1.  Replace: “I really don’t need a brake at all, just a gas pedal and mad skills” with: “I need to brake before a turn so my car doesn’t end up in a ditch somewhere“.

Most arcade racing games teach you that a brake button is merely a piece of plastic on your controller you don’t use. Trust me, if you want to try a sim racer, and not hate the game at the first corner, learn to brake in a straight line. Most new racing games have some sort of suggested driving line you can activate. Do so, and make sure you follow what it says, if it’s turning red, you probably need to brake. You also have to apply the brake like you would in real life, which brings me to point 2:

2.  Replace: “I’m activated my NOS and turbo booooooooost!” with: “I’m gradually going to apply throttle until I reach full acceleration”

Nothing makes you slower in real life than a burnout, slapping your fat fingers down on the accelerator will do the same thing that your daily driver does when you floor it on snow. Since the cars you race in these games are 5-10 times more powerful than your real life automobile it takes less slippery conditions to make the car feel like it’s on a sheet of ice. If you learn to gently press the controls you will enjoy the game much more.

3.  Replace: “I’m going to floor it and grind this outside wall like Tony Hawk to get around this turn” with: “Must touch nothing, must go faster”

Colliding with anything is a major no-no in a sim racer. It generally slows you down to a halt ruins your car’s performance and in the case of some online sim racers causes you to get additionally punished by an automatically cut throttle. While you can slam into the back of someone else to assist your car in slowing down enough to take a sharp corner. You aren’t going to get very good at the game when you’re in first, when you don’t have any cars to slam into to slow down.

4.  Replace: “I go faster when I drift around a corner!” with: “If I accidentally drift out a little everyone behind me will pass me on the inside”

Unless you’re palying a drift mode or goofing off drifting is a bad idea. It looses tons of speed and control and takes incredible skill to master in a simulation racer. Just like in real life (go figure). We’re taught by most arcade racing games that doing “cool” things like drifting not only don’t penalize us, but reward us in some cases. Which brings me to the final mindset to change, and the biggest one:

5.  Replace: “Oh man, did you see me drift around that corner while activated my slo-mo turbo mode?” with: “Oh man did you see me take the corkscrew at Laguna Seca almost perfectly, I took 2 seconds off my lap record!”

The hardest part to enjoying a simulation racer is being able to submit to learning a new skill. Most arcade racers only reward split second timing, you only have to have a fast reaction time to succeed. In a sim racer you need that and you have to know when to accelerate, when to pass, when to slow down and try again another corner. It takes a while to get good at that. And you definitely need a strange definition of fun to enjoy the experience. To me carving the perfect corner is just as much fun to me as jumping accross the hoover dam while on fire through a t-rex as he explodes. And I accept that I’m weird. Are you?

I’m fully immersed in car-topia as I get that once in a while chance to fuse my inner gamer-nerd with my inner petrol-head. In fact I managed to resist the urge to rewind when I missed a corner bad while trying to overtake in my pimped out digital Cobalt (I know the irony of driving a simulation of my own car). Why did I not rewind this bad move and brake earlier? Because I wanted a reason to take a picture that makes the game seem more action packed than it is.

I’m loving how the achievements are doled out in the new Forza Motorsport. They flow freely as “rewards” for doing “things”. Nothing like Forza 2 in which the game gave achievements only when you did things that involved the words “all” or “every”, for example “Get all the cars in the game” or “Get a gold in every race”.

I’ve been thoroughly rewarded for doing fun things and it shows with how much time I’m putting into the game. The game insidiously tracks how much time you’ve spent racing and how much time you’ve spent in the menus. Which seems like the ratio should be astronomically tilted towards the racing time, but that’s ignoring how much time I will spend laboriously pimping out my cars with various stickers and tuning setups. I’m going to hazard the ratio of time spent in the drivers seat versus fiddling with the various extraneous bits will ultimately be 1:1.

Good bye, life.

This is the last car blog for a while, but it’s a doozy. Next summer when the gaming drought hits I won’t be sad at all. Because summer is when the autocross season starts. Basically I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but I have to say at the outset that if you have a decent auto or know a friend who does makes sure you try going around an autocross course or a road track at some point in your life. You’ll realize just how little you know about driving.

 First of all, here are the two courses I ran at my first event (I went to another one since).

 As is custom at the autocross club I went two, they run a technical course in the morning, then modify it to make it faster and run it backwards in the afternoon. When I showed up in the much talked about turbo Cobalt, expectations were high. Many people had read articles about how fast the car went around the Nurburgring and VIR. In fact, as I rolled into the pit I could hear people talking about the car.

“Did you hear about what cars that beat at VIR in…” they would say. Which was a great feeling, considering I had the cheapest car of the bunch. My class consisted of two BMWs and a Mazda MazdaSpeed3, to give you an idea of the caliber of cars there, let alone the fully modded 350Zs, Corvette Z06s and numerous Miatas.

