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.
