PUSHING THE RIGHT BUTTONS FOR SUCCESS
How GT ace James Baldwin helps F1 gamers improve
You could hardly fail to notice on the motorsport landscape the growing presence, and extreme competitiveness, of sim racing and Esports, boosted in the last 12 months by Covid’s implications for our movements.
Scott Mansell, head of the Driver61 driver development business, and a EuroBOSS champion and former Indy Lights racer, indeed noticed, and did so pre-Covid. So he started creating specific coaching courses for sim racers.
“Driver61 started in the area of sim racing [at] the start of 2020,” he tells Motorsport News. “I already had an idea that a percentage of our audience were sim drivers just from the comments we see on YouTube and inquiries that we would have through the website.
“So it was just a natural progression and it’s a big market in its own right. It was a way for us to take the assets and the knowledge that we had in motorsport and put it into a different area of sim racing.
“Our general outlook is that the two worlds are already quite close together in terms of transferable skills and they’re only going to get closer,” Mansell continues. “The battles that you have out there are real; you could argue that it’s a purer form of motorsport because it can be more equal. And I was amazed when we ran the first trial coaching sessions, the quality of the driver was fantastic.”
And the official Formula 1 video game, F1 2020, is prominent in Esports racing, with even its own official international contest that’s broadcast live. Mansell wanted to offer a tailored course to help people get into the very top echelon of that game’s racers, and brought in James Baldwin to help. It’s now live as the F1 2020 Masterclass.
Baldwin is not only a champion sim racer and McLaren competitor in the F1 Esports contest mentioned, he also adapted astonishingly to real-life competition in British GT last year, winning on debut then contending for the overall title. Yet Mansell thought of Baldwin before these real-life exploits.
“We’d been aware of James for quite a while because of the [YouTube] content that he produces and his World’s Fastest Gamer title,” Mansell explains. “With this course [on] F1 2020, there are certain things that are quite game-specific, so we needed some assistance and we wanted the best driver out there and someone who had the ability to coach as well. Relying very heavily on James’s knowledge, we built the course together. He was the obvious choice. I’ve actually been even more impressed since we’ve known him and especially what he did last year with the real-world stuff.”
Baldwin tells MN: “Scott and Mike [Winter] told me about this course they were making, it hadn’t been developed in any way. They formed a little team to get all the information down, do the tutorials, the demonstrations. Scott [is] interested how the skills can compare from sim to real life, so I’m quite fortunate that I can talk about that quite fresh in the memory.
“[The course is] the first of its kind, no-one’s really done it before, so we wanted to make sure it was right. It took quite a lot of development.”
The course was developed during 2020 and the first cohort has run, with the next starting imminently. Currently it focuses on braking; modules on areas such as steering, racecraft and vision may follow.
“We do a big research period first of all,” Mansell notes. “We define the problems within that platform, we interview a load of drivers, James actually got out there and did some one-to-one coaching as well to really understand what the issues were, and then we package all of that into a stepby-step breakdown of how to be fast, and that’s where we add the value at Driver61.
“The problem is with real world and sim racing drivers, because they probably
think that they’re a great driver already, they just go out and push as hard as they can go and they don’t learn the underlying refined technique, so that’s why we break things down.”
“It’s not normal coaching,” Mansell insists. “It’s a step on from that. I coached at the tracks for 10 years sitting next to people on test days and looking at data, and it isn’t the best way to coach. Breaking things down, layering skills up like people do in other sports, 80% fundamentals, get them perfect, and then tweak the last bit.
“What we teach in the course is not to brake at this point, turn at this point, hit this apex. It’s giving the drivers the tools to figure that out themselves. We do this across all our training. Because if you’re just copying someone you’re never going to be as fast as them and also when the tyres start to go off or the fuel weight starts to come out you can’t adapt to it properly.
“We do that across our real-world training, the iRacing [another sim game] training, the F1 training, we do Assetto Corsa, and we take the same principles. If you want to get into that top 1%, if you want to get within half a percent of James, you need to get a step back, get everything fluid and flowing with your style.”
Baldwin notes: “Scott is really good at that. I learn stuff from his videos because I never really thought about certain things like how you come off the brake.”
“James is being pretty humble there,” Mansell counters. “We’ve worked with or viewed a lot of sim drivers and he is probably the most adaptable one that I’ve seen. With sim driving, one of the pros is that you get unlimited test time, but one of the negatives is that you get unlimited test time! So you have drivers that just are fast because they memorise everything.
“This is why James did so well in British GT because he understands the physics of the car and he can adapt his technique to suit and that puts him apart from some of the other sim drivers.”
The course provides documentation plus live briefing sessions from Mansell and Baldwin where you learn about the technical depth such as in trail braking or manipulating the grip. Then there are hours of set exercises on the track where you put these things into practice.
“That’s where the magic happens,” Mansell adds, “because you’re trying to put some conscious awareness on a technique which is incredibly difficult to do, but you have to do that and probably drive round a bit slower and put attention on it, get the technique right and then repeat it and repeat it so that it becomes automatic, and then you can move onto the next thing.”
There are also one-to-one or small group training packages, and Driver61 also recently acquired hotlaps.io and has added data logging and analysis software to its F1 2020 offering.
“One great thing about sim racing is that you have a bit more flexibility in how you can coach,” Mansell adds. “You can choose whichever circuit you want, you can do whatever you want on that circuit, there isn’t any traffic, it doesn’t cost £35,000 a day to hire! So you have scope to be a lot more creative in how you train.”
So how has Baldwin found the transition into coaching? “When I started doing this with Scott and Driver61 I knew what I was talking about but I didn’t know how to translate it to someone who’s just starting out,” he admits.
“I’ve developed that skill, Scott and the guys have definitely helped me because Driver61 has an array of coaches that specialise in different games and stuff.
“It’s a skill that I didn’t have before and I enjoy doing it, giving something back, and it does make you reflect on your own driving a little bit more. So when I am sim racing myself or competing I’ll go the extra 1%, it’s a win-win situation.
“You can’t see yourself as a GT3 driver or an F1 Esports driver, I’m just a driver doing different things, and if I know more overall then it’s going to help. I’ve noticed one example, I can jump from a singleseater situation with downforce to a GT car with no downforce pretty quickly and easily now and I understand what I need to do differently from one car to another.”
And both Mansell and Baldwin are convinced that sim racing, and its coaching, is only going to grow. “F1 Esports [is] clearly the biggest racing Esport and in five years’ time it could be one of the biggest Esports in the world with the backing of Formula 1,” Baldwin says. “There’s going to be more people hungry to figure out how you be fast. It’s growing exponentially every year. And it’s not easy, it took me about two years and lots of learning from fast guys, lots of graft, and I’m not even the quickest.
“I suppose there will be more of these courses coming out [from others], [but we] have a real advantage because we’ve found the niche so early and it’s already heavily developed.”
Mansell adds: “It’s a really exciting area to be in, not only with the F1 stuff but with the other platforms. We’re piecing together a youth programme at the moment as well, because we’re finding that karters are using sim racing as a complement, we’re just going to see more and more of that.
“We’ll see more coaches doing remote training but in all honesty we’re so developed with our training programmes that we’re three or four years ahead.”