Brock Packard #24

Brockton Packard - Team Manager / Driver for Niner eSports

I come from a military family with no real history in motorsport apart from the recreational quad bikes that we owned, however my love for the sport was sparked from a young age my mom would sit me Infront of the TV on Sundays for the NASCAR races because it was the only thing that could get me to sleep, and still to this day the rhythm of the cars going hundreds of miles an hour, inches apart can put me to sleep. That however is not how i treat the sport today. From a young age i have always wanted to take the cars apart and put them back together, and I always wanted to find a way to go fast. Whether it be bicycles quads R/C cars Go-karts, riding in real race cars or the seat of a simulator ive always been addicted to speed and how to get more out of something. I am also the team lead for the iRacing team at Niner Esports which is the university of north Carolina at charlottes esports organization. I have also been part of a underfunded NASCAR truck team Reaume Brothers Racing (RBR) and was able to experience first hand what really goes on in making a team no matter how small or how large able to succeed on and off the track.

Contact: Brockton Packard at Visit Online!

            

• The who/what/where/when/how of Brock? Expand on the Family-Life part from the intro. How did you get into cars? What made you into a Petrol-head? Chevy, Ford, MOPAR or other…
• So let’s talk about racing, you’ve dabbled in various ways, be it Karting, R/C, and iRacing – all of which are very different. Where do you see yourself taking the next step as a driver? Or do you even want to? What are some barriers to entry? What are some interesting alternatives?
• Let’s talk about your experience as part of the RBR team. How did you get into that?
  What were some of your responsibilities? How long did you participate in the team? What did you learn from the experience?
• University Life: You’re studying Mechanical Engineering. How is that going? Thoughts on programs like Formula SAE? Are you aware of Formula BAJA?
• There’s actually a debate as to whether or not SimRacing is even considered eSports – let’s face it many eSports aren’t even sports, (The 2023 Top 10 are: League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Overwatch, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Hearthstone – no where on this list is iRacing – why?
• If someone isn’t already into racing, SimRacing might be viewed as “just another video game” – How would you convince someone to become part of this eSport?
• You co-host The Pressbox Motorsports Podcast – what’s it about, what do you talk about? Frequency of release, why should people tune in, where can you find it? Upcoming #spoilers?

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Break Fix Podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autos sphere, from wrench, turners, and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of Petrolhead that wonder how did they get that job or become that person.

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Mountain Man Dan: Like I’ve always said, you gotta start ’em young.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re right. Mountain man, Dan and our guest tonight is a prime example of that exact sentiment.

Mountain Man Dan: Much like myself, he comes from a military family background with no real history and motor sports apart from the recreational ATVs that they owned. His love for the sport was sparked at a young age when his mom would sit him in front of the TV on Sundays for NASCAR races ’cause it was the only thing that could get him to fall asleep.

Crew Chief Eric: Fast forward many years and Brockton Packard finds himself racing go-karts. He’s the team lead for iRacing at Niner eSports, part of the [00:01:00] University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s eSports organization. He’s been part of an underfunded NASCAR truck team, Raum Brothers racing and co-hosts, the Press Box Motorsports podcast, and he’s here tonight to share his journey and thoughts on the world of motorsports for other aspiring enthusiasts.

So welcome to Break Fix Brock.

Brockton Packard: Hey guys, it’s good to be here and, um, excited to have a great show tonight

Crew Chief Eric: and like all good break fix stories. Everybody has a superhero origin. So let’s dive deeper into your Petrolhead origin story. Tell us about the who, what, where and when of Brock expand on the family life part of our introduction.

How did you get into cars and what made you into a petrol hood?

Brockton Packard: I grew up in Southern Central Florida around Daytona, Miami, all those dig motor sports locations. The NASCAR season would start and end in Florida. We’d always go around those kind of races. We had Sebring, U S A International, which you iRacing fans out there are very familiar with through the rookie street stocks programs.

Like Dan was [00:02:00] saying in the intro, my mom would put me down on Sunday afternoon in front of the TV and I’d watch the cars go around. The V eights had a certain sound that my brain would just shut me off. For four or five years probably. That’s how I’d be able to fall asleep over the weekends. And then eventually I’d start watching those races, collecting the die cast, getting to know who was my favorites and who were not my favorites, and then kind of formed my own opinion throughout that.

In the motor sports world, like was also mentioned, we went to what was called the mud hole in Florida. It was about a couple hundred acres of just Florida swamp. Everybody would run their Jeeps, their trucks, their motorcycles, all that stuff through the woods, and we’d go through that, just rip through it hours and hours and hours day after day.

So that’s kind of where it started. And then working with my dad on his Jeeps, he had old eighties and nineties Jeeps. His seal of approval was if it was a manual transmission and if it had the stamp on it, that would be his best case scenario for his Jeeps. But we’d [00:03:00] work a lot on those because they were old Jeeps in Florida, so there’s rust and stuff would break and we, we weren’t nice to ’em, but that’s when I kind of got my first like mechanical hands-on experience.

Mountain Man Dan: Having lived in the Southeast, I know that working on the Jeeps a lot and while I was in Southeast my share of Offroading and there’s a lot of sand mixture in the mud down there and it’s really hard on a lot of components such as your bearings and stuff. So I know there’s a lot of upkeep to be able to go play in the mud down there.

Brockton Packard: Yeah. And. That Jeep was not the, uh, finest running Jeep in the world by any means. There was one day that we had just finished working on it, getting a couple parts and pieces in there, and my dad drove it down the road and I went inside for a couple minutes and all of a sudden we heard this big pop. We walked outside and the muffler was skidding down the road.

He blew the whole muffler and the the exhaust off of it. That we just like put on there. So there were lots of breaking and fixing moments with those Jeeps and that kind of progressed throughout my life.

Crew Chief Eric: So in all of our stories, there’s usually a common thread, right? Even if we were like [00:04:00] you, or we were placed in front of the TV and exposed to it, or out there turned wrenches in the garage.

There’s always that one time, that first time when a car or a truck or something got your attention and it was out of the ordinary because you were so used to just seeing Jeeps or just seeing whatever it was. What was that one vehicle that really got your attention?

Brockton Packard: We were in the epicenter of.

American Motor Sports in Florida, at least at the time, we were part of a racing church group that would go to Sebring for the Porsche B M W, Audi Owners Club, and we’d do a thing called Kids Racing for Life. We’d go down to Sebring, it’d be a week and a half-ish, couple weeks maybe, and it’d be essentially a make-a-wish.

For racing, there’d be these kids there and we’d set ’em up in Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Audis, all of this kind of stuff. And I think it was at that moment, was one of those moments that just sparked something inside me that racing was what I wanted to do. I always liked racing. I always liked nascar, but [00:05:00] being able to go around Sebring in a Porsche or something like that is just a different.

Experience That’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t been in a race car before. And it was funny because we had the hand signals, you know the the go faster, the go slower, the thumbs up, thumbs down kind of thing. ’cause you didn’t have radios and I was the only kid that just kept going. Thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up every lap.

’cause I just wanted to go faster, wanted to feel the G-forces going around the corners. And the sea brings such a fun track. The bumps, the corners. It’s not a lot of elevation, but it’s so fun. So I think that was by far. One moment that really sticks out in my head, maybe another moment that relates more of why I am a NASCAR kid.

My first Daytona 500 was the 50th anniversary 500 that we went to, and just the atmosphere and the crowd and the, the smell, the noise, it, it kept pulling me back in, over and over and over again.

Mountain Man Dan: There’s definitely something about the smell of race, fuel in the air that just gets you going.

Brockton Packard: My American ethanol and Goodyear tires.

You can’t get much better than that,

Crew Chief Eric: which actually leads to a great pit stop [00:06:00] question, right, Dan?

Mountain Man Dan: Yeah. So being into motorsports and stuff like are you Chevy Ford, Mopar? What is your preference when it comes to manufacturer?

Brockton Packard: You know, the red and blue flames and that neon yellow 24 on the side of Jeff Gordon’s car always drew me to the Chevrolet side.

Of course, I have a soft spot for the Jeep because of my father, but I love myself some Chevy Camaros and Corvettes. They look mean to me. They sound mean. They always run well and uh, it’s never a bad combination, I suppose

Mountain Man Dan: being a GM guy, there’s common ground there. So you’re in good company.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. We’ll leave the square bodies for another episode.

All right guys. All jokes aside, let’s talk about racing. In the introduction, we talked about how you dabbled in it in various ways, carting remote control cars, and obviously iRacing, which we’re gonna talk about a little bit more here as we go along, all of which are very, very different. Where do you see yourself with this experience taking a next step as a driver, or do you even wanna be a driver?

What are some of the [00:07:00] barriers to the entry and what are some interesting alternatives that you’ve explored?

Brockton Packard: Driving has always been a number one priority for me. I love the feel and the kind of senses you get from driving a race car, whether it be virtually from above on a driver’s stand with an RC car or in a car.

That’s definitely what I want in the future, but the sport is very money driven and very uh, opportunity centric. My mom, I, I love her a lot, but she always made me have plans, plan A, B, C, and b. Plan A was always to drive a race car. That was number one. Plan would always want to do that. Plan B was to work on it in some shape or form, which we’ll get into a little bit later with some of the R V R stuff.

And Plan C was to be a, a spotter. That’s something that in I racing, you’re able to do. You’re able to spot and crew chief and strategize and all of these different things and I found a love for it. Actually pretty late on. I’ve only been high racing for about five years now, and that’s when I got my first real sense of spotting, being able to call the runs out, call high, low, middle, [00:08:00] et cetera.

Being able to do that kind of thing, seeing what was gonna happen before it happened, and also being able to do a little bit of math in there with fuel mileage and stuff like that. That was always something that I knew I was good at, but I didn’t know how to put it into motion. With iRacing, I was able to find that and then my Plan D would be, uh, broadcasting.

I do a lot of broadcasting with L SRT V with their main sim racing series. I help out with the Press Box Motorsports podcast. I’m very media forward so I can talk to people. My mom’s a communications major. I can talk your head off all night long. Where I see myself taking the next step as a driver is I’ve gotta get in a real car.

As much as you can learn from sim racing, that’s not gonna cover everything. I don’t know how a race transmission shifts. I don’t know how the clutch feels. I don’t know how all those things work inside the car, so I need to get in a car eventually. Hopefully that opportunity will rise soon. Like I said, the barriers right now are definitely the, the money involved, and I, I don’t wanna use that as an [00:09:00] excuse because it’s just part of the game.

It is what it is and we all accept that when we try to do this sport.

