Trevor Marks (K-53)

Trevor Marks - Founder & CEO for K-53

K53 is a consulting agency focused on the convergence of sim racing, esports and motorsports.

Contact: Trevor Marks at trevor@k-53.com | N/A | Visit Online!

    

• Did you come from a racing family? Are you “the only one into it?”
• What drew you to eSports/SimRacing?
• You ended up at DreamHack – tell us about that? 
• As an e-sports racer yourself, how have you seen it change over the last 5 years? 
• Is sim racing as strong as it was in the 20/21 season? 
• What are some new developments in sim? 

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads 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.

Crew Chief Eric: From Formula One to the gritty world of rally racing, tonight’s guest’s expertise in esports and motorsports is setting the pace for this dynamic industry. Trevor Marks is not just another gearhead. He’s the founder of K53, a consulting firm with its sights set toward the convergence of sim racing, e sports, and motor sports.

Brockton Packard: And he’s here to tell us all about his road to success. His partnership with Torque Atlanta. One of the most thrilling racing simulation venues in the world and how this haven for racing enthusiast [00:01:00] combines cutting edge technology and immersive experience that puts you in the driver’s seat

Crew Chief Eric: with that.

Let’s welcome Trevor to break fix. Hello. Hello. How are you

Trevor Marks: guys

Crew Chief Eric: doing? And joining me tonight is returning guest. Brock Packard, who you might remember from his double episode. He’s part of the Niner Esports team at University of North Carolina. And since his last appearance on Break Fixed, he’s now an engineer for Jordan Anderson Racing.

So welcome back, Brock.

Brockton Packard: Thanks, Eric. Thanks for having me and excited to be a co host this time and ask the questions instead of answering.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, like all good break fix stories, there’s a superhero origin. So Trevor, tell us about the who, what, when, and where of you, how you got into racing and especially the world of e sports and sim,

Trevor Marks: you know, it’s easier to explain getting into racing than is e sports, you know, e sports is such a small close knit community.

There’s very few people that have the professional pedigree to even say that they’ve been a part of this industry for 15 years or 20 years. And I was [00:02:00] blessed enough. To have the opportunity to jump in with one of the biggest organizations in the world, which is DreamHack, which is now ESL Faceit group, which is a conglomeration of Faceit, ESL and DreamHack.

I was working as a logistics manager for a large logistics company in Atlanta. By the airport, we were moving millions of pounds of freight a week. So I was responsible for the sort and I developed a lot of transferable skills in that role and DreamHack was just starting to launch in the United States in about 2016.

They had just had their first show in Austin in 2016, and they were looking for volunteer crew members for the rest of the DreamHack shows. And I applied for it like it was a job. I got the crew lead position, which would have been DreamHack Atlanta 2017. And through my communications with the team. They started to fly me out to the other DreamHack shows.

I went to DreamHack Austin 2017. I went to DreamHack Denver 2017, and I quickly learned that they did not have the logistics set up that they needed to expand in the United States. From [00:03:00] that conversation, a contract was birthed and that’s how I got my first start in eSports as the logistics coordinator for DreamHack North America.

So I set the standards and the protocol to get millions of dollars of equipment across the country in a timely manner. I’m the reason why all the things you saw at a DreamHack show arrived on time. That was me. For two years to make sure that happened. And during that time, I shadowed the sales and partnership team, namely Magnus and Justin Burnham and Blaine.

Those three guys took me under their wing, showed me the ropes, gave me the who’s on first, he’s on second for the industry, how things worked and Justin Burnham pulled me to the side one show. And he said, look, man, I know you’re brilliant in logistics. You’re a smart guy. You can figure this out. I know you can do logistics to no one else, but you’ve got an act for this business side of things.

And you really ought to see that through. And from there, it’s just been one step after another, got recruited to RTS. Then I went on to work for Nurtree for a while, came back to RTS. And now here I am starting my own firm, looking at the opportunities bubbling up here in the United States and taking advantage of it.

That is how I got into e sports from logistics [00:04:00] to managing one of the largest e sports festivals in the world, in the United States, creating a lot of relationships there and then bridging those relationships to start my own firm. See,

Crew Chief Eric: if I had told that story, I would have said the year was 1984 and I had an Atari.

And I was playing pole position. You had to have been a gamer before you became a logistics expert, right? I mean, were you in the world of cars? Did you come from a racing family? I mean, you’re wearing a grid life sweatshirt right now. You have to have a passion for motor sports, right?

Trevor Marks: Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. My father is. A lifelong motorcyclist. You know, he’s in his mid seventies and he still rides when he gets a chance. So that was always a part of the pedigree. And then I grew up riding dirt bikes and I never got the chance to really participate in motor sports, which is a problem that everybody’s trying to solve now, right?

