in order to get a car to behave in-game as it would in real-life—so accurate that many racing drivers use SMS’s simulation technology to test for their real-world rac-es. Here’s how that process works …

BUILDING A CAR

Suspension

A good starting point for building any car is to look at the suspension geometry. With modern cars, we often receive detailed CAD models from our automotive partners. Pickup points from these models can usually be applied directly into our dynamic suspension model to be sure that things such as caster angle, kingpin inclination, roll centers, etc., and chang-es of these with respect to suspension travel, all match the behavior of the real car.

The steering geometry here also plays a direct role in calcu-lating forces which come through on FFB steering wheels, giving drivers a ‘feel’ for how the car is reacting, so this a key area of focus and a main driver in what makes an RWD pro-totype have different cornering feel to an FWD touring car.9

Suspension Setup

This data often comes from the manufacturer. Things like ho-mologation forms for modern GT3 cars include a vast amount of information for spring rates, damper force vs. velocity plots, and anti-roll bar dimensions. These values generally plug directly into our model or can easily be approximated with best-fit curves to match the real car over its range of setup options.

Chassis

The most important aspects of the chassis itself are mass, center of mass, and moments of inertia on each axis. The former pairing is relatively simple to measure on a real car; moment of inertia (MOI), on the other hand, is a much more complicated affair.

To measure it accurately requires a large turntable and setting up a car with no fluids and rigid suspension to remove dynamic effects—all of this along with a great deal of test rig calibration in order to produce accurate values.

It’s quite an ordeal, and although we have received this kind of data on occasion, it is very rare. A much more common approach, and the one we use, is to break the car down into seven or eight component boxes such that their size and mass create a reason-able approximation for the known specifications and dimensions of the real car. The result from this approach can be remarkably close to MOI measurements from a real car.

Other chassis elements include aspects such as the fuel-tank size and position, which also play a part in vehicle handling. Modern race car designers put a premium on locating the fuel tank as low as they can and as near to the Centre of Gravity as possible so that handling does not change significantly as fuel-load burns off.

But race car engineering is not an exact science, of course, which is why you will also find superb racers such as the Aston

Martin DBR1 fitting their fuel-tank right out at the other end of the spectrum—a 182L tank hung way out behind and above the rear axle. Weight distribu-10

tion therefore changes all the way from 40:60 to 50:50 in this car, depending on fuel load, so the chassis dynamics will evolve significantly over a long run. Getting this kind of accuracy in our simulated cars is vital—not only for us, but also for our manufac-turer partners.

Engine & Gearbox

Dyno plots are the gold standard for engine model creation. We use them whenever possible to match the torque curve shapes, and we then add to that minor calibration for known power lev-els (because all dynos have some calibration factor in-built and are more about ‘torque curve shape’ and relative differences rather than absolutes).

Our engine model works on a volumetric system—amount of air flowing through it—so setting up the intake system is the next step in making sure throttle response is correct, while also pay-ing close attention to the effect of things like engine air restric-tors being correct.

Turbocharged engines get a boost pressure curve mapped over the full engine RPM-range, which is especially important for mod-ern race cars as balance of performance is largely done through controlling how much boost turbo cars can use at various engine RPM. This ensures both power level and throttle response is cor-rect—something that a few of our drivers are not too thrilled with when we accurately model the turbo-lag inherent in some

of the early 1970s monsters!

Hybrid

Our hybrid power unit system is essentially adding electric mo-tors in parallel with the ICE engine. We give it basic specs such as maximum torque and power output, storage capacity, recharg-ing properties, etc., and then hook it into the drivetrain to assist in driving the car.

The modern LMP1H field are a challenge in this respect, mainly because so much of the tech’ is highly-secretive, but the regu-lations dictate enough detail (max power output, total energy per lap at Le Mans, for example) that it is possible to observe on-board telemetry and reverse-engineer the systems so our game model is as accurate as possible. This actually does bring up a point about our working relationships with auto-manufacturers: they’re happy to share detailed information, but some racing technology will always remain a secret, sometimes even years after a car has been retired from competition.

Drivetrain

Our driveline model is a modular system where each element of the car, from engine crankshaft through to the wheels, is as-sembled from a range of building blocks: clutches, differentials, bearings, gearboxes, brakes, couplings, shafts and so on to link everything together.

Each component of each car is tuned for inertia, stiffness and damping properties, and special functions such as the various types of differential (clutch & ramp, geared torque biasing, viscous, locking). This, for a ‘simple’ car, might be modeled as:

ENGINE->CLUTCH->GEARBOX->DRIVESHAFT->DIFFERENTIAL->AXLES->BRAKES->WHEELS

A complicated AWD car might send the GEARBOX output through center differential, one shaft of the center differential’s output going to another differential on the front axle while the other shaft goes through a handbrake-activated disconnect before reach-ing a third differential on the rear axle. Our system allows for a completely arbitrary design of the driveline models using as few or as many of those building blocks as is necessary to connect the engine to the wheels. This lets us create accurate models for everything—from your average FWD hatchback to the 1968 Lotus 56 AWD turbine-powered IndyCar to the Ford Bronco ‘Brocky’ with a transfer-case 4WD system which can toggle between 4WD and RWD modes.

