With the coronavirus going on all around us, there’s obviously no professional sports happening at the moment. The main source of entertainment and escape for plenty of people, it’s rather cruel that there aren’t any sports to watch during this banishment to the confines of our homes. I get it: the reason we have to shelter in place is the same reason there aren’t any major league baseball games happening right now. It doesn’t diminish how much I am missing sports, and surely I’m one amongst many.
One discipline that seems to have embraced the situation quite well is that of motorsports. It’s uniquely able to adapt to the world of gaming, the simulation of which offers a convincing translation that it suffices to keep us entertained. Unlike a basketball video game where you don’t physically toss around a ball to play, a car in a racing game can be controlled with a wheel and pedal set-up, offering a decent enough facsimile that pro racers actually use them for training. The more extravagant setups can even offer some modicum of motion and g-force simulation, though those are prohibitively expensive for mere mortals like me who don’t have million-dollar contracts.
But I have been playing racing games with a wheel and pedal (shoutout to Logitech) since the days of Gran Turismo 4 in the early 2000s, and it’s deeply satisfying for me to see how much the “real-life” motorsport community have embraced driving simulators like a Gran Turismo or iRacing during this coronavirus episode. There’s still lots of racing happening on the weekends, just all in the virtual world. Honestly I’m quite thankful for it because it helps to break up the utter monotony of every day being exactly the same as the last.
Of course, I’m eager for real racing to return to real race tracks. There’s no replicating the sights and sounds of drivers man-handling actual cars through a corner, displaying acts of athleticism most of us can barely imagine. I’d also like to go outside and attend races, and indeed there’s no more intoxicating smell than the burning of petrol (sorry, Formula E).
In the meantime, I’m glad we have a pretty good substitute.
This is nuts!