Crew Chief Eric: So which discipline do you see yourself starting in? Do you see yourself going down a path of dirt, oval, asphalt, round rounds? Are you thinking sports car? Are you thinking spec Miata? There’s a lot of different gateways into motorsport, whether it be oval track or road course.

What are you thinking?

Brockton Packard: You know, if you asked me this question a year and a half ago, my answer would be very straightforward and very simple. I’d go into the asphalt oval. The late models, limited lates, pro stocks, that kind of stuff. The short track feel. I like that. It’s fun racing and it would eventually lead into what I want to do, but recently through a a team that has partnered with niner eSports, it’s called Beaver Block.

We’ve run the Daytona 24, the Bathurst 12, and will be running the Sebring 12 here in a couple months. I’ve kind of shifted gears into that sports car kind of Miata realm, and I’ve found a new passion for that and it’s fun [00:10:00] because, You’re not having to worry about everybody around you. You gotta worry about your race and the different teams and stuff like that.

So it’s not as cut and dry as I would’ve hoped, but I’d be okay with running a Miata or something in the IMSA realm. The endurance racing is a fun challenge for me because NASCAR has our long races, the Coke 600, Daytona 500, but 12 hour races where you’re running six or more hours is just a. Different level of challenging.

I’m one that likes to go for the more challenging events. So I don’t know. That’s a good question and unfortunately I don’t really have an answer for it.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s take that a little bit further. What are your thoughts on the big races like the Rolex 24 or even Lamonts?

Brockton Packard: Oh yeah, I would love to run those. I did my first virtual Daytona 24.

This year, and that was just a different experience. I’ve never run my first lapse in a race three hours into a race already. That was just such a foreign field to me to get in the car that [00:11:00] already had damage. The field was already spread out, and I did 26 or 27 practice hours before that race. About five or 600 laps to get prepared mentally and physically for that race.

And we streamed that whole thing and we went through the paces and we finished 10th in our class. So we ran the B M W hybrid, that new B M W, and we finished 11th overall because we had a bit of a struggle. It was just such a fun experience because I didn’t take it as we had to win. I knew we weren’t going to, I took it as a learning experience, and then next year we’re gonna win.

Mountain Man Dan: When you were asked like, which discipline or direction you’d like to go, you opened a a key aspect there. Motor sports is such a wide spectrum and so many young people like yourself initially you think one thing’s what you want, but as you’ve come to experience other things, it’s opened your eyes like, Hey, I also like this.

That’s a big thing that I try to promote with kids, like, don’t pigeonhole yourself into one discipline or one thing that you like because that makes the whole motor sports world rather cliquey. I think as [00:12:00] a whole, motorsports we need to work together to get experience out there for people who’ve never been into it and everything.

And then a big thing I wanna give your mom kudos for is the way she had, you have multiple plans. So many people don’t realize without successful planning, you’re gonna set yourself up for failure. But you’ve had not just one backup at three backup options, which allow you to still be involved with motor sports, which is a great path forward for you.

Brockton Packard: Yeah, there’s always. A lot to motor sports and people always think it’s either you’re driving the car, you’re spotting the car, or you’re crew chiefing, and that there’s nothing else in between, which is kind of why I went into the mechanical engineering realm and all this kind of stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: You both bring up very valid points.

One that’s overarching here is that a lot of people fall victim to chasing just one dream. They have this dream, I wanna be a pro driver, I wanna be this. I wanna be that. Life is full of twists and turns and every pun and cliche that you can come up with along that journey. But what’s important is that you’re already recognizing there’s alternatives along that that you may or may not be [00:13:00] more interested in.

And that leads into what Dan was saying about motorsports is people don’t realize that there are sub-disciplines inside of the greater sanctioning bodies. Let’s just look at Formula One or looking at W R C or Sports Car and Endurance Racing. You can start to just dissect that. I’m a big Rally fan. But when I talk rally, what am I talking about?

I’m talking about, you know, group A, group B. Mm-hmm. That type of stuff, versus T one raid or Baja. And you know, again, there’s so many other things you can get into that you don’t have to hyperfocus on just one of them. So the doors are always open, and I’m glad you’re situationally where as we say, you know, in coaching, your eyes are up, you’re looking ahead and you’re thinking ahead.

If this doesn’t pan out, what’s next? But you’ve already dabbled a little bit in the racing world, right, Dan?

Mountain Man Dan: Yeah, so let’s talk about your experience as part of the R B R team. Like how did you get into it? What were some of your responsibilities with them and how long did you participate with the team?

Brockton Packard: Getting involved with them is kind of a funny story. It was 2021 my freshman year of [00:14:00] college. I was a band kid in high school and I did a a, a year of band in college and I just happened to get covid on our first game week. For our, our home opener for football. So I was stuck in a quarantine room, kind of just scrolling through Twitter and Instagram and stuff, and I saw a post pop up from R B R saying interns wanted and how to apply.

So I called my mom and said, Hey, you think I should go for this? It’s not paid. It’s experience only, but it’s experienced. She told me to go for it, so I filled out the information and I think within two or three days they called me back to have a phone interview and then they had me up at the shop a month later.

I was on board for that, and that was right around. November, so it was kind of the end of the season, so we just kind of cleaned the shop when I was first there. And then beginning of 2022, everything kind of started to ramp up. We had the fad Moffitt deal with the 43 s t P, the Richard Petty [00:15:00] colors on our truck, and then everything kind of snowballed.

I had just about every responsibility you could think of from going to Food Lion, the local. Grocery store to buy Gatorades and sodas for the race weekend to sweeping the shop, to ripping stuff off the truck when they didn’t come back in one piece. Lots of cleaning though. Something that you have to kind of get through your head is, everything’s important no matter what you do.

That was hard for me at first because I was like, man, I want to build stuff. I want to do things. I want to go, and I had to remember that I’m a 19 year old kid that has no experience on a race team, so I need to chill out and learn from everything. We went to Dinos, we did chassis pull downs. I learned so much and I was only there for six or seven months.

From being an interior guy to them taking me to Texas Motor Speedway for the summer race there, having my family and girlfriend there during that race, my first race on a crew, that was just another worldly experience. You know, you always have those [00:16:00] dreams of doing what you wanna do and then it happens and you’re like, holy crap.

I’m here, I’m doing this, I’m living out a dream. So just being able to do everything essentially on that race team has fulfilled so many bucket list items, but has also helped me continue my career.

Mountain Man Dan: I got a feeling it’s created many more bucket list items as well.

Crew Chief Eric: Plans. E, F, G, right? Yeah.

Brockton Packard: There’s a, there’s a few more backups now.

Mountain Man Dan: Tell me about your experience there in the pits during the race. Like how was that for you? For someone who’s never seen it, only seen it from tv, like explain that to people and the thrill that there was with that.

Brockton Packard: That was a wild weekend. So the truck race was on Friday, so we flew out Thursday at midnight.

From Charlotte and landed in Dallas at about three, four o’clock. So it was late. We were all tired as all get out and we fell asleep. Woke up at like seven, 8:00 AM went down to the track and walked through those garages. We all see those Bob Ris tweets where it’s, you know, sea of mechanics and engineers walking [00:17:00] through the front gates.

And I was like, okay. This is literally every crew chief and everybody who’s important, all in one little gaggle around the garage. We all walked in, we went to our holler, unloaded all the pit equipment first, and then we unloaded our two trucks, the 43 and 33 for that weekend. Got everything kind of set up.

Getting ready for tech. Tech was wild. I’ve never actually gone through tech before and it was just, you know, a long line with a bunch of people and you just kinda sat there and people would walk around, talk to you, say hi, and then you had to push the truck up like. 25 degree incline to get it up on the second inspection.

But like all good things, we failed the first time. We failed tech inspection the first time for a few different reasons, which we expected. You know, if your car doesn’t pass the first or second time, you got a little bit of an issue. But if you failed the first time, you know it’s something good, you got something going on.

’cause if you’re not cheating, you’re not winning. We pushed through tech and then we kind of just chilled for a little bit. Texas Modus Speedway is a bit of [00:18:00] a monster for the cruise because going from the garage to pit road, there’s a hill. We don’t turn the cars on for anything unless it’s on track, so you can’t just drive the car up the hill.

We had to push that thing up 20 feet, the hill, and it’s just a steady, kind all the way up. So they’re not the heaviest things in the world as fast as they go. A brick and a half for sure. So we went through practice. Unfortunately, our 33 truck wrecked in his first lap of practice, and then our 43 truck had an unimproved adjustment that got disqualified.

I think I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. So basically as soon as we were done with practice, we were all thrashing, welding, beaten body panels, straight rebuilding, basically the whole rear end of that race car to have at least one car in the race. We’re all running on two, three hours of sleep, maybe a little more if you slept on the plane.

It’s Texas during the summer, so it’s 110 degrees out. We’re all sweating. We’re just destroyed by the end of this thing. But we finally get it fixed. We get it [00:19:00] going, and we run the race, and I think we finished like 33rd or something, but it was such a sigh of relief when the car rolled off for the first time and we saw.

Everybody just go by checking the speed stuff. There’s so many things you miss on TV and there’s so many things you miss when you’re at the track. Being behind the scenes, having a crew shirt on, having those credentials, you see so much and it’s something that I never want to forget and I want to continue to do.

Mountain Man Dan: From your time with R B R, what would you say was one of the biggest things you learned from that experience?

Brockton Packard: Just the never give up attitude of that whole team. They’re an underfunded team. They had seven full-time employees when I was interning there, and they had eight interns, so the interns outmatched everybody who actually worked there.

Since then, that’s kind of changed and they’ve gone through some ups and downs. I’ve learned a couple things that I won’t say on air because there are a couple things I like to keep to myself.

Crew Chief Eric: See, you know, he is a car guy because once we figure out what that little thing is, we’re not gonna share it with anybody.

Yeah. Until we’ve beaten him six [00:20:00] ways from Sunday to the next race, then it all gets exposed. Right.

Brockton Packard: There’s a few things that I’ve learned here and there a few things of what not to do. A few things of what to do, like team dynamic. Always be close to your employees and even if they’re below you can’t act like they’re below you.

Having that family atmosphere is just so important because I. I woke up on Saturday morning and I could not stand up, and I was like, how the heck did I get through it? And it was just the positive reinforcement from everybody. Like, get up and go do your job and do it right and get rewarded type things.

They were awesome guys, and I, I love every single one of them to death because they’re the ones that gave me my first shot and never gonna forget that.