I got a couple pics of the car from a photographer who takes shots of the competitors. Sadly, no one came with me, so I didn’t have someone looking for my car in particular. Luckily, the club is very welcoming and the guys with cameras make sure to get pictures of everything.

Yes, I have a printout attached to the side of my car instead of real numbers, and a big goofy R to point out that I was a novice. I ended up being ranked in the D-Stock Class instead of the rookie class, which was good for the rookies, as I pointed out on the podcast I might have had an edge on them from my “experience”.

The next event I returned with magnetic numbers in tow.

It’s important to not a couple things here: 1. No “R” on my car anymore, 2. I’m coming out of a hard left hander here, notice the chassis is level and all four wheels are down, 3. You can tell it’s out of a left handed corner because there are pointer cones on their side (I didn’t knock those over). Not shown in picture above: my big goofy-ass smile.

So what have I learned autocrossing?

Well, that it was a ton of fun. That I have a lot to learn…

And that it will shred your tires if you drive as hard as I do. Maybe I need some race rubber…

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but having a lateral g-meter in your car and driving on public roads is like giving a kid a firecracker and telling them not to set it off on days that end in “y”. I’ve spent many of my lunch breaks trying to find twisty roads nearby to really test out the car and have been keeping a leaderboard of sorts of my maximum lateral g pulled.

It’s a little blurry (the iPhone has a decent camera but lacks the ability to take a macro shot), but that’s my new record: 0.88g. It was a hell of a right hander, marked 10mph with a yellow sign that I may or may not have completely ignored. The car is rated to .91g on a flat surface, but on a track or regular roads that pitch with the turn it’s capable of upwards of 1.3g, which is faster than falling, but sideways so it’s much more frightening.

In case anyone was curious where my gage sits, I realize I never actually showed where it hides. And because everyone I’ve sent this picture asks: no, I don’t live on a farm!

Occasionally, smart people do dumb things. (Ironically, the dumb thing here is driving while taking a picture. Those who drive stick and are keen of eye will notice I’m doing 39mph in 4th gear, which is a pretty gentle speed.)

Edit: I think I have to worry about getting too much attention even in my car…

The big wing has already brought several ricer flybys down upon me. “Silly WRX”, I chuckled, “you aren’t an STi…” 

As I had predicted, my blog will every now and then get overrun by a little shop talk. Last Friday I finally got the call to come down to my local dealership and pick up the car I’ve been waiting months for. For those of you who don’t follow my every breath and thought: I picked up a 2009 Chevy Cobalt SS Turbocharged (as pictured in my driveway above).

I’ll no doubt drivel on about my car on a future blog but for now one feature stands out among the rest to prove to me that this is the car for a video gamer who wants to go fast.

Generally speaking, I do not know why I would need to know the barometric pressure. In case you were curious, my personal best lateral G reading has been .51, apparently the car goes to .91…I don’t have the cojones for that.

On the A-pillar (the column to the left of the windshield that blocks your view of the small children you run over) resides what Chevy has conveniently called a “Reconfigurable Performance Display”. Which wouldn’t be convenient usually, but is merely because the next best description, “Small LCD That Tells You a Myriad of Information That Can Either Help or Totally Distract You While Driving”, isn’t nearly as short.

In practice, the device is as useful as you make it. As a 5-speed novice I find having a digital readout of MPH and my current gear selection very helpful. When you’re concerned with following traffic rules and not hitting other cars its very easy to forget what gear you’re in. It wasn’t until I payed close attention to the gage that I noticed some of the clever logic it has, logic I would expect out of a Gran Turismo or Forza, not GM.

Yes, you can change the rpms that the shift lights start and stop on. Right out of GT, Forza and Need for Speed.

You can set the numbers above to appear in the lower right hand corner with the stack of green to red indicators on top. When you are in gear and the FCO (Fuel Cut Off) is deactivated, it displays the gear you are in. What’s neat is when you are coasting in gear or free-coasting with the clutch in the number drops as you’re speed drops to recommend a gear to shift into. Which is a great help to a driver like me who has limited experience with a standard transmission. At this early time in the car’s life I’m supposed baby it and never drive much over 4000 rpm, which makes downshifting a tricky proposition, go one gear too far and I’ll be revving to 5000.

This kinds of display technology is certainly not limited to my Cobalt. As one would expect; GM is late to the party. Mitsubishi actually contracted the Gran Turismo team to program the display on the new Evo X’s excessive LCD readout. (I’m totally jealous)

And because I can hardly contain my excitement:

I love my Cobalt primarily because it’s freaking fast (0-60 5.5sec), but also because it doesn’t look like a cobalt at first glance.

Two-tone interior? Cobalt? Wha?!?!?