Accessibility is expensive. It’s difficult. And that’s part of the reason why sim racing is blowing up so much because so many people interested did have an access point. I was one of those kids that didn’t have an access point. I had Hot Wheels. I had magazines. I remember when Nikki Hayden, RIP, the Kentucky kid was kicking butt over at MotoGP and I was [00:05:00] following his career in the early and mid 2000s, still want a Repsol CBR 1000RR because of him in that livery, I was watching from the sideline and I was an avid gamer.

So I had always been a gamer since early ages. My first real racing game was Forza Motorsport 2. That started kind of like, Oh, this is tuning. This is learning what cars are fast. Actually, no, I think the first racing game before that was Sega GT 2000, which came with the original Xbox. And I played the heck out of that game and learned what cars were good, what cars were bad, never had a wheel, just always was participating in that and continued to game.

It was a friend of mine, Calvin, that was living with me at the time. That was my roommate that while I was working for the freight industry was like, Hey, you’re playing Counter Strike, you’re jumping in tournaments. You’re competitive. You play a lot. You have a passion for e sports. You should use that passion to go into the industry.

And that’s what was the catalyst for me to start with DreamHack. After getting on with DreamHack, I rediscovered my love for sim racing, coincidentally at CES 2020. I was still following racing, I was following grid life, I was going to motorsport [00:06:00] events in Atlanta, I was watching Isle of Man, I’d watch Formula One, still always watching consuming content, but not participating as much.

Until CES 2020, I had a contract to do the Razor booth at CES. So I was part of the staff and helping out Razor with a couple of different things and brought a Visaro rig to the booth. Basically every morning, the booth has to be calibrated for like 20, 30 minutes. So they would just let me hot lap for 20, 30 minutes in the Visaro booth, which that’s a phenomenal rig.

That experience, like a switch came on and I was like, Oh, I have to get more of this. Luckily enough, within a year of that happening, Torque Motorsports opened up in Atlanta. And then I jumped right in. And started sim racing at Torque Motorsports and competing and just driving from then on.

Crew Chief Eric: And we’re going to talk about that more as we go along.

So you mentioned Forza Motorsport. It’s kind of funny. A lot of people I meet are always like Gran Turismo, kind of the granddaddy of them all. But there are titles that predate Gran Turismo, right? If you think about Jeff Kramer’s Formula One, Formula One GP2 and Papyrus’s IndyCar. Those are some of the most tunable games that even [00:07:00] predate Sony, predate Forza, things like that.

So this idea. Simulation in the video game world has been around for a long time. So as you look back over the history of the games you’ve played, kind of a pit stop question, what are some of your favorite titles? What are some of the worst?

Trevor Marks: Well, first of all, I would like to shout out GP laps on YouTube.

He does a lot of historic vintage racing and also like vintage. Esports and vintage sim racing games. So I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I missed through his channel. I just love to give him a shout out for that content and exploring some of these titles retroactively. As a child coming up, the crown jewel was Project Gotham Racing 2 and Need for Speed Underground 2.

Now, New Speed Underground 2 was peak Fast and Furious culture. The movies had just come out. You could customize the car. And then also they were selling a dream because the cars in the game were regular tuner cars, like a 350Z, a Civic. So you could, as a 13 year old kid, realistically look to potentially owning one of those, and that made it tangible.

I think that there are some divides in the community, but. I had some friends that always used to ooh and ah over the Aston Martins. [00:08:00] And I was part of the group of friends like, well, I could actually possibly one day own a C5 Corvette. So that’s what I’m going to make my dream car because it was something that was tangible.

And then my friends would have them and this, that, and the third. So, you know, USB Underground 2 was definitely the first time of like seeing yourself. Potentially being this type of racer and, and like participating in that. And then also kind of introducing a lot of us to the street culture for drifting, for driving, for street racing.

And that was like the entry for you looking at motor sports. That was like, this is racing. And then the other titles come along. Project Gotham Racing 2 was foundational because Project Gotham Racing actually encouraged you to race, learn how to race, learn racing lines. It was a more Sim Katie experience than Need for Speed Underground Racing was.

And in that it led you learning how to progressively break. And I actually started to develop a lot of friends. This is the onset of Xbox Live, when Halo 2 came out. Project Gotham Racing 2 was me playing online with other people. That was the first Sim Racing experience, playing online, jumping leaderboards, custom games.