Crew Chief Eric: Somewhere in the mix of all this, based on your time with R B R and you had aspirations of being in nascar, now you’re choosing maybe plan. C. D, or E, somewhere along those lines.

You’ve also changed the courses that you’ve taken there at the University of Charlotte. So let’s talk about your university life a little bit. You mentioned that you’re in mechanical engineering, so how’s [00:21:00] that going? Is that still plan C?

Brockton Packard: Yeah, right now it’s still plan C. I’m gonna beat the horse to death on Plan A until it doesn’t go anymore.

But you know, having that engineering degree, and I’m also going to dual enroll as a communications student as well, be an engineer that can talk to people. That’s a very important thing, especially in the NASCAR and motorsports world. Being able to communicate what you wanna do and being able to. Also have the know-how to do it is something that is insurmountable when it comes to any motor sports, but especially nascar.

Mountain Man Dan: So what’s the good and the bad of the ME E program?

Brockton Packard: It’s a hard program. Not a lot of people get in it. It’s one of the highest contested programs at U N C C because we’re all here for the same reason. 20% of NASCAR engineers, NASCAR crew, and NASCAR crew chiefs. Come from U N C C. If you have a degree from here, you’re most likely going into a motor sports program.

Having that good G P A getting through the classes, you gotta [00:22:00] be pretty darn good at math. It’s pretty math heavy. I think I get all the way up to calculus four or something like that. It’s kind of ridiculous. There’s math that looks more like English sometimes, so having that competitive attitude, not taking a failure as a failure, but a learning experience, and then.

Finding ways to make a really hard degree a little bit easier is definitely advice and the good and bad.

Mountain Man Dan: Well, I’m sure especially with NASCAR there in North Carolina, that’s like the heart of where NASCAR began, so I’m sure that’s why everybody wants to be involved in that flocks to that areas.

Crew Chief Eric: Mooresville is known as nascar. U Ss a, right?

Brockton Packard: Yeah. Motorsports, U Ss a Mooresville, Concord. Even Statesville. There’s shops all over the place in North Carolina. It’s like you can’t go. More than 20 miles without seeing a, a little interstate sign with a Motorsports facility somewhere. I mean, you’ve got Hendrick Motorsports, track House, and Rush Fenway Klowski, all within about five or 10 miles of the U N C C campus.

Charlotte Motor Speedway’s five miles. Then you go to [00:23:00] Mooresville, junior Motorsports, Joe Gibbs, RBR R’s in Mooresville as well. Further out in Welcome North Carolina. You’ve got your RRCs, your Petty G m s. Wood Brothers is in Mooresville too. So there’s a whole bunch of teams, both Truck, Xfinity Cup, even late models and legends.

They’re all over the place here.

Mountain Man Dan: I grew up watching a lot of Monster Truck stuff and I know Dennis Anderson has hit his shop for the Grave Digger down there in North Carolina. Is that anywhere near Charlotte?

Brockton Packard: It’s about six hours from here. It’s funny you bring that up ’cause I’ve got a couple Monster Jam stories as well.

Growing up in Florida. They would go to Raymond James Stadium, it would always rain. The best mud shows of the year would happen in Tampa and year after year after year for my birthday. It would always happen around the same time. So we’d go watch the Monster Jam show and then one year. For some reason we came up to North Carolina and we went to their shop up in, I think it’s Kitty Hawk, and we walked in and this is, I don’t know, 2010, maybe 2009, and there’s a smaller version of Ryan [00:24:00] and Kristen Anderson and Adam Anderson all.

Out front running this RC car all around and we walk in and Dennis is just sitting there and we had lunch with all of them. It was just one of those weird meeting your hero moments because I, I absolutely loved the grave digger truck and I continue to follow that, but I’m more of a son of a digger now.

I like that blue paint scheme. That blue paint scheme’s got a special place in my heart. But no, the black and green wrecking machine bad to the bone all the way through gotta be some of the best moments. And there was a point in time where I wanted to be a monster truck driver, and then I realized those hits are pretty hard, so it might not be the best case for me.

Crew Chief Eric: So that is not a plan on the list of plans.

Brockton Packard: That is not a plan. It would be a cool experience, but definitely not something that I’m going to actively pursue.

Mountain Man Dan: So what are your thoughts on programs like Formula S A e

Brockton Packard: I was part of Formula s a e last year and a little bit of this year. I love those guys too.

Great hands-on experience, building more open wheel type [00:25:00] cars, but there’s still some things that definitely transfer over and it’s a huge resume builder saying that you were part of a S A E program, being able to. Continue with that program, be a team lead, even a driver. It gives you so much more notoriety than somebody with a piece of paper saying they know how to do math.

Kind of broadening your horizons throughout college, finding things that you might not think can connect to the world that you wanna be in. You wouldn’t think an open wheel race car would connect to a NASCAR team, but. Building that race car. They now know you have fabrication skills, the mechanical engineering needed for it, and the communications and team working skills to be able to work with the team and also help build a race car.

Mountain Man Dan: Are you aware of formula Baja?

Brockton Packard: I am aware. Unfortunately, U N C C doesn’t have a formula Baja. Right now they used to, it seems like every meeting we have, somebody calls out, bring back Baja, so it might come back. I’m not sure, but I do know of it and I’ve watched some wild YouTube videos of it too. [00:26:00]

Mountain Man Dan: So what types of motorsports organizations or clubs are you involved with currently?

Brockton Packard: Right now it’s a little bit of that s a E program and then. Majority focus is managing the iRacing team for the Niner eSports program that we have here.

Mountain Man Dan: Being in Charlotte have, have you been to the NASCAR Hall of Fame?

Brockton Packard: Oh yeah. It seems like I’m there every other month. I love their simulators. I love the history of it, and every time somebody’s visiting here, I always wanna take ’em there.

It’s like my Disney World. It’s that feel that you’re surrounded by history and it’s also kind of a goal. You know, not a lot of people get to go into the NASCAR Hall of Fame and be inducted and it’s always that Shoot for the stars and you’ll hit the moon type deal. Say you’re going into the Hall of Fame, maybe you might end up in a seat.

You never know, but I. I always like to tell myself walking through the doors one day I’ll be there for a different reason, but for now, I, I enjoy it as a tourist and a motorsports connoisseur.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it’s time we switch gears and we need to talk about one of your other favorite topics, which is [00:27:00] sim racing.

Thanks to Covid Sim racing in all its different forms, quickly became 10 times more popular than it ever had been, and it still seems to be on the rise. So let’s get some of your thoughts.

Brockton Packard: That kind of explosion in 2020 and 2021 was a weird. Shift in the iRacing world, we were always big and we always had our big events.

You know, the Koch series, which used to be the peak series and the NASCAR realm of iRacing always had big prize pools and stuff like that. But once they did the Pro Invitational and nationally televised it, All of these cup drivers, indie car drivers, all these guys were getting on the sim. It really made it less of a game for the general public and made it known that this isn’t something you just mess around with on a Sunday night because you think you can.

This is something that people use and people are able to do as a tool, and it gives you that experience without actually having to do anything. Personally, iRacing is still the best [00:28:00] sim out there. The quality of their updates and things like that. Second to none in my book. I like how the physics work, how it feels, how it drives, what I can feel through the steering wheel and pedals.

I like their NASCAR program and their road course stuff as well. But I know there’s a couple things that we don’t have. We don’t have rain, we don’t have flat spotting tires. We know those are coming and we know that they’ll be top class once they get here. There’s a whole bunch of different avenues to go, but I try to stay away from things like Ran Ismo or Forza, and I know that might hurt a little bit for some people, but I don’t like that arcade feel anymore.

I like being able to feel the car and understand the car and not just slamming the joystick left and right or not being able to feel through the steering wheel for me. iRacing is definitely still number one on my list. We’re still. Skyrocketing in players and new accounts, rejoining accounts, and laps turned.

I think we turned the 5000000000th lap on iRacing a couple months ago, and that number is [00:29:00] just gonna continue to rise. With our most recent update. We had the, I think a Reno Cleo. A Formula Ford 1600 and then the new late model stock car just came down, so I know there’s gonna be a lot of people running it at the point of recording.

Crew Chief Eric: Having been in motorsports for a long time and coming up through the video game generation myself. Pretty much born with a controller in my hand. I’ve seen the evolution of video games, and we’ve had other people on the show to talk about that and where the future is, and they’re like, all right, old man screaming at the clouds, you know, what do you talk about?

I’m like, look, I’ve been here since the beginning. I think the biggest complaints, those of us that have experienced on track with sim racing say, is, It doesn’t translate driving with your eyes, despite even the best, most expensive rig doesn’t feel like being in the car. You don’t have the G-force, you don’t have the lateral forces.

You don’t have any of this kind of stuff. And you see some of these extremely complicated rigs where they’re bouncing up and down and doing all this gyroscopic stuff and you’re like, cars [00:30:00] don’t do that. They just, they don’t,

Mountain Man Dan: Eric, I know how technically minded you are and having the amount of experience you have in cars, like I do it myself and I’m not near as experienced on track as you are, but I’ll notice playing certain simulators or games, it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t feel like it would in real life.

So I wonder if a lot of the young guys your age, Brock, that haven’t had much seat time in real cars aren’t able to pick up on that and what you guys consider to be more legit. I’m curious if you would get more seat time if you would start to be like, That’s not actually how this happens.

Brockton Packard: That’s kind of how it would work.

If I had actual experience behind the wheel of a car, I could feel what the car is supposed to feel like. And like I was saying earlier, I don’t have experience behind the wheel of a real race car. I have go-kart experience, but we don’t have go-karts, so I can’t say. Yeah, that’s exactly like the go-kart.

I’m driving a cup cart. I don’t know what that feels like. I know what it looks like. It feels like. I know what that independent rear suspension should do based off of working on it, but I don’t know what it actually does. So I’m sure that there’s [00:31:00] a difference in the real versus sim, and I’m sure that with more real world time behind the wheel of a race car, any race car, I’d be able to pick up on those differences, whether subtle or drastic, and go, Hey, that’s not at all what that feels like or, Yeah, that’s pretty similar.

With more time behind the wheel, I’d maybe lose my rose colored lenses, but right now it’s the best thing since sliced bread. ’cause I don’t know any better.

Crew Chief Eric: But it brings up a real life question. I’m sure you’ve raced Seabring many times. I racing, but you’ve been at Sebring in a race car. How does it really compare?

Brockton Packard: Memories are a little fuzzy, but I do remember a lot of the bumps and a lot of the corners and a lot of stuff like that. Unfortunately, iRacing doesn’t have a street spec, Porsche nine 11 that I can just rip around there, but it does a pretty darn good job. Yeah, the graphics of some of the peripherals aren’t great.

