Part Two is just a click away if you haven’t read that first.
“Yeah, that’s my line, pal!” the streamer uttered, taking his videogame car around the corner of the videogame racetrack. In the rearview mirror, the driver he was racing with jammed on the brakes to avoid slamming into the back of his car, having been beaten to the punch. It wasn’t a dirty move, not that I understood that at the time.
(Pexels / Rezk Assaf)
Watching this older gentleman, a retiree from the United Kingdom who streamed himself playing racing games and other vehicle simulator games full-time, fascinated me. For the first time, I was hearing things like racing lines and out-braking someone. This was sometime in 2014. It sent me on a fact-finding mission on Wikipedia.
In my 20s I realized that racing has actual rules. It’s not a demolition derby styled free-for-all as I had been led to believe from pop culture and what goes viral: cars flying in the air, doing flips, ending up in walls. Accidents happen, but dangerous driving is penalized by the racing stewards which does seem antithetical to the fast and dangerous image of motorsports. It’s just marketing. Even Drive to Survive, which I mostly enjoy, is built on drama between drivers, manufactured at times like a season of The Bachelor, and those moments whenever cars come together, complete with slow motion and different camera angles.
There can only be one optimal racing line, so if more than one driver is going into a corner, they will have to pick a line. The battle is fought in the run-up to the corner. Whichever car is ahead by over half the car’s length by the time they turn has the right to that corner. This can mean drivers may try diving down the inside—sticking closer to the inside of the turn—but they may run the risk of running right into somebody who has already committed to the turn from the outside who rightfully holds the racing line. Sometimes it works, and sometimes they take themselves and others completely out of the race, possibly with frightening bodily injuries. An average Formula 1 car in 2023 costs between $12 and $15 million USD.
In the heat of wheel-to-wheel racing it’s not always so cut and dry who “got there first,” so many drivers drive with caution. Forcing somebody off the track is grounds for review and a possible penalty, so they leave a space for other drivers. Then there are some who don’t, who put their car into any gap they see and hope the other guy brakes. Some could even argue this instinct, maybe a lack of self-preservation, is the difference between a driver who is World Champion material and a driver who is not. Ayrton Senna drove with fire. While I think he sometimes goes into full-on reckless territory, Max Verstappen undoubtedly drives with fire. The man is very fast.
Read more about putting together the perfect turn, including braking zones and gear shifts in part four. I said I’m not into car culture, but gearboxes and manual transmissions are friggin’ cool. And F1 cars have eight forward gears to get them up to top speed.