Feature
August 13, 2007

The Rules of Auto Racing, Wrecking, and Talking
-or- Back Off, That's My Line!

by Tom "20mm" Hayden

Sound real? Like something in NASCAR? Formula One?

Yeah, except those guys don't get to talk to each other during the race. To their crews and spotters, yes. To each other, while racing, no, and that is probably a good thing. Imagine what that would be like, in the heat of the moment and the race. Something like "your line you monkey's *&#)@$%!?"

Racing and wrecking and talking. Afterwards, they get out of the cars and beat each other up. It has happened, and that's without the voice comms directly between the drivers.

So is it any surprise that in our world, which is simulating the real world of racing, these things occur? Where we do have TeamSpeak and can talk to each other during the race, as well as text chat? No, not really. At least, we can't get out of the cars and punch each other out, but we punch each other's lights out in other ways.

Why is that? Can't we all just get along?

Well, sure, we could. But we're simmers. Our nature is to be competitive. Add to that the dynamic of driving a race car, and being able to talk about it at the same time, and you have a potentially volatile mix.

Imagine yourself in the cockpit on the starting line of a "serious" SimHQ race. You've trained for a week, maybe a month for this moment. All the practice hours, the pre-race practice, qualifying, getting the setups right, making sure your wheel is calibrated, dialed in and to your liking. Set the fuel load, check the tire pressures. Now, it's showtime!

And despite your best efforts not to get all tangled up in a mess at the start, it happens. Turn 1. Someone ahead gets crossways, someone else bumps into them, before you know it it's a melee out there and BANG! Out of the blue you get conked. Maybe you're pushed off the track with damage and now have to regain lost ground and think about a quick pit stop, which means more lost ground. Can you make it a race with the damage? Maybe, but now you're thinking about that instead of racing. Is my wing damaged? How are the tires? Gotta check this and check that and then make a decision. Not in your race plan you say?

Even worse, maybe you're just out of the race. Right there and right then. All that training and practice, for zippo. Thoughts of being in the top 3 finishing positions drift off like helium balloons at a kid's birthday party. Gone.

But not forgotten. Oh no.

Because that's tough to take. You may want a restart and are not shy calling for it. Others (in your mind, those that didn't get tangled up), don't. You have a good idea of the culprits and why what happened happened. Maybe it comes out over the voice comms. Hard feelings follow, and sometimes carry on.

Oh, it's a lovely day at Spa, fans. Players A, B, and C are out of the race before they even got a lap in. Trust me, they're not happy. Players D, E, and F, see an opportunity here with A through C out of the race, and are hell bent to go. Somewhere down towards the bottom of the list we have a player, let's call him X. As in me. Now, X has no aspirations about finishing in the top 3, he just wants to finish. And, he hopes that his crappy driving skills do not finish the upper tier players, like A though F. He gets nervous when he sees a car coming up on his six (sorry, I'm a simulated pilot in another life), and hears a call on TeamSpeak, "On your left!"

"OMG, just stay to the right and let him go. You're drifting left, stop watching him in the mirror! Stay right dammit! Is that a left hand turn coming up? Where do I go now?"

Do I say these things over the voice comms? No, at least, I don't usually. But I think them.

So, let's talk about voice communications in the auto racing arena. Many of the same rules that Dart explained in his excellent article, "Roger, Out! TeamSpeak Rules of the Road" apply here as well. But simulations being what they are, for one thing, different, there are significant differences. And it is those differences I want to talk with you about today.

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