And the people look like they’re from a Nintendo 64 game. The drivability of the [00:32:00] track, the aggressiveness of those curbs that are there, they’re pretty spot on. In my opinion. Sunset is the Bumpiest corner in the world in real life, and it’s the Bumpiest corner in I racing too. Most of my experience at Sebring is in a hypercar or a hybrid, so it’s a little bit of a different world just in that sense.

Personally, I was able to jump in sim and know my lines and know my breaking points and know things like that just based on that experience I had, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

Crew Chief Eric: The upside is when it comes to training guys that have been on simulators, you know where the turns go, so I don’t have to tell you that the next turn at v i R is a left to be like, wait, it’s a left.

It’s very different when you’re training people that haven’t had the lapse, but the one thing. I’ve experienced with people that have come from simulators, they learn quickly, but when they get out of the car, they’re like, that’s nothing like what I expected. That’s usually the response I get from my students that have never really driven on track before.

Brockton Packard: I try not to take everything [00:33:00] literal when I’m driving the race car, I try to know the line in a little bit of the tendency with the physics engine, but I know it’s not real and I know that air moves how air wants to move, and it’s not something that. We can code to move how it should because it’s not always the same.

So I think learning the tracks that I’ve never driven before, like I’m in Charlotte, I’ve never lived in Virginia, so I have no idea what Virginia looks like. And I don’t know what V R R looks like. But I ran a hybrid race at V I R a month ago, so I know what the track looks like and I know how to drive it, and I know that I should be set up on the wide side coming and turned one so I can get a good run into turn.

Two. It’s knowing the feel of the track so you can go on there and not have that. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I’m driving a race car on a racetrack, driving a race car. Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up. You can be confident in having the mental stability so you can work on the physical.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a give and take even in real life, you know?

Absolutely. I wish I could do what I do in the sim world, but you can’t. Right. Some of it is, it feels like cheating physics and whatnot. That [00:34:00] actually begs the question too, about the discipline of motorsport you’re focused on in the sim world, and I think it’s an overarching conversation about the most popular.

Disciplines inside of iRacing and that I still think is asphalt oval. Right?

Brockton Packard: Absolutely. The NASCAR and the short track community in iRacing is one of the biggest in any form of motor sport because it is so limited everywhere else. You’ve got the NASCAR heat games in the NASCAR ignition games that are coming out, which are widely.

Dislike. I hate to say it because I know people spend time and money and work on those as their blood, sweat, and tears, but they’re not what they used to be. And people are starting to see that and starting to search for something to really figure out what they want. If they want to go into a sports car realm or a dirt realm, or stay in the asphalt realm.

So I think they come to iRacing, they see that we’ve got almost every generation of stock car from the 1987. For [00:35:00] Thunderbird Buick and Chevy Impala, or it’s the Monte Carlo, excuse me. And then you’ve got the old cots, the gen sixes, and now the new next gens with the Xfinity Series, the Cup Series and the Trek series.

And then you’ve got all of your short track stuff, your legends cars, your silver crown cars, street stocks. We’ve got all those different. Professions of oval racing, people start to go to that because, oh, it’s the car I run in real life. At the track I run in real life. Let me go work on that. I know there’s a few guys that are going to Southern national that are running southern national with this new late model car because they can’t get practice time at the actual track.

There’s a lot of exclusivity with the oval racing side of it because we can’t really go anywhere else. A c C doesn’t have any oval stuff. There’s no outlet for us. So we all come here and we all have fun and bash and wreck and flip and all that kind stuff, but we also take it very seriously. The money’s good in here.

If you can get [00:36:00] to the top 40 in the NASCAR side, you can join the Coke series, which has a hundred thousand dollars prize pool at the end of the season, plus you get a. Big trophy at the end of it too, so that’s pretty good. It all comes down to how much time are you willing to spend on it, and how much time do you have to spend on it, because it takes a lot to get to that point, and it takes a lot of effort to get good enough to get to there.

Mountain Man Dan: For people that are looking to get into it, is there a used market out there? Would you tell them to potentially go buy something used or, or do you recommend buy a new right off the bat?

Brockton Packard: Especially if you haven’t done it before? So iRacing can be a monthly, yearly, bimonthly try monthly subscription if you’re gonna try iRacing.

You buy the $13 monthly subscription for one month. You go out to your retro gaming store or eBay or something and you find a cheap wheel that has some force feedback with pedals, and you slap that sucker on your desk and you download Ira saying, You got a 50 to $60 piece right there and you understand what you like [00:37:00] about it, what you don’t like about it, and then figure out if that’s something you want to continue doing and continue working on throughout your, I guess, career we can call it.

But I wouldn’t go full bore and just dump a bunch of money into it. Money doesn’t necessarily buy performance and buys comfort in this realm. Of course, there’s things that will help you. A direct drive wheel helps, and the vibrating pedals help being able to catch things that you wouldn’t be able to do.

Through your head and headset and through looking at the screen, but it’s not something you need right off the bat. That’s something you need after you’ve perfected your racecraft, your lines and kind of understand the race engine that you are using.

Crew Chief Eric: If you don’t get totally frustrated and cancel your subscription before that point.

Yes, exactly. There’s another side to this. It’s kind of an interesting side. When you look at eSports as a whole, sort of, as a, either a profession or even as a sport itself, there’s an actual debate as to whether or not sim racing is even considered an eSport. Because motor sports, a lot of times is not considered a [00:38:00] sport.

So when you look at the list of the top 10 in 2023, eSports, I’ll read off the titles here. None of these, in my opinion, are sports at all. We’ve got things like League of Legends, go to two Counterstrike, Fortnite, call of Duty, Overwatch, Valant, rainbow Six, rocket League, and Hearthstone. Nowhere on that list.

Is iRacing. Why?

Brockton Packard: You know, it’s such an interesting question because just in our experience at Niner eSports, our iRacing program is our youngest program. We didn’t have an iRacing program up until November, so this is all a very new program for them, and it was a new world that they didn’t know about.

Most of that is just look at your mainstream media. It’s Call of Duty, Valant League of Legends. Those are your more widespread known titles. There’s skill involved with it, but it’s less of a learning curve and more of a point and shoot, or there’s strategies that everybody knows. I racing or sim racing in general is something that takes time to [00:39:00] understand and time to learn, rather than picking up a controller and playing through a couple levels and then knowing what to do.

I racing and sim racing in general is a hundred percent in eSport. We’ve got some of the bigger competitions. We’ve got some of the bigger traction when it comes to what we’re aligned with. But I will say, I don’t know if you guys saw this, so they came out with this E Olympics and there’s nowhere on there.

Is any of those 10 games? There’s no League of Legends, no Call of Duty, no Overwatch, no Valant. In those E Olympics. Well, why is that? Because they’re doing all these sports titles. Of course, they have to choose Grand Primo as the SIM racing representative, which I was a grand tri kid growing up, raced a lot of that, and I love the titles, but they’re not as good as a set of Corsa or.

I racing. So they could have probably done something with iRacing or a set of Corsa, but we’re represented in the e Olympics, which, who knows how that’s gonna be? So I think we’re getting more and more recognition [00:40:00] and representation. Covid helped, wasn’t a great point in our history, but it definitely helped a lot in the sim racing and the eSports world in general.

So hopefully one day we’ll be up there. But I think there’s just such a saturation of those 10 games. You can say, call of Duty and everybody’s played a Call of Duty game. You can talk about that with a bunch of people. So I think it’s just there’s so much saturation of those. Titles out there that it’s hard for other titles like iRacing or a set of Corsa to kind of catch up.

Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned something earlier about getting ready for these races, and we had this conversation back in season one when we had Tucker Boner, who most people may know and recognized from Twitch as Jericho. He was also on chasing the crown on Amazon Prime. And so we discussed this with him and he said, you know, going into eSports and doing this professionally, there’s a lot of.

Actual conditioning and training that has to occur. So what do you do to physically prepare for some of these races?

Brockton Packard: I mean, a lot of people will say that there’s [00:41:00] 90% mental and a 10% physical attribute to sim racing because you are staring at a screen knowing that there’s no physical thing that’s going to happen to you.

But you know that if you do one wrong move, your entire race is over. Physically, we just run laps constantly. I’ll use, for example, our Daytona 24. Attempt that we did for about a month and a half. I did nothing but the Daytona Road course in that B M W V eight hybrid. That was the only thing I ran for a month and a half on iRacing, putting in laps and laps and laps, understanding the car, understanding the track, understanding how to deal with traffic, both getting past and passing slower cars.

Physical side of it is just muscle memory. When you’re driving a race that long, or any race, you don’t wanna second guess yourself. When you fly into the bus stop or when you go around turn one at Bristol, you don’t wanna second guess yourself. That should be second nature. You want to be able to think about what the person in front of you is gonna do, what the person behind you is gonna do, where are you on the track, that kind of thing.

[00:42:00] So physically it’s. Learning the track, learning the car, being comfortable enough that you can put yourself in some sticky situations. Kind of that mental aspect is just putting yourself in those mentally strenuous places. When you’re three wide, on the bottom in Talladega, or three wide in the middle at Talladega, you’ve gotta put yourself in some really crappy positions and you’ve gotta make a lot of mistakes.

To be able to trust yourself enough to go three wide, go four wide, go around the outside, do random moves that would help you win races and stuff like that. And that’s something that comes with time. I’m not even going to lie to you guys. I’m not there yet. I second guess myself all the time because I’ve done some bonehead moves and wrecked a bunch of people.

There’s always that doubt. You’ve kind of gotta quiet those inner voices of doubt and be able to lock in and just focus solely on your car and understand that you can only control your race. So most of it’s a mental training, I guess reaction times. [00:43:00] Just throw a ball around every once in a while. I don’t know it.

It’s sim racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Well that’s funny you say that. ’cause back in our day, us old guys here, Dan and I remember, you know the land parties and we would get our case of balls guana, remember that stuff? So there’s a whole nutrition aspect. Back to this too. And there’s a lot of things you have to look at in terms of repetitive stress conditions, fatigue, you know, mental duress, things like that.

And so what do you do again, on that physical side? How do you change your diet? Do you work out, you know, how do you get prepped for these longer races?

Brockton Packard: I try to work out every other couple of days. I’m not a huge gym rat. I’m five foot four and 125 pounds, so there’s not much of me to go around in the physical side of the world.

