Although I really enjoyed the rain-soaked Loma Prieta PCA AutoCross 3 , I thought it would be cool to try the course again in the dry and perhaps with a bunch of different cars. SO, being a true geek and having carried my little GPS data-acq unit around on the course walk, and having recently found an amazing racing simulator that lets you set up AX cone courses, I set to work hacking up some software to let me do just that.

First, I loaded the course walks, two of which followed the inner & outer cone lines. This gave me the following:

[img]/UserFiles/marina-ax3-GPS-walk-thmb.jpg[/img]

This shows the cones lines and one of my runs (the dotted line). There were a couple of slaloms, so I walked a little circle around those cones which you can just see as darker dots in the tracks.

The simulator (called Live For Speed) has a big L-shaped parking lot in which you can build AX courses:

[img]/UserFiles/LFS 2006-05-30 22-45-08-12-thmb.jpg[/img]

so, back in the program I added the lot outline and realigned the GPS course to fit in the lower area:

[img]/UserFiles/marina-ax3-GPS-walk-insim-thmb.jpg[/img]


and then I had the program generate the course in the simulator by placing cones every 10 feet or so along the outer lines:

[img]/UserFiles/LFS 2006-05-30 22-45-49-26-thmb.jpg[/img]


I tweaked the cone placement by hand in the simulator's course editor to get the slaloms right ad to put in the start & end beacons, and then went driving!!

[img]/UserFiles/insimcar.jpg[/img]


I was actually pretty blown away by how close the simulation felt to the real course. The times & top-speeds for a roughly-similar car were quite close to real-life and I was able to run it hundreds of times in cars ranging from Minis to a Formula open-wheeler. The only real downside is that this particular simulator does not let you add custom cars, so you've got maybe 25 or 30 cars you have to choose between, ranging from Minis to Formula Ones. They haven't licensed any real cars, so they have look-alikes and there are Boxster & 911 equivalents, but no Caymans (as yet!!).

Still, it was a lot of fun. I captured a couple of runs as QuickTime movies:

1. The Boxster-lookalike, various camera angles
2. The Boxster-lookalike, helicopter view
3. The GT3 lookalike, various angles.

For comparison, here's me in the Cayman (in real life!!).

Again, the simulator is called Live For Speed available for download here. There's a free demo version that will load AX tracks but only has 3 cars to choose from. The full version is about $40. The course layout I generated can be downloaded here, in case you want to play.

Wow John, you are quite the geek. This looks like a lot of fun... will you be out for the GGR Ax on June 10 in Alameda? Hope to see you there!

brad

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21-year PCA Member
PCA DE Instructor

Hi Brad!! Unfortunately, the only DE ground school for months is on June 10, and I'm booked into it. I'll certainly be going to the July 8th GGR Ax, and maybe the LPR one on June 18th.