Aerodynamics

When we’re really lucky, a car’s reference data will include a complete aero’ map showing how it responds to ride height and setup changes for drag, downforce, and center of pressure. The task then is one of matching the behavior in our system which is composed of 8 individual aero’ elements, each with unique response to setup changes, ride height, chassis rake, yaw effects, and non-forward motion.

Tyres

Cars usually begin their development life on ‘donor’ tyres from a similar car. As other elements fall into place, focus shifts to the tyre construction so the carcass handles vertical and cornering loads appropriately. We monitor deflection in the model to adjust the sidewall and tread construction so the magnitude of translational and torsional deflection is in the correct ballpark and occurs in a way that suits the tires being modeled—radial, cross-ply, or some hybrid in-between. The rubber compound is then tuned for adhe-sion, thermal, and wear properties to suit what is used on the real car. This process then iterates to finer detail until the performance aspects all match the real data as close as possible.

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PROJECT CARS &GLOBAL ESPORTSEsports is a key aspect of the Project CARS 2 brand, and one of the main ways in which we keep our community of fans engaged with Slightly Mad Studios’ products for the long-term after each game’s release.

Esports are multiplayer video game competitions which are usually live-streamed online so that fans can watch their favourite games and cheer-on their favourite professional players in action. The winners receive large cash (or other) prizes that serve to incentivise participation, as well as raise the stakes to engage the online audience of viewers via Twitch and Facebook Live.

The motor industry is starting to see eSports as a new way to reach a younger audience. Our gam-ing hardware partners are also engaged with these competitions, sponsoring teams, drivers and even the competitions themselves. Names like NVIDIA, Logitech, Thrustmaster, and Oculus have all supported Project CARS competitions, and sponsored Project CARS teams over the last three years. Sim-racing is also the next emergent form of motorsport. It is already being used by events such as McLaren’s “World’s Fastest Gamer” to uncover new driving talent.

We have been hosting major tournaments in the Project CARS franchise since 2016, awarding €25,000 in prizes in that inaugural year alone, and €25,000 in 2017. This was funded by both the series’ sponsors, and by franchise publisher, Bandai Namco. There are approximately 35,000 active eSports gamers in Project CARS, of which 4,000 are pro-level drivers, spread across 1,200 teams. This brings authenticity and a competitive edge to the game. Most of the top teams are European, with France being the most successful country to date. We have also held live races in bespoke eSports arenas: in 2015 in the ESL Arena in Paris, and in 2017 in the ESL Arena in Cologne.

The 2017 major series, known as the “SMS-R Championship”, featured studio broadcasts by ESL, one of the world’s largest eSports produc-tion companies. The 10-round championship concluded in the World Finals at gamescom, the world’s largest gaming convention, and approx-imately 120,000 people watched the series via Facebook and Twitch live streaming.

In 2018 we are continuing to demonstrate our commitment to eSports with several new competi-tions. The first was the “A1 eSports League” in the spring of this year. Austrian telecoms giant A1 funded its own eSports tournament in partnership with ESL. The competition featured just two games; eSports juggernaut League of Legends, and a Rallycross competition in Project CARS 2. In

our segment, €15,000 was awarded to the top players, and the competition was even-tually won by the G2 eSports team, which is owned by two-time F1 world champion, Fernando Alonso.

Project CARS 2 has also been selected to be the platform for the first ever “Renault eS-ports Series.” This competition is owned by Renault and op-erated by Events House, one of the companies responsible for 2017’s F1 eSports Series. Online qualifying rounds for this competition are already underway, using the Commu-nity Events mode in Project CARS 2.

Our game was selected due to the variety of Renault cars available in the game, and our experience in hosting top level tournaments. Over the course of the tournament, players’ skills will be tested in Renault touring cars, rallycross cars, Clio Cup and Formula Renault.

The top players will compete in a live final at Renault’s mar-keting zone at the 2018 British Grand Prix, and the winner will receive a full day of training at the UK’s Palmer Sport race school. Including seat time in Clio Cup and Formula 3000 machinery.

We are also working to final-ise the sponsorship arrange-ments for the 2018 edition of our major series, the SMS-R Championship, which will see last year’s champions, BAM esport return to defend their

title against the rest of the world’s fast-est eSports sim-racers. We are also work-ing on con-cepts for ad-

ditional manufacturer eSports championships with our auto-motive partners. More details will be announced later this year as negotiations progress.

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€15,000 was won by the G2 eSports

team, which is owned by two-time F1

world champion, Fernando Alonso