Go to the gym, lift some weights. Your arms are gonna be just dead by the time you’re done with a couple hours of racing. For our Daytona 24, I ran the second most out of our six drivers, and I ran four and a half hours. I [00:44:00] think by the end of that, my legs were shot, my arms were shot, and I didn’t have everything turned up.

I had everything kind of turned down to where I could be comfortable for that long. So just putting yourself in an uncomfortable position, like holding a. 10 pound dumbbell in front of your face for five, 10 minutes. Just having that endurance, not necessarily raw strength, but the endurance, getting as much sleep as you can.

The team that we ran with, their team captain and I stayed up basically 12 hours each for that. We didn’t take care of ourselves as well as we should have, but being able to just push through the tiredness, not make those mistakes, and just. Be able to understand what your body is telling you and what you can do, because if you push yourself too hard, you’re gonna start making mistakes and you’re gonna cost not only yourself, but the team, an opportunity

Crew Chief Eric: monster or Red Bull,

Brockton Packard: neither.

Actually, I’m not a energy drink guy. I try to stay away from the caffeine just because my body decides that it’s gonna go on a huge spike. Like five minutes and then it just plummets within 10 or [00:45:00] 15. So it doesn’t work for me. I try to just stay hydrated. Gatorade, right now we’re drinking the body armors.

Those are pretty good, but I can’t drink a lot of them. Basically two bottles of water and a Gatorade for when I’m not in the car. And then I’ll have a, a water bottle with a hole poked in it when I’m driving.

Crew Chief Eric: If we wanted to get somebody convinced to come over to SIM racing, to get away from what we call the Sim Cs, like Forza and Grant Smo and some of the other games, how would you convince someone to become part of eSports?

How would you tell them that it’s just not another video game?

Brockton Packard: I wouldn’t say a darn thing. I’d put ’em in front of the wheel and tell ’em to. Try and drive it. That was the fun thing for me. We announced the iRacing team to the Niner eSports programs and the U N C C, and then we had a LAN event two or three weeks after, and I brought my sim ring and my computer and all of that.

I brought everything there. I ran laps and people said, oh, I could do that. And I said, really? Go right ahead. And every person that said, I could do that, couldn’t do it. Proving somebody that it’s more than [00:46:00] just an arcade game, that it’s harder than you think. The guys that go, oh, I played Forza and I played Grand Tribo, that’s great, but you haven’t run a simulator yet, so come on down, sit in the sim and experience it.

If it’s something that you laugh at or have fun with, then you’re hooked from there. Explaining it is such a hard thing to do when somebody already has it in their head that it’s just a video game, that they don’t understand that these are broadcasted events, that there’s leagues, that there’s cash prizes involved with this.

They have to do it themselves. They have to try it, and I’m not saying going out and spending that money or maybe spend a small amount of money for it by yourself. The Daytona and the arc of car, if you’re a NASCAR person and run that. Those are great cars to run on that track. 13 bucks, run it and see if you like it.

If you’re in the Charlotte area, go to the Hall of Fame race, iRacing at the Hall of Fame. They give you that opportunity. It shows you what iRacing can be. You can’t explain it because it’s something that is so skewed in the [00:47:00] minds of people that don’t know about it. It’s just fake news basically. When somebody who hasn’t tried it talks about it, so.

Go ahead and try it first. See what you can do with it. See if you like it, and if not, then it’s not for you. But if you do like it, then you found yourself a fun little sim to run on.

Mountain Man Dan: When we spoke to you originally and you sent over the link for the Twitch stream that you guys had for the race just prior to that, I went on watched it and with the exception of the graphics being obviously, you know, very video game, it was seriously like sitting in front of the tv.

Watching a NASCAR race on a Sunday with the commentating, with watching the different views from the different cars and stuff. I was very impressed with how well that was done.

Brockton Packard: Everybody on iRacing tries to treat it as more than just a game. If you say it’s just a video game, bro, on the iRacing chats, people will start light you up because it’s not a video game.

Never say it’s a video game to somebody who is a hardcore I racer. ’cause you will never speak to them again because it [00:48:00] is not a video game, it’s a simulator. As a generalization, it is a video game. It’s something that you play on a PC with video game materials, but it’s a tool to help simulations and stuff like that.

But we try to keep it as professional as we can, especially on the broadcasts and things like that. So having that professionalism, that TV feel like you’re watching a late model stock race on a Wednesday night. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Mountain Man Dan: So for the podcast that you co-host, uh, press Box Motorsport Podcast, what’s it about?

How often do you guys release it? Why should people tune into it? And are there any upcoming spoilers?

Brockton Packard: The Press Box Motorsports Podcast is a podcast that is hosted by Charles Wooten and I from L S R tv. We mostly talk about the sim racing world and we dabble a little bit in the real racing. People should tune in to see the news and the.

Different leagues and events that not only L S RT V is hosting, but also iRacing itself, myself, being not only a team manager [00:49:00] but also a racer will, you’ll get inside scoops on different types of leagues that my team is running in. And then also some special guests. I think our next guest, uh, is a Coke series driver, so a professional driver who got his first win on Daytona, so be on the lookout for that one.

He is also a team member of the Niner eSports program as well. So we do a thing or two about the real world stuff, but it’s mainly a sim racing podcast.

Mountain Man Dan: Well, speaking of which, what is next for Brock?

Brockton Packard: Yeah, so it, it’s funny you guys ask that because I’m actually going up to the Jordan Anderson racing shop up in Statesville, which we’ve been in talks for a few weeks now, and most likely working with them, working with their 31 Xfinity program.

Which is another reason why Chevy’s, my favorite manufacturer, being able to work with them. I’ll, I’ll take more of an engineer role, higher data, keeping everything sorted at the shop, uh, making sure everybody knows their inventory and things like that. And then working closely with their crew chief for the [00:50:00] 31 on Race notes setups throughout the weekend.

Crew Chief Eric: Well. Brock, it’s come to that point in the show where we’ve run out of plans and we need to know if you have any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover.

Brockton Packard: Yeah, of course. I’ve got a shout out my mom and dad for always supporting me and getting me to where I am now.

You can find me at Brockton P on Instagram. On Twitter, it’s Brockton Packard, and then on Twitch, it’s Brockton P 24 for all the weekly racing and stuff that we do. Follow Niner eSports on Twitter, Instagram. Facebook watch NASCAR on Sundays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Mountain Man Dan: If you want to keep up with Brock and all of his progress, be sure to follow him, as you mentioned on social media at Brockton P on Instagram, or at Brockton Packard on Twitter.

Tune into his podcast, the Press Box Motorsports podcast everywhere. You listen to all your podcasts or chat with him on the GTM Discord server and tune into his races via live streams at Twitch tv slash. Brockton P [00:51:00] 24.

Crew Chief Eric: Brock, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Break Fixx, having a healthy debate about sim racing and eSports, but also sharing your plans for your future with us.

They’re very well thought out and we wish you the best of luck. And I hope one day you look back like Hannibal from the A team with the cigar and your mouth and say,

Mountain Man Dan: I love ’em when a plan comes together.

Brockton Packard: Hey, man, it’s, it’s been a great time and I’m so thankful for you guys having me on here and yeah, it was super fun, guys.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the plan, and he’s sticking to it. Yeah,

Brockton Packard: man, I, I got a plan for everything.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on pit stop mini episode. So check that out on www.patreon.com/gt motorsports and get access to all sorts of behind the scenes content from this episode and more.

Crew Chief Brad: If you [00:52:00] like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about G T M, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org.

You can also find us on Instagram at grantor Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief@gtmotorsports.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.

As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and G T M swag. For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and monster.[00:53:00]

Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] We always have a blast chatting with our guests about all sorts of different topics, but sometimes we go off the rails and dig deeper into their automotive and motorsports pasts. As a bonus, let’s go behind the scenes with this pit stop mini sode for some extra content that didn’t quite fit in the main episode.

Sit back, Enjoy, and remember to like, subscribe, and support Brake Fix on Patreon.

That’s going to be the title of this episode. What’s the plan? What’s the plan?

Crew Chief Eric: With Brock.

My big thing with iRacing, if I can get on my soapbox for just a moment, is iRacing still the best? And what about some of the competing products out there? Like I said, of course, a Composizione and some of the other sims that exist on the market. The experience. Is probably one of the best. And I say that with a little [00:01:00] bit of hesitation because I think it could be better.

The graphics are not great. The menu system is extremely complicated. The tuning mechanism is just to the point of complete exasperation. Like if you just want to arrive and drive, iRacing is not for you. With so much sim experience under my belt, there’s been a lot of programs that came before iRacing that were really cool.

And we didn’t really have the horsepower to capitalize. On how good they could have been and they were abandoned just because of lack of interest in evolution and everything else, but you take something like a cc a set of course, a competition and not a set of course, which is like Forza and you compare it to iRacing just from a sports car perspective.

And I tell people all the time that are nonbelievers, go try it for yourself. The ACC experience is better. It is, but you’re relegated to sports cars. You have to be into endurance racing. You have to be into that. Whereas I racing gives you. More of a [00:02:00] palette to choose from, I guess you would say let’s kind of level set for people because for those of us that are really into iRacing, you can apologize for it all day long.

You know, you can justify it, you can rationalize it, but in reality, let’s talk about some of the things that it misses from real life.

Brockton Packard: Of course, nothing’s going to be perfect.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh yeah.

Brockton Packard: You can only take so much. I mean, we saw it last year with Formula 1 with the Mercedes W13. They didn’t know it was going to porpoise because they couldn’t simulate that stuff in sims, so it caught them by surprise.

So, sims, it’s not the fix all, end all, etc. You can’t do everything on a sim, and there’s obviously room for improvement for both. Uh, Seto Corsa could… add some stock cars or some dirt stuff and iRacing could take a better focus into some of the more visual and also simplification of their tuning and their setup building process as well.

They’re both good sims and it’s all dependent on what you enjoy as a driver and what you enjoy as a fan as well. Now [00:03:00] that I’m getting into some more sports car stuff I might go back to ACC because when I I tried it the first time. I wasn’t a sports car driver. I didn’t understand it, didn’t understand how to drive it, so I just kind of messed around, flipped a couple cars, and then was like, alright, I’m done.

Being able to have that experience both ways, and being kind of level headed about it, and saying, you can do whatever you want with it. It’s just a realm of freedom, you know? So I think both sims definitely have a lot to work on. But with more powerful computers and more powerful simulation abilities, we don’t know where we could be in the next two or three years.

Assetto Corsa and iRacing could be the best sims flat out, hands down, no questions asked. There’s always going to be something better in the form of something else. So, for me, iRacing is the best sim just because it has what I want. It has the creatability that I want and it overcomplicates things so I understand it a little more.