I remember playing cat and [00:09:00] mouse. You’d get two teams of eight. One team member is the mouse, which they drive a mini Cooper and the other three team members drive big, heavy GT cars, like the GT 40. And then you try to get your mouse across the finish line first. And so you’re defensively driving to protect your mouse, but then aggressively driving, trying to Ram and block the other mouth, which is a lot of fun in between moments of real motor sport and kind of learning how to drive.

And I would say Forza. Three and four were when things started to kick into overdrive and you’re really learning racing lines. I think it was fourth, uh, three to introduce rivals mode, but rivals mode, man, that was like crack cocaine. Like you get that. I got my time on a leaderboard. My friend beat it by 10 10th.

Oh, hell no. You go back and it was fun. Cause you get to see where they were bad at the track. So I had a certain areas with my friend, Matt, where I was like, Oh, you suck at this tight section and I’m really good at this. But then on a longer sweeper section, you just have the throttle control better. So I’m really struggling there.

So I need to make sure I’m as clean as I can through this section. So that when I get to the section where I’m not good at, [00:10:00] and that is a very real skill that you do when you’re driving and preparing for a track, you have certain areas where, you know, you’re not really fast there, you’re a 10th or two off pace.

And you have to be very protective of that. Or you have to work on that area during your quality time. And when you’re racing at somebody else and you notice that they’re struggling in one part of a track, that’s where you attack. So it’s, it’s funny how rivals mode at Ford’s a three or four kind of like encapsulated some of the actual racing techniques that I still employ today.

When I’m sitting down for sim race.

Brockton Packard: So 2020 did a lot for the world, but especially for the world of sim racing, every motorsports got shut down. We all had to transfer into something that we didn’t have to be next to each other. We had to figure out a different way of life for however long we were shut down.

I know NASCAR, we went to iRacing and a lot of other motorsports went to their own video games and started running their own things. So as an eRacer yourself, Did you kind of see a change or a shift in the motion of growth in SimRacing over [00:11:00] the last five years and then 2020 and beyond?

Trevor Marks: I didn’t jump on the bandwagon because the CES 2020 was pre pandemic.

That was right before it. So that’s when I was getting involved. So I wasn’t so much a SimRacer at the time, but I was an e sports professional. So as an e sports professional post COVID, I was like, yeah, finally, like I kind of had been feeling this way for a while, and I’ve been asking this question about SimRacing and why we don’t see more of it and it’s.

Only sport that’s transferable from the actual sport to the actual race. Like, I don’t care how good you are at Madden, you’re never going to be able to hit a gap like LaShawn McCoy or like any one of these Hall of Fame runner backs. Like, that doesn’t transfer. You being good at 2k doesn’t make you jump shot good in real life, but you being good in the sim can possibly mean that you’re good in real life.

And the Grudge Reason movie that just came out is basically the story that proved that. And I remember watching that live as a college student. When that happened, I actually participated in that competition and I knew that I couldn’t do it with controller. I was like, I’m never going to be able to make it to the top of the leaderboards.

But I threw my name in the hat and I remember watching that journey and just being amazed to sit around the TV in college, watching that, and then to be a [00:12:00] professional in the space. Having watched the Nissan GranTurismo GT World Challenge come to fruition, and that driver actually still driving and testing today, and then to be an esports professional 10 years later and be like, why is this not a pipeline?

Why are we not doing this? The pandemic was a catalyst to prove that this is a viable sport, that it does have an audience, and that it has legs on it. One of the biggest drawbacks to traditional sports games as an e sport, and this is something that I have a particular opinion of as a professional, is that the NFL will always be more exciting than that.

NBA 2K will never be as exciting as Game 7 Finals. It never will be. It’s never going to eclipse its real life counterpart. Gran Turismo

World… Challenge, like when they have their competition, that’s some damn good racing. It’s fun to watch. It’s exciting. And it has merit in and of itself. We all watched not Australian GP was form of the one NASCAR did 900, 000 viewers on Twitch during the pandemic for the one [00:13:00] reports that they have 30 million total combined viewers across all their platforms, because they did F1 TV into the whole thing during the pandemic, that was obviously in lieu of the real form of the one.

But the fact that that many people even care to watch shows that there is something there. There is a business principle there. The pandemic essentially created a test period. I don’t think that it made an industry out of nothing, but I do think that it catalyzed things forward a couple of years so that this propagation that we see now with sim racing in lieu of the pandemic may not have naturally occurred this way until 2025 2026.

Now that we have the pandemic, now people are jumping in line. Now you see Ford partnering with Next Level Racing, the branded SimRig, Pagani partnered with S Attack to get their branded wheels and pedals, and you’re starting to see the manufacturers jump in and people starting to pay attention to it.

