Younger drivers get a leg up on reconfigured Homestead thanks to video games.
By BRANT JAMES
Published November 13, 2003
HOMESTEAD - Matt Kenseth cleared Turn 4 and nestled his No.17 Ford into the racing groove along the front stretch at Talladega Superspeedway. Nothing but clean air and a checkered flag in front of him.
But Kenseth's rearview mirror suddenly blazed with the reflection of a black Ford, "e-i-p-r-a-h-S' across the hood. By the time he and Kurt Busch passed the grandstand, the No.97 was tucked inside, crumpling in Kenseth's left door. Kenseth was at his mercy. Busch sidled up into Kenseth again, sending his teammate toward the wall. Just enough. Busch held his car low and breezed through the checkered flag.
Darn you, Kurt.
Reset.
Video games are much more than a casual pastime for many racing drivers, though Busch's virtual paint-trading with Kenseth was one of the more interesting exchanges during a tournament held between drivers at Talladega this summer. Today the super-realistic games, which can be played online against anonymous opponents, or versus friends in a motorcoach at a racetrack infield, are quite often virtual race simulators.
Intelligence reports were circulating about the redesign of Homestead-Miami Speedway even as dump trucks and front-end loaders caked piles of dirt into the corners of its formerly flat-banked turns.
"The boys playing the video game said Homestead's going to be real fast," said Busch Series driver Scott Riggs in September, revealing a bit of information at once telling and sublime. "With that new banking in there, they could be pushing 180 (mph) in the straightaway."
All of Winston Cup's drivers got to test the new variably-banked surface at the track south of Miami on Wednesday, but many of them, the virtual generation, if you will, had circled the 1.5-mile track hundreds of times already, picked out the tight entry into Turn 1, felt for the racing line exiting Turn 2, followed the teal-painted walls down the straightaway at 180.
The rest had heard the scouting report at some point or another, disseminated from the mobile homes of Dale Earnhardt Jr., Casey Mears, or Elliott Sadler, who nearly missed the driver introductions at the 2002 Daytona 500 while engrossed in a role-playing game in his coach/arcade.
"(Games) give you the basic idea of what is going on before you get to the track," said Mears, a rookie in just his second full season in NASCAR. "They're actually pretty accurate to where the bumps are and the seams. The thing you lack is feel. But the rest is very good."
EA Sports, whose development lab is in Lake Mary, creates realistic replicas of each Winston Cup track for its NASCAR Thunder game by gathering exact geometric information with on-site measurements and photography, and compares it with track blueprints provided by NASCAR. EA Sports acquired the blueprints of the Homestead revision from the in-house construction firm of parent company International Speedway Corporation. The process was made simpler and the replica more exact because Homestead is the first track to be re-designed entirely with computer software.
The game company then used set-up variables and statistics from its media library of races at each track to tweak its algorithms until the virtual cars perform as close to reality as possible.
The game, which debuted this summer, led executives at ISC to believe that its investment in excess of $10-million was going to achieved the stated goal: improve racing by increasing the opportunity to pass.
"The first time we went down and showed the game to the ISC people they were jumping around the office," said Tom Goedde, EA Sports senior product manager. "From what we showed them, it was going to add roughly 30 mph to the top speed and shave five seconds off a lap."
Between two long rain delays, cars averaged roughly 175 mph at Homestead on Wednesday. Most teams expected qualifying speeds to reach around 180 - more than 20 mph faster than Steve Park's 3-year-old record and very close to the gamers' predictions.
Homestead-Miami president Curtis Gray heard the buzz but was happy to see trucks and cars begin replicating the results on Monday during open testing.
"Not until (Monday) did I feel comfortable," he said. "It did everything we thought it would. They've been as close as one mph or so on all the tracks I've seen."
But Sadler, Mears and Bobby Labonte, who plays Xbox with his son, knew that already. A generation that has known video games all its life might have found another source of information older drivers either miss or discount.
"I would think we have an edge," Mears said. "If you grow up doing something, like playing video games, you have an advantage, or if you like it. I don't think (older drivers) like it very much."
But the younger drivers like them - all of them - very much indeed.
"Junior won the EA Sports 500 at Talladega," Goedde remembered, "and it was about a month before we had released the latest in the Medal of Honor series, and he's real into that. In the middle of the trophy presentation for the race, Junior leans in to our marketing director and asks, "Can you get me an early copy of Medal of Honor?"'