Because for me, [00:04:00] simplification is my worst. Enemy. I can’t oversimplify something because I’ll forget how to do it. If I make it complicated, I have to make that checklist, and I don’t know, maybe that’s me trying to find a silver lining with the overcomplication, but I enjoy it.

Crew Chief Eric: But I also feel like that’s where it separates the wheat from the chaff.

If you want to jump in and create spec racing in the virtual world, you have to simplify it, because I don’t have the time. I’m making a gross generalization for a lot of other people. To sit down and build specs or build tunes or whatever for these cars. So you’re always going to run back of the pack because you’re not willing to sit down and do the math and take the extra effort that it takes to put out a build.

You jump into something like ACC and the tuning is limited. And now a Ferrari is a Ferrari is a Ferrari. In GT three against cars that are basically BOP. I don’t see a real BOP in iRacing, although I’m not a fan of balancer performance in [00:05:00] real life. It makes sense in the sim world because in the old days it was pay to win, right?

The guy with the most money always won the race because he either had a cheater tune or he was buying his way up for the best mods, all this kind of stuff. So the gaming world. It’s still present in IRA saying I’ve seen it myself. I did a couple of years of IRA saying on and off, it left a bittersweet taste in my mouth where on other platforms, I found it to just be simpler.

The experience was more rewarding. I didn’t have to spend a ton of money and time in the trenches to get away from what I like to call turn one chaos or all the non drivers, right? The people that are just out there creating havoc. Cause I hear once you cross this threshold, it’s suddenly iRacing gets so much better.

Yeah, because you’re with the upper echelon of drivers, but how much time do you want to spend in the trenches doing that?

Brockton Packard: Yeah, and that’s a good point. And I think the main downfall that always sticks out to me for iRacing is it’s pretty expensive. You know, you got to pay for your subscription every year and then you [00:06:00] got to pay for all these tracks and cars and stuff.

So that’s my only downfall with it just by using it so long. I’m not an accountant, I’m not a business person in any means, so I don’t know why everything’s so expensive and I don’t know if it needs to be that expensive. But I do know that they have those fixed series, you know, we’ve got our A fixed, B fixed, C fixed, and the iRacing stuff, the lower levels are normally fixed setups, so you can’t really do much, and then once you cross the Threshold as you called it, then you have two directions.

You can go with each echelon of racing. You can go stick with the fixed side where you everything is fixed and it’s purely being able to drive the car adapt throughout the race. And then you have the open side, which is the more publicized side where you’re able to make that. strategic change to the car, put more tow, camber, put more wedge in it, all that kind of stuff.

So it does kind of give you the two different ways to put it. It’s also, [00:07:00] you gotta get there. That’s kind of where it separates the people that are willing to stick it out and the people that are wanting to do it versus the people that are there just to have fun and not.

Crew Chief Eric: And you’re 100 percent right.

There’s different roots to all these video games. If you kind of look at it like a family tree, there are certain physics engines that have existed for a very long time. And so iRacing is one of the newer ones. Codemasters has been around forever, and they’re always the dark horse that we forget about, and they have their tentacles wrapped around.

Things like Formula One’s official video game and WRC and things like that. And then you have the Sim bin vein, which was like GTR and project cars and all that stuff that came out of that lineage. When you look at it, I often wonder there’s been a lot of mergers happening. Like there’s a lot of titles that don’t exist anymore.

A lot of them have folded up underneath of, let’s say the electronic arts and things like that, which they go back years and years too, in terms of physics engines with [00:08:00] cars from the need for speed series, which started in the nineties on the PCs and whatnot, so this isn’t new for them. But again, when you look at iRacing as a polished product, you see the latest Gran Turismo come out of the latest Forza come out and you look at the price to your point, the barrier of entry is cost.

But you’re saying subscribership is up. Laps are up. There’s this weird economy here where it’s like, does it really need to be this expensive? Granted the new Forza Motorsport will come out eventually. It’s going to be a hundred bucks, but it’s a 4k product. Do you know what I mean?

Brockton Packard: Yeah. So, I mean, if you trace iRacing roots back, they go all the way back to the Polaris times with the NR 2003.

That kind of stuff, the NASCAR side anyway. And then EA got the exclusive rights for a while. And that’s when I got introduced into the e sports, well, e sports. I was, you know, three months old, but my first video game I played was the EA sports NASCAR thunder 2003. And then I’ve kind of gone from there.

I’ve always wanted iRacing, always wanted to try [00:09:00] it and see what it felt like. Got the opportunity, liked it and went for it. Now, the subscription I pay for is a hundred bucks a year. So that’s essentially buying the newest Call of Duty game or the newest Forza game or whatever every year. I’m

attacking that for just a second.

How much have you spent on your rig? That’s a different story. Oh, okay.

Brockton Packard: I didn’t buy this rig right off the bat. I had an old… Gosh, it was a Logitech wheel with a Gran Turismo logo on it that is older than me. So it was at least 21 years old now, because I’m 20, and we had that before me. And I raced on a school desk with a yellow Fisher Price chair, probably until I was 10.

And then finally, I moved up into iRacing, and I still race on that desk with a Tony Stewart recliner was my seat of choice. After I got into iRacing fully for about a year and a half, I spent 200 on my Thrustmaster T150, which I still have to this day. It’s survived [00:10:00] about four and a half years now. And now that I’ve gotten more into it and starting to kind of try to go professional and more on that eSports level.

The rig chassis is obviously going to be expensive. I think I spent 300 on that, and then I’m starting to try to get some Fanatec stuff. So, the higher up you go, the more you’re going to spend. That’s something that you can’t necessarily get away from, and you can’t excuse that. But, It is what it is, in the sense of, the pedals I have, I have the, the Fanatec Club Sport V3s that I literally just plugged in yesterday.

They have the vibrating pedals on the gas and brakes, so you can feel that tire chatter, the things that you said you couldn’t feel through that kind of first stint of iRacing that you did. Well now I can feel when the back end is sliding, and feel when the brakes are locking up, and all that kind of stuff, so.

Yes, there’s money in it, for sure, but it doesn’t have to be. I could still be running on my 20 year old wheel with a crappy computer [00:11:00] and a desk. It depends upon how serious you want to take it.

Crew Chief Eric: See, and I think that’s where my hang up is. I didn’t, but turn maybe a couple laps in the oval side of the house.

And it’s never really been my thing. I’ve either gravitated towards WRC or endurance sports car. And so the endurance sports car side of iRacing, I felt was pretty lacking and having to start with spec Miatas, which I’ve personally driven the experience. I was like, this Miata doesn’t handle like this in real life.

I can go through this turn at summit point, flat out. And I don’t need to sit here and do all this crazy stuff to make it happen. Even a stock Miata from the factory handles better than they do in iRacing. And stuff like that just drove me crazy. And one of my litmus tests is Watkins Glen. I have so many laps at Watkins Glen.

I use it to compare games and most of the sports car related games, whether it’s Forza or Gran Turismo. ACC I recently all have walk ins Glenn. And to be honest with you, the best experience I’ve had so far is when ACC finally released the Glenn. It’s like, [00:12:00] you could really tell they nailed it. The physics is right, but they cater to the sports car GT 3 GT 4 market.

And so they’ve got all that dialed in. So again, I’m comparing not necessarily apples to apples, it’s sort of apples to oranges because I’m not really on the popular side of iRacing, although it exists and there’s plenty of races, like you said, the 24 hours of Daytona, you know, and things like that.

Mountain Man Dan: Real quick, I wanted to touch back on something real quick.

You mentioned, uh, Eric, like the top 10 games they listed. Do you think any of that has to do with the fact that a lot of those are console based compared to computer based, although they are available on computers as well, as to possibly why some of the iRacing is not as popular or common?

Crew Chief Eric: Don’t open up this PC Master Race Pandora’s Box on us now.

Brockton Packard: I’ll, I’ll entertain it for a second. I definitely think there is some PC versus console. I wouldn’t call it… Bias, but it’s definitely there. I know that a couple of those games on the list are only PC. I think League of Legends [00:13:00] is PC only. There’s definitely, the availability of your PCs versus your consoles is drastically different.

Not everybody’s gonna go out and spend the money on a gaming PC. You might go out and buy your Xbox X or your PlayStation 5 because it’s something you’re gonna use and it’s something that, you know, in another 5, 6 years you’ll get rid of and I think there’s a little bit of bias in the gaming world when it comes to Xbox and the console stuff versus the PC stuff but I just think there’s just a lot of those titles out there You ask somebody if you want to drive a car around in a circle for 3 hours versus go Play Call of Duty.

Majority of the population nowadays is going to go play Call of Duty.

Crew Chief Eric: But if the iRacing guys were to capitalize on the new systems, the PS5 and the Xbox X and the compute power that is, they’re like super computers compared to The old days and probably a lot of the gaming rigs we have on our desk that we’ve spent thousands of dollars upon [00:14:00] the X Box X blows them out of the water.

Why can’t they develop a version of iRacing that runs on the X Box? It can handle it and then some, but I think a big asterisk there is in order to gain the audience, nobody wants to buy a game that looks like iRacing that plays on a console that’s like 8K capable.

Brockton Packard: There’s some truth to that. They look like they’re trying to do it, because they released their World of Outlaws Dirt game on PlayStation, and I think it might be on Xbox as well, which is through the iRacing engine, and it’s almost like a pilot to see who’s gonna be interested in something like that, which is possible, and I hope one day it is, because that would be awesome, even though I think a few of the people that are strictly console players might have a bit of a learning curve ahead of them.

I If that were to happen, and if those two worlds meshed, we could maybe see iRacing, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say top five, but definitely in the top 10.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s also the economics dynamic there, right? Whereas if you get it [00:15:00] through Microsoft, you’ve already paid for their subscription. So now they’ve got a broker, all that on the back end with iRacing, and it doesn’t line up with their cost model.

So that makes it super complicated too. But in a fantasy world, to your point, it would be cool to see iRacing running on an Xbox because What does your steering wheel and pedal box care? It’s connected to a computer. All that stuff is built in. It can handle it because those same pedal boxes and steering wheels are oftentimes used on other games on consoles.

So there’s a lot of good crossover there.

Brockton Packard: Yeah. My Thrustmaster is actually built for the PS4 and the PS3, and it works great on iRacing. And I know a lot of the Fanatec stuff is PS5, PS4, and then Xbox compatible. So there’s a lot of compatibility. Except for the games, and I’d love to see any of the sims really, a set of cores to get on a console, because a lot of the computing powers, like you were saying, is so good that we could have 8K, 4K racing without [00:16:00] having those huge processors and graphics cards and RAM and all that kind of stuff that you have to have on the PCs.

