Bedroom racers take on the pros

Ever pictured yourself racing against a Formula One world champion? A new online driving game promises to allow you to do just that. It is called iRacing and it simulates the racing experience so faithfully that it is said to be used by pros, including Jacques Villeneuve, a former F1 world champion, for training. It's open to anyone and so amateur players have a chance of racing against professionals. The game is aimed mainly at American audiences and hence most of the pro drivers are from competitions such as NASCAR (Villeneuve switched to NASCAR racing in 2007). In an effort to extend its appeal, iRacing has just added Silverstone to its menu of circuits (Oulton Park and Brands Hatch are due to be added shortly) and expects to attract to its roster of regular players big-name drivers more familiar in Britain. Such is the detail with which the circuits and cars are reproduced that iRacing is in talks with several F1 teams and drivers about signing them up. The cost - between ?8 and ?12 for a monthly subscription - is a lot less than a set of F1 tyres. All online players, including professional drivers, start as rookies. By showing they can drive competently in progressively faster cars, they move up the ranks and compete against increasingly skilful opponents in driver leagues. Every subscriber has to race under his or her own name - subscribers pay by debit or credit card, meaning top-flighdrivers putting in a few practice laps can easily be spotted. "I recently got an e-mail from a guy who used to race stock cars," says Steve Potter, communications director of iRacing, which is based in Bedford, Massachusetts. "He asked, 'Was that really Jacques Villeneuve I was racing against at 2 o'clock in the morning?' "The fact you have to race under your own name gets to the heart of what we're trying to do. We are allowing people to have an introduction to a part of the real world that would normally be prohibitively expensive." The company's reproduction of every dip and curve of each circuit has won the following of some of the biggest names in American motor sport, including Dale Earnhardt Jr, Marcos Ambrose and Colin Braun, the NASCAR drivers, as well as Justin Wilson, a former F1 driver now racing in IndyCar. The realism is said to be matched by the handling of the cars. Dave Kaemmer, iRacing's co-founder, says the mathematical modelling - which claims to take into account the viscoelasticity of different tyres, for example - makes the program powerful enough to rival the simulators used by top racing teams. "We go to a garage and measure every part of each car," he says. "So we weigh the chassis components, measure all the suspension pick-up points and get data on the driveline. We get information from teams that have run cars on test drives. We then feed that into the multi-body system that is the core of the simulator, so every car handles as it would in the real world. It feels real because, mathematically, it is real." Like other web-based games, iRacing is open to anyone with a PC and broadband. A plug-in steering wheel and floor pedals are the only bits of kit you need to get started. Earnhardt claims more and more NASCAR drivers are using the simulator. "It's interesting to me that Alex Gurney, AJ Allmendinger [both NASCAR drivers] and I can be practising in a race and there's maybe a 50-year-old plumber and a 15-year-old kid who just finished his English homework in the server there with us," he says. Wilson, who raced for the Minardi and Jaguar F1 teams before joining IndyCar, adds: "Some of these guys are faster than professionals. Sometimes I spend the whole race just trying to keep up."