Forza MX Racing Simulator

I recently discovered the best possible reason to be early for your flight - the Forza MX Simulator! The return flight from our recent family vacation to Cancun, Mexico involved getting to the airport extra early because we were carpooling with another family on an earlier flight. I figured it wouldn't be hard to kill a couple hours in the airport, and it turned out the Cancun airport did in fact have some pretty good shopping and dining. The best part though, was this sim racing rig where you could get 12 minutes of racing for only $24!

The car choices ranged from sports cars like the Porsche 911 GT3 all the way up to a modern F1 racecar. There weren't a ton of tracks to chose from but I believe there was Watkins Glen, Road America, Circuit of the Americas, and Spa-Francorchamps. They also had several different sim setup options depending on your familiarity with racing sims.  I opted to turn off the brake assist and the racing line. The hard part was choosing a track and car. I wanted a track I knew fairly well but would also be fun to drive. I opted for Spa and, just because it was the fastest option, the modern F1 car.

The first thing I noticed with the sim was just how weird it was getting used to the viewing angles involved when you have three large screens wrapping around in front of you. I'm so used to video games at home where you need to fit everything you want to see onto a normal-sized TV that's at least five feet away. This means, at most, you have to look from one edge of the screen to another to see through the approaching turn. You barely need to move your eyes, let alone your head. That first set of turns at Spa on the Forza MX sim, however, looked like everything was on mega-zoom and it was very weird having to turn my head noticeably to the side to see through the corner.  This was something I got used to after a minute or two, but the three-screen setup never really felt like the awesome game-changer I expected it to. Of course, I was only doing solo hot laps and not racing other cars, so I'm guessing if I was trying to navigate around other cars on track the added visibility to each side may have felt like more of an advantage over my home setup.

Another interesting feature of the sim rig was the moving seat. I have to admit this felt a bit more like a gimmick than something that genuinely immersed me in the driving experience. Turning side to side rolled the whole rig in each direction, and hitting the brakes hard pitched the whole thing forward. It didn't really feel like a true replacement for the G forces you'd experience driving a car. More importantly, it didn't produce any sensation that actually mattered for car control. It would have been a totally different story if you could feel through the seat of your pants the rear end of the car stepping out with oversteer.

The best feature of the racing setup that really was a big upgrade over my home setup was the steering wheel, which was some version of the McLaren GT3 wheel from Fanatec mounted onto a Fanatec direct-drive podium base. I think this was my first time driving a direct drive wheel and the sheer power of the force feedback in the steering wheel was outstanding. The build quality of the wheel as a whole was also great, with the shift paddles having a very satisfying solid click to them when shifting. After finishing my laps, my hands were feeling tired from wrestling with the wheel around Spa similar to how they felt my last time out karting, which was pretty cool from a simulator.

As far as how the actual driving went, Spa is a long track and it took some time to get familiar with the turns and the rig and the car. The funniest part was just how quickly the F1 car decelerated. I would err on the side of caution for an upcoming corner, brake a little too early, and before I know it I'm barely creeping forward and still have 50 or 100 yards before the actual turn. By the end of my time, I was getting more aggressive in the corners, which did result in some satisfying fast turns but also resulted in a few off-track excursions that totally killed my lap times. Luckily the simulator was more forgiving of taking an F1 car through a sand trap than the real thing would be.

If I was doing it again, I think I would have chosen a slower car like the Porsche GT3. Although it was fun going blazing fast in an F1 car, there was so much grip and speed that you never really felt like you were balancing the car at the limit through the turn. It was brake-turn-accelerate all so quickly that you were out of the turn before you really had a chance to feel the edge of adhesion through the steering wheel. I think a slower car with less grip, relatively speaking anyway, would have given me a chance to see what the wheel's force feedback was capable of from a "feel" standpoint.

Overall it was a really fun experience. It must have looked fun to passers-by in the airport because the Forza MX stand was deserted when I started and by the time I finished there were a bunch of people waiting in line to try it for themselves. It's hard to say where I'd rank the "love of driving" aspect of it compared to other racing video games or real life track days, but as a way to kill a few minutes in an airport in definitely can't be beat.

60k Mile Giulia Check-in

I ticked over 60,000 miles in my Alfa Romeo Giulia this past week. It's been four years and 41,000 miles since I bought it and it seems like a good time provide a "long term test" update on what I think of the car.

A lot of what I liked about the car when I first bought it is still true now. It's fun to take the car out on some twisty back roads and play with the quick acceleration and nimble steering. The car sounds great when you're winding it up. The "manual mode" on the automatic transmission is even really responsive and fun to play with. Obviously it's not quite the same experience as a true stick shift, but the pros of having an automatic for a daily driver outweigh the cons of missing that three-pedal action, at least for me.

One of the fun things about the car which I'm surprised hasn't faded yet is how unique it is. Even though the Giulia has been on the market in the US for seven years, you don't see a ton of them on the road. I still have people come up to me at gas stations, coffee shops, etc. that complement the car and ask me how it is to drive. Some people have never even heard of Alfa Romeo at all and think my car is way more expensive than it is. Given all the BMWs and Audis I see around that, in M or RS trim, surely cost twice what my car did, it's funny that my car is the one turning heads. I guess if you look at the sales numbers, I think there have only been around 50k Giulias sold in the US so far, which is about how many BMW 3 series were sold in 2021 alone.

The biggest thing I was worried about when I bought my car was reliability, because most of the people I spoke to who had heard of Alfa Romeo knew their poor reputation in that area. It hasn't been totally perfect - I had the sunroof get stuck in the open position and the whole sunroof had to be replaced (covered under warranty). But, cars in this segment tend not to be stellar when it comes to reliability anyway, and so far the Alfa has been on par with my BMW 330 I had before this or the Mercedes C320 before that.