Mountain Man Dan: One quick thing your mission is like a lot of the high racers get really offended if you call it a video game

Crew Chief Eric: That’s why I do it

Mountain Man Dan: So growing up like for me simulators like there wasn’t many racing simulators growing up, but there were flight simulators

Brockton Packard: Yeah,

Mountain Man Dan: and it’s funny because I look back at the ones like Chuck Yeager flight simulator used to love playing as a kid That was one of my things where I always enjoyed aviation, but never got into it.

So I joined the military, you look at the quality of the simulators, then look like the cheap video games now. And I wonder if it’s the fact that our video games have improved so drastically with the graphics and the, just the technology in general. I wonder if that’s why so many people. think that it’s just a video game and not a simulator because they don’t realize on the back end how much of the mechanics go into be a simulation and not just a video game.

Brockton Packard: I think a lot of people don’t realize how much technology is [00:17:00] actually in not only iRacing but most of these high end simulators. A lot of people look at your Gran Turismo, your Need for Speed, your car video games, and go, well, that must be everything, because they all look very similar. They all have slightly different graphics and slightly different physics engines, but they all look, just to an untrained eye, quite similar in performance and things like that, and they don’t understand that.

These sims are as close to real life as you can get without spending 15 grand on a Miata. I think a lot of people take that to heart and kind of wear it as a patch of honor that if you race on this, you’re racing on a simulator. It’s something that is Built not to entertain, but to engineer.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a compromise there too with compute.

So to have 8K graphics, you probably have to give up on the computations needed to satisfy the physics engine. And so iRacing’s physics engine is extremely complicated, and so you forgo the graphics, and that’s why it ends up looking like Xbox 360 [00:18:00] stuff. There’s a compromise there. And I, that’s where I think ACC does a pretty good job of straddling the line between the two.

I would never qualify that as a video game or a Simcade. It’s definitely a simulator and especially in the way it operates, you’d almost need two boxes to do it right. In some ways, one to handle offload the front end and one to do the back end. If you were going to do it with a console, although we talked about, you know, how to do that with an X Box, it has tons of compute in it on a totally separate thought.

I was thinking about where iRacing came from and you mentioned, you know, the NASCAR games and the IndyCar games and I was wondering if it maybe stemmed even as far back as your Papyrus games from way back when. Yeah. I played those and they were a bear. You had to tweak everything to get the car to barely go straight.

That was frustrating back in the day for sure, but again, there’s only so many branches of the, you know, racing family tree when it comes to these platforms, to these titles, let’s call them what they are, right? If somebody were to [00:19:00] map out the history of a lot of these games, it’d be really cool to see who influenced who, who picked up intellectual property and carried it through into the next evolution.

Brockton Packard: The iRacing trees. A bit of a funky one, we kind of go up and down and sideways and turn it all around, but I think they might have done like a short film on like where they came from for their 10th year. Yeah, the papyrus and that kind of stuff. Sorry, it’s a little before my time.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m old school, man. Yeah,

Brockton Packard: man.

Crew Chief Eric: I started with pole position like the original racing game, okay?

Brockton Packard: But I mean, we go back and we look at things like that and we go, wow, those graphics are crap. The raceability is crap. That’s what makes me so excited for the future. 10, 15 years from now, the fact that Assetto Corsa and iRacing are gonna be not good simulators if they don’t continue to keep engineering and keep doing all these things, that excites the hell out of me.

Because that means we’re gonna have some of the best simulators in the world. [00:20:00] Because people like yourself aren’t satisfied with what we have now. They know we can get more. Everybody knows it. So we’re going to get there. And in 5 10 years, we’re going to have something that doesn’t look a darn thing like iRacing.

And something that doesn’t drive like iRacing. And something that doesn’t have the tweakability. Something that you can do completely differently. And it’ll be so much better. And we’ll look back on iRacing and go, why did we ever run that? Or we’ll look back at Assetto Corsa and go, how could we stand that?

And how could we live like that? So I can’t wait for five, six years from now.

Mountain Man Dan: Uh, VR becoming a big thing. The real life flight simulators I’ve been from a military experience where you basically go into a closed container that’s set up on hydraulic rams. And when you’re flying, like the landing, It’ll jar and everything, almost like you’re actually in the aircraft and it feels very similar.

Do you think that maybe in the future, like some of the rigs will be set up with like the hydraulic stuff and maybe potentially even go to where eventually it’ll be a VR headset? When you’re looking, it’s almost like you’re looking out the windows of the car around you.

Brockton Packard: We have that [00:21:00] now. iRacing is VR compatible.

It makes the graphics a little worse, which I know Eric is gonna be giggling in his chair about. It’s VR compatible now. I personally don’t like the VR. I like having a bigger monitor. I guess maybe because I wear glasses and it’s uncomfortable because things squish into my face and it’s not great for me ergonomically.

Mountain Man Dan: Well, I’m sure it’s horrible for endurance races too. Yeah,

Brockton Packard: because then your face is all hot and sweaty and you got the red ring of shame around your face when you take it off. So, I like my monitor. I like being able to No, that I’m not in the sim for wanting to be a race car driver. I get motion sick pretty easily.

Like if I’m riding in a car and not driving it, I’ll get motion sick or car sick, but if I’m driving it, I won’t. The VR kind of gives me that I’m not actually driving the car. It almost breaks immersion for me. Personally, I’d like to have just a full canopy monitor. That would be cool. Full canopy [00:22:00] monitor on some hydraulics.

We call them butt kickers. And basically it sticks to the bottom of your chair and it vibrates when the car is sliding and stuff like that. So that kind of stuff is what I would want. I wouldn’t want to go on the VR stuff though.

Crew Chief Eric: Assetto Corsa is fully Oculus capable, which I haven’t tested yet. I have a buddy that has one.

I am quite curious to try it out as a matter of fact, because I do want to see what that experience is like versus, you know, just staring at a regular screen. On the other side, you know, I mentioned before Codemasters is always kind of hanging out in the dark, you know, that was a weird merger there too.

They bought Mad Game Racing, which is all project cars. The other one is, what is it, Kylotonn that does the FIA, the WRC series. And I was reading that. You know, WRC 10 came out in 2021, and there hasn’t been another release since, which is kind of strange. And it also has a hyper precise physics engine and they claim it to be more of a simulator.

And when you play it compared to like dirt or dirt rally, it is much more complicated. It’s a lot more difficult, [00:23:00] but they’re saying WRC 11, if it ever releases is going to be the last one. They’re like kind of closing their doors after that releases again, wonder who’s going to absorb them. Where is that?

Simulator engine for rally gonna end up

Brockton Packard: that is one thing that I racing is missing is that stage rally We’ve got the rally cross and we’ve got some of the hill climb things like Mount Washington But that’s not a rally course. That’s more of a hill climb It would be interesting to see where that physics engine goes and where those go iRacing lost IndyCar to, it’s whoever makes the, uh, rFactor stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: ImageSpace, ISI, been around forever. Which rFactor was a splinter of SimBin way back when.

Brockton Packard: So, we lost them to them. So there’s a bit of a lack of a sport, basically. So they might pick that up. So I don’t know it, it would be cool to have a stage rally in iRacing. I thought it would be cool. . You know, I have plans for everything, guys.

So . [00:24:00] I would love to see Monster Jam come into iRacing. That would just be cool. .

Crew Chief Eric: That would be pretty slick

Brockton Packard: because you know, iRacing, you can put any car on any track. We did a race with the. Mercedes F1 car, the W12, around Dirt Bristol. How’d that turn out? The one of the funnest races I’ve ever driven. So imagine like, Gravedigger going around Silverstone or something like that.

That would just be wicked.

Mountain Man Dan: The World of Outlaws game that they released, I’ve seen a couple of advertisements for Xbox. I’ve been highly tempted to get it because, like, the World of Outlaws, I like the short dirt track races. That’s where, like, NASCAR loses me because they’re such long and more endurance based.

The shorter races I really like, so I’ve been half tempted to pick it up and try it out.

Brockton Packard: I haven’t tried it yet because I don’t have a console here and I’m I am not a dirt guy in that sense, I want to learn more about it, but sprint cars are scary and late models are hard to drive. I’ve [00:25:00] heard a lot of good things about it, I’ve heard a couple negatives about it, but I think that’s what you get with any new game, there’s gonna be a little bit of weird stuff going on.

Crew Chief Eric: You haven’t raced until you’ve done European super trucks. That’s all I’m saying. Oh gosh. Like the, the semis, the boss tails. That’s where it’s at, dude. Yeah. Where you gotta manage the water in the tank. ’cause the brakes are overheating and Oh, it’s insane. Yeah. I would do that in a heartbeat.

Brockton Packard: Those guys are kind of insane when they drive those.

I’m like, what? Who would do that? Just, who would do

Crew Chief Eric: that? But it’s, it’s brilliant. Why wouldn’t you do it? It’s great. Yeah. There’s, there’s so many things. Just another. Discipline of racing. That’s all it is.

Mountain Man Dan: So your question is all wrong, Brock. It’s not, why would you, it’s like, why wouldn’t you want to? Yeah, exactly.

Brockton Packard: Oh man. You ever have those late nights when you’re watching YouTube and eventually those like crash compilation 2023 comes up and then you get all these wicked wrecks. And I always see those and like the whole cab comes off and it’s just the chassis rolling it along. And I’m like. Where’d he go? Where is he?

Crew Chief Eric: [00:26:00] He’s in his egg crate.

Brockton Packard: He’s fine.

Crew Chief Eric: Don’t worry about him. You’ve done that in mechanical engineering, you know, drop the egg from the side of the building. It’s the same thing. I want to get your opinion just for opinion’s sake on the Codemasters evil alliance. I’m sorry. Electronic arts merger. What are your thoughts on that?

Brockton Packard: Oh man, it’s tough. I was an EA kid. I grew up on the NASCAR titles that were all EA. I was that generation of console player, so I miss that. I like EA, EA has a bit of a soft spot, but it’s not the greatest in the world. I’m not too familiar with it because I did kind of go away from it once. EA stopped producing NASCAR titles, and you know, I’m not a sports kid.

I watch my football every once in a while because I have to, but I don’t play soccer, I don’t play football, I don’t do that kind of stuff, so I stopped paying attention to EA. I didn’t really hear about it until, what, 20 minutes ago? So I [00:27:00] don’t know, I’d have to do some research about it until I said some things on it, but I don’t know.