Williams Esports, McLaren Esports, like all of the manufacturers from Formula One and from other racing are starting to pay attention. So what this has done is basically COVID has led to everybody turning their heads, maybe not their wallets. [00:14:00] Maybe not their influence and maybe not being an emphasis, but at least turning their heads in that direction.

And it’s part of the reason why I started the firm and why I am getting into this now, because I see the opportunity and I see the holes and gaps that need to be filled in e sports. One of the issues. Is getting non endemics into the space, getting them comfortable with the brand, getting them comfortable with the product, getting them comfortable with the audience and comfortable spending.

They’ll go to Madison Avenue and spend seven, 8 million on a DreamHack production across seven countries and it’s streaming in between DreamHack shows for half of that price with three times, four times the amount of interactivity, they’re kind of scratching their heads, right? We’re at a turning point on a couple of different levels.

And it’s going to take time for the rest of the industry to kind of start making moves, but we’ll start to see different projects pop up and be explored to see what their financial stability is. And all of that has been accelerated due to COVID.

Brockton Packard: So you’re kind of in a different perspective than I am.

I’m very. Behind the steering wheel. [00:15:00] I’m a consumer, but you’re a very innovative and trying to find those things that the consumer like myself, or somebody who’s trying to sell this product to the school to give us more funding or things like that, what are developments in the SIM that you are seeing and, or what are you trying to do with K53 to fill those gaps?

Trevor Marks: We are missing the core foundational infrastructure that they have in the EU at a fundamental level. What do I mean by that? If you look at Motorsport UK, Motorsport UK is an organization, I would say somewhat similar to NASA or SCCA in between different racing groups and they advocate for things and they like sponsor and work with sim facilities.

There’s networks of sim facilities working together and Motorsports UK is working with them to get sim racers into the seats. Like they understand the value proposition and how if we have kids racing in this. And participating in this, and adults racing, participating in this, this is more tickets for people to come to racing events.

It’s a healthy outlook for families. [00:16:00] It’s good for students. It’s good for kids. And everybody’s open to come and try it. It lends itself to more industry. So they look at this as building an industry, instead of just something that kids are playing, and we haven’t quite gotten to that. I don’t think motorsport teams in the United States understand the value proposition of having a sim racing team or even the value proposition of esports in general and how it can be an extension of your brand and even get to the point where it can live on in itself.

Williams F1 esports doesn’t have to have anything to do with the real team. It can exist and be profitable and be in a really successful, great community led team and organization. Independent of the form of one team independent of the F one team is doing good or bad. They haven’t wrapped their heads around that yet.

I don’t think we’re there. So what K 53 is doing is looking at the ecosystem that we have in the United States, looking at what we have in EU and working with partners to start to fill that gap. And either be the entity that needs to be there or find partnerships to make that happen. We don’t have a sim racing expo.

[00:17:00] ADAC, the big sim racing expo in Europe just happened a couple weeks ago. I’ve been reading all about it and drooling from a distance because I can’t go and see that. We need that here. That’s something that I would love to talk to DreamHack and say, Hey, we have an existing show. Let’s get a hundred thousand square feet, 50, 000 square feet and put a sim racing expo on the show floor at DreamHack.

That’s an easy ask. It’s easy to sell into and we can get the brands involved. And I am going to push for that and advocate for that to make that happen because we need those brands. We need those people here seeing, touching, tasting, and seeing everything that’s available. There’s some people that don’t even know AcidTech.

Make sim racing equipment. Think about that for a second. They haven’t did it. They’re like, Oh yeah, the water cooling guys. No, bro. They’ve what there’s a dearth of information and a dearth of infrastructure. So we need more organizations to galvanize the sim racing facilities that are around and to galvanize the sim racing facilities on campuses.

It’s really hard for an individual sim racing team, or let’s say you have a 10 seat. Sim facility at [00:18:00] UNC Charlotte or UNC Chapel Hill, and you’re looking for sponsorship, that’s a hard sell for Pennzoil to sponsor a university. But if it’s sponsoring 15 sim centers up and down the East Coast, and it’s a regional approach, now Pennzoil may be more applicable to that.

I have been in the room under different eSports negotiations where I’m talking to a brand. For example, one specific monitor brand told me that if an event has less than 5, 000 people, they just don’t have the bandwidth to do it. But if it was 10 events with 5, 000 people, they would totally do it. They have goals that they have to hit and confront.

That ask from the sponsors, from the money coming in. And I feel right now that there’s a lot of people in the Simracing community and everybody is individually saying, Oh, Hey, can you help me out? Hey, I have a great brand. And it’s like together, weak, apes by themselves, weak, apes together, strong. Right. We have to band together.