Another downside I've noticed having owned the car longer is that the back seats are quite small for a four-door car. The rear leg room on the passenger side is kind of tight, but the rear leg room on the driver's side is really a squeeze even for my 4'5" daughter. I pretty much never have to take multiple adults anywhere in my car so it hasn't been a big deal so far, but I could see it becoming more of an issue down the road as my daughter and her friends get taller.

The biggest downside of the Giulia to me is where it falls short of being a true performance car. The same kinds of issues I discovered on the autocross track also show up if you really start pushing the car hard on back roads. The brakes don't inspire confidence, especially as they get hotter and hotter. The suspension can react in strange ways to bumps, creating kind of a wiggle in the back end that makes the car feel unsettled. And the steering, although very responsive, doesn't transmit much feel for the road or the tires' level of grip.

In the end, although the Alfa Romeo Giulia isn't perfect, I'm still glad I bought it instead of any of the alternatives in my price range. It's neat having a car that you don't see very many of on the road. And as long as you aren't using it for motorsports or really going ten tenths on the back roads, it's a fun car to drive. Hopefully it'll keep treating me well until I can get my next dream car.

United Karting Arrive & Drive

A couple weeks ago I made it out to United Karting to try out their rental karts. It's an outdoor karting track sort of similar to what I did at SpeedVegas in April. I only did a couple of races but I was happy with the venue overall and I'm looking forward to going back.

My first race was a bit of a mixed bag. During the warm-up lap while I was getting a feel for the kart's handling, I noticed that the kart would dart to the right as soon as I applied the brakes. It also wouldn't turn right at all unless I was braking. I made it through the session, but it was annoying driving because I had to stab the brakes to rotate the kart any time I went through a right hand turn on the track.

Other than the kart problems, I also found the track a little hard to navigate. Most of the walls are the normal red and white interlocking barrier systems you find at most karting tracks, but some of the track boundaries only used tires that were fairly low to the ground. It made it hard at times to visually pick up where the next corner is supposed to be until you really got the track memorized.

Just to get the last of the negatives out of the way now, the seatbelts on the karts didn't really cinch all the way down so it felt very weird driving with loose seatbelts. The track was also kind of bumpy in spots but that wasn't a huge deal.

The second session, between having a much better kart and being a little more familiar with the track, went significantly better than the first. My main impression was just how fast the track and kart felt. Unlike SpeedVegas, there was no point where I was running into the top speed of the kart and just waiting patiently for the next corner. There were even a couple corners where you go flying past the barriers at such a speed that it felt like you'd have quite a shunt if you messed up the corner. Presumably with the interlocking safety barriers, the walls would have some give and you wouldn't actually hurt yourself, but it definitely added to the sensation of speed on the track. If anything my only quibble with the track layout is that there weren't enough typical brake-apex-accelerate-trackout corners that can feel so satisfying to get just right.

The balance of the kart in my second session was also pretty nice. Several of the corners were long enough that you could really play around with the throttle to affect the balance mid-corner, which was a lot of fun.

One thing worth mentioning is that I was able to show up and get in a couple races without having to wait around forever, which was nice. Part of this is just down to having gas karts, whereas I think at Autobahn Indoor Speedway they have to wait to let the electric karts charge up fully between races, resulting in a lot of down time.

Overall I was really happy with the experience. I was several seconds slower than the other drivers, but I'm looking forward to going back and learning the track and the karts better and improving my lap times. A lack of decent passing opportunities is a huge problem at Autobahn, so I'm curious to see how the track layout at United Karting works for wheel-to-wheel racing once I'm actually quick enough to be closer to the other drivers.

SpeedVegas, Part 2 - Karting

If my feelings were a bit lukewarm about my exotic car driving at SpeedVegas, the karting we did afterwards was an unqualified great time. The karts were fun to drive, the track was challenging, and I even got in some great wheel to wheel racing.

I've done a lot of indoor karting at places like Autobahn Indoor Speedway and, while it's fun, those experiences left me worried about a few things that might be likely problems at SpeedVegas. My biggest concern was traffic, since you can get held up a lot by slower drivers at Autobahn while you're waiting for a decent place to pass. Even with 15 cars on track at SpeedVegas though, the track was long enough to get some separation from other drivers and the straight sections were long and wide enough to get passes done.

Another thing I was worried about was how long we'd be sitting around waiting to get on track. We were signed up for three races, and at Autobahn it can take forever to get through three races because of long waits between each race. At SpeedVegas though, were were on track for our first race very quickly and then only had a few minutes of downtime between each race. Maybe it's because the karts are gas instead of electric and so don't take any time to charge up, but they were pretty much constantly running races.

One minor downside was that the karts were slightly underpowered and didn't have quite enough top speed. I've done gas karts before where you really had to roll onto the throttle smoothly while trying to avoid power oversteer, but that definitely wasn't the case with these karts. The longest two straights also felt like you reached the kart's top speed too early in the straight and then were just waiting until you reached the next turn.

Despite those downsides, the track and karts still combined for a really fun drive. The karts tended towards oversteer under braking, so getting the balance just right to scrub a little speed and then get through a corner smoothly without sliding was challenging - in a good way. There was a good mix of fast and slow corners too, with the first corner at the end of the main straight requiring just a little bit of brakes and then flying through at nearly top speed. Nailing the braking point, turn-in, and apex and carrying full speed to the outside wall was super satisfying.

The other people in my group really had a great time there also. Everyone had varying levels of experience and even the less experienced racers enjoyed improving their laps during each session. This kind of karting is such a great mix of wheel to wheel racing, accessibility for all skill levels, low cost, and just general fun factor. It seems crazy to say given the huge cost difference, but I think the karting races outshined the exotic car driving as the highlight of my day.