Mergers happen. Unfortunately, business is business. So, whether or not it’s for the money or for the product, we’ll see. With how most video game companies have been going, it’s more for the money and less for the product. So, we’ll see. I don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m really curious to see how it affects the next version of Horizon more than anything.

And I know that’s totally out of scope for the conversation because that, we’re talking arcade, it’s like Outrun.

Brockton Packard: Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: If you think about it, only because a lot of people don’t realize that Playground Gamers is a collaboration between Turn 10 and Codemasters, and Microsoft obviously sponsored both of them to make Horizon happen.

And you could see it in the first versions of Horizon, it was all Codemasters UI that was lifted from dirt, or one of their other series like Grid, you know, Forza physics engine making it all work. And so. It was a recipe for success. It was an amazing game. Great soundtrack. If you just wanted [00:28:00] to do open world driving, like the old test drive series from way back when it was re imagined and it was fantastic.

But now with EA and their weird rights to things like licensing Porsche and stuff like that, which has always been a battle for Forza and for Gran Turismo. Why are there never Porsches? Why isn’t there this? Why isn’t that? Because EA owns the rights to all that kind of stuff for like the next. 20 years or whatever it is, it sort of becomes a little crazy when you think about that merger and the contracts that Codemaster has with the FIA to be the official game of Formula One, right?

F1 2023 is supposed to come out, but it’s like under whose flag?

Brockton Packard: People think video games are so simple. And then you look at the inner workings, not necessarily the technology side, but the

Crew Chief Eric: politics,

Brockton Packard: the politics and the people. It’s like, Man, it’s so hard to follow, and I mean, in the end, maybe some people win, but most of the time, the people that are actually playing those games are the losers in that, which [00:29:00] sucks, because I remember I got an Xbox S, I think it was?

It was like the generation before this newest one. I got it only because I wanted to play Forza, because I had never played it before. I was a PS kid that grew up on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, had Gran Turismo 5 through Sport, never played a Forza game, so I bought it for that reason. I was like, oh, hey, a Porsche, and kind of the, I’d never realized that they had the Ruffs, but not the Porsches, and I was like, why is that?

So being able to experience both worlds. It, it’s nice. I really hope that it comes out and it doesn’t kill a title because one bad game, the NASCAR world saw it with, uh, NASCAR heat. The first NASCAR heat that came out, 2016, was terrible, and it wasn’t good, and people stopped playing it, and people stopped buying them, and now we’ve got whatever motorsports games is pushing out, which isn’t very good either.

It’s tough to be a [00:30:00] motorsports fan and play video games because, for not being in the top 10 at esports, it’s such a competitive scene. That one wrong move and you’ve killed an entire sports title franchise. So

Mountain Man Dan: I hope it works out like you were talking earlier for the fact that you hadn’t tried various different ones.

And this is just me thinking outside the box. The ideal thing would be there’d be one game that we could do any discipline, whether it be, you know, NASCAR world of outlaws, you know, road course endurance racing, it’d be nice if there was one. Game or simulated to do all of those things, but there’s so many other intricacies that it’ll probably never happen.

And especially like Eric was mentioning with all the licensing aspects, that alone becomes a nightmare to make any of it possible. And then at the same time, then it comes to the penny pinchers that they’re not going to do it because they want all the individual games for each genre of racing. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: I think 10 years ago, that was the initial intent of iRacing was to.

Be one ring that rules them all sort of deal. But the problem is [00:31:00] what you learn in developing code is after a while you get lazy, you start to templatize things. You start to do, well, this is good enough because it’s front engine rear drive. So all front engine rear drive base setups are sort of the same.

You get these things like Forza 850 cars. Yeah. Of which. They’re all the same 10 cars underneath with different skins on top of them. And that’s what you run into on every one of these, whether it’s the best simulator on the planet or otherwise, sometimes it’s just aesthetics over top of a base set of computations.

And so it’s difficult to hone in on the intricacies between, let’s just say something as simple as the C6R, the C7R, and then you make a drastic jump to the C8. So you start to question and say, well, Well, how did they build this base framework underneath? How does it really work? And that’s where I lose interest in games where it’s like 9, 000 cars.

And I have to spend 9, 000 hours to tune a C8 R to handle like a C8 R, which I’m [00:32:00] assuming handles a certain way in real life based on experience, either coaching in the right seat or, you know, driving one or whatever. And so that’s difficult. Whereas, you know, going back to that. Us versus them, iRacing versus ACC, ACC has a much more limited number of cars, but a 911, and a Ferrari, and a Benz are not the same.

And you can tell when you drive them in the game that they’re not the same specs under the hood, pun intended.

Brockton Packard: Yeah, and I definitely have seen that. I feel like they’re getting more towards the individuality of certain cars, but there’s definitely tendencies of certain cars, you know, the AMG GT3 Evo that we run on iRacing is definitely a heck of a pusher in the middle of the corners, and it’s the same thing with, let’s say, the They both push the same type of ways, they’re both front engine cars, they have the same tendencies, and I don’t know if that’s so much as setup or just that’s what front [00:33:00] engine cars do, I’m not 100 percent sure on the endurance championship side, but I do know that On the, the NASCAR side of things, you know, the Xfinity car drives like an Xfinity car, the Cup car drives a lot like the Cup car, the truck drives very similar to the truck, all of those are very individual cars, but, like you were saying earlier, they’re individuals.

There’s only three of them, with different skins on top of them. So, I think there has to be a balance between having the eclectic group of race cars that everyone will want to drive, and then also having the Modeling and the temperamental attitudes of each car highlighted in the correct ways and not oversaturating the market as well.

Crew Chief Eric: One of the other things that I feel like the simulators and even the games, you know, as much as they talk about laser scan, this and that, and all the other things is when it comes to elevation changes, that’s very difficult to capture because a lot of times when [00:34:00] laser scanning is done, it’s being done, let’s say from a vehicle in motion, and so everything is relative to the vehicle.

So oftentimes it just seems really flat and you run V. I. R. As an example, we just talked about, or Watkins Glen, you’re coming up out of the toe V. I. R. You’re coming down through the roller coaster. When you see it in real life, you drive it in real life. You realize the game you might as well be driving on a billiard table.

It’s that flat, even with simulated elevation. Lime Rock, Road Atlanta, and I’ve driven all these myself, Road Atlanta, you might as well be driving off the side of a building, that’s how steep it is, but in a game, you go flat out, you know, under the yellow marker coming out of 11, and you just stand on it, in real life, that’s a pucker moment.

Cause you can’t see anything but sky. And when you come down, it’s literally like coming down on a roller coaster. And you better be in the right spot at the right time and hang the hell on. But you can’t get that same feeling when you’re on a simulator, no matter how good it is. [00:35:00] Maybe that’s my bias. I’m jaded because I’ve driven these tracks in real life.

But it’s something that’s irreplaceable. It’s that experience. And to Dan’s point, come out and try it. It can be expensive. There’s a barrier of entry. But we tell people all the time. You don’t need a full fledged race car to go and enjoy turning laps at a track. Just like you were saying, you don’t have to buy a Fanatec motion activated rig to go simulation racing.

The same is true of going real racing.

Brockton Packard: That’s a big point of The reason why I can pick and choose a couple things on Sebring is I haven’t driven on it, but I have been driven on it. And I have that feel, even though it was a while ago, I still remember it and I still understand it. And going out and trying it, it’s the same thing that I was saying with people who just think it’s a game.

Come try it, come figure it out, come understand that it’s not a game. Go try real racing, go ride in the car with somebody, go get coached by somebody, and understand it’s not just driving around in circles, that there’s points and so many different things [00:36:00] that you have to watch for, not just what’s directly in front of you, you gotta look 100 yards in front of you to make sure the track is dry, there’s nothing on the track, there’s not a car going backwards on the track, you gotta make sure that everything’s good, and so that’s like a bucket list item is to drive a car on a track just doing it.

Mountain Man Dan: It is addictive and you’ll want to do it a lot more.

Crew Chief Eric: And you’ll be terrible at it, you know?

Brockton Packard: That’s the beautiful thing about it is in the sim world, you can pick up a bunch of different cars and they may drive similar or there may not. And you’ll be trash at them. I could not run three laps at Daytona attract that.

I have run many times in many different cars with that new BMW. I couldn’t the power, the downforce, it was all very, very different. So I didn’t understand it. And you know, you put the time in, you put the effort in, and 24 hours into a race, you realize, Hey, we just did 400 and some odd laps without killing ourselves too much.

[00:37:00] And a month ago, I couldn’t turn a lap. So, it’s the ability to pick up on things and understand that mistakes are okay. But not major mistakes make minimum mistakes

Crew Chief Eric: in real life, the little ones and the big ones.

Brockton Packard: Everything’s bad. Yeah. That’s where the SIM stuff kind of helps. Cause I can make those major mistakes.

Crew Chief Eric: Your safety rating goes down. Yeah. Just a little

Brockton Packard: bit. You know, if you ever want to. Have a revisit to the plan. I’ll be sure to make some time up.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, and you know, if you ever want old guys screaming at the clouds, you’re more than welcome.

Brockton Packard: Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think that’s, I think that’s it.

Crew Chief Eric: Go team 24.

Yeah,

Brockton Packard: go team 24.

Crew Chief Eric: We [00:38:00] hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast, brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at gtmotorsports.

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Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Break Fix Podcast
• 00:35 Guest Introduction: Brockton Packard
• 01:40 Brockton’s Early Motorsports Influences
• 02:46 Hands-On Experience with Jeeps
• 04:20 First Encounters with Racing
• 06:40 Choosing a Path in Motorsports
• 13:54 Internship with RBR Team
• 20:54 University Life and Future Plans
• 23:17 Monster Truck Memories
• 26:00 Motorsports Involvement and NASCAR Hall of Fame
• 26:55 The Rise of Sim Racing During COVID-19
• 27:58 iRacing: The Ultimate Sim Racing Experience
• 29:37 Real vs. Sim: The Driving Experience
• 34:11 The Popularity of Asphalt Oval Racing in iRacing
• 36:21 Getting Started with iRacing
• 37:45 Sim Racing as an eSport
• 40:54 Physical and Mental Preparation for Sim Racing
• 45:16 Convincing Others to Try Sim Racing
• 48:25 The Press Box Motorsports Podcast
• 49:25 Future Plans and Shoutouts
• 51:40 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

Bonus content available as a #PITSTOP mini-sode.

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