K53 is looking to band together, bridge relations amongst SimCenters, producers, people that produce events, people that manage and operate teams, and to take those relationships. And help bring some of the brands in and say, Hey, this is how we can do this. This is a [00:19:00] starting place. Can we do activations across all the SIM facilities?

One of the big goals is starting to work with SCCA and NASA to create seat time in their spec classes, spec Miata, spec E30, spec Porsche 944, spec E36. Cause those are slower cars, but very competitive. Something that I would totally be comfortable putting. Let’s say a 16 year old girl is really fast on the sim and she’s never had a chance.

Let’s put her in a spec Miata, see how she does. And that’s something I feel very safe. We can put her in the right track and finding team slots that I had my first racing experience at 24 hours of lemons. It was fantastic. I highly think that would be a great way to get sim racers into seats. We are just missing so much infrastructure in so many different places.

It’s really hard to pick and choose what specifically we’re missing. It’s like all of it. We have no governing bodies. We have no advocacy. We have no lobbying. There’s nothing here. There’s just individual companies doing things and K 53 is going to solve that problem by start stitching some of this together and creating a little bit more organization out of this individuals looking to advocate for their industry.

Brockton Packard: As part of a sim racing team and organization here at UNCC. [00:20:00] We’ve definitely run into those issues of trying to sell an organization, not so much a product or whatever, but you’ve got to sell the organization. And this organization is a very young organization. If I’m talking to the Dean of the school, she’s just going to look at me and go, it’s just another video game.

Why should I put any money into just another video game? And with your firm and how do you approach that? And when someone tells you that, what’s your answer to that? And how do you bridge that gap between, oh, it’s just some kids behind some monitors and this is applicable to real life?

Trevor Marks: That is a question that’s been the bane of everybody that’s Worked in business development and sales in e sports has had to deal with again.

I’m very blessed and fortunate to have learned from some of the best at EFG. If everybody’s coming to them and saying, Hey, this isn’t real, we’ll speak out hard numbers like, Oh, this energy drink company just signed a seven figure deal to be the sponsor for this activation for one year. We’re estimated to sell 500, 000 against this broadcast.

Do you want a part of that? Or this is the total [00:21:00] number of people that we, you know, if we’re talking to a brand and we say, Oh, they start himming and hawing. It’s like, well, this is the last broadcast that we did. This is the captive audience. This is the exact target demographic you’re looking at. You make it very, just this broadcast, just this weekend, just today, just this show, they start to get the hard numbers.

In a sales conversation, if somebody’s that keen and hard against the product and in the mindset against it, you have to hit them with very linear numbers and explain to them what is, is not happening. So if I’m talking to a dean of students and they’re like, look, I just don’t get it, man. You want us to play video games?

How is this a sport? And then I would probably break out a video of Max Verstappen talking about the importance of sim racing and be like, that’s number one driver in the world right now at the number one sport with the best team behind them. And the best money behind him, he’s saying that this is a valuable.

So do you think your opinion is better than Max for Spad? The answer is definitely no. Though you have to find a corollary to either directly rebuke what they’re saying, or do you use numbers and facts behind the industry to like spoon feed them and lead them in and go, okay, that’s a lot of money. Well, is that realistic?

Is that possible? Or, [00:22:00] okay, well, that’s a good viewership. If we could get that kind of viewership, that would lead to this. And a lot of times from a. From a business development standpoint, I’m definitely not a salesperson. I am not Mr. Cold Call. I look for solutions and I ask questions and I look to figure out what your problem is.

I’ve talked to administrators at schools that are like, we want to increase our recidivism rate. Where we have students that come here, they go for two years and then leave. Or we need to increase our admissions numbers. So then the response would be tailored to that. It’s like, okay, well, how many kids in this, in this area are into racing, into cars, things really big with people that are 13 to 23.

If you had a virtual drift league, you’d be the only school that had that. The amount of students that went to UC Berkeley because they had an e sports program. Is growing every year, right? Because I even want to go to a school. I’m very passionate about League of Legends. I’m very passionate about Dota.

I’m very passionate about Counter Strike. I don’t want to go to a college where I can’t play that with friends nearby or that I can’t be a part of that. Right. Or there’s an esports team I want to try out for. Are we a hundred percent there where that’s going to be like the decision maker? I don’t think that esports is going to be like [00:23:00] Alabama football, where when Alabama wins, their recruitment goes up because everybody wants to be a part of Alabama winning pedigree this and the third.

But we are in the space now where it’s like, well, I’m serious about sim racing. I’m serious about esports. And I would like to go to a college that also places value on sim racing and esports. And I will pick a college that reflects that. And that will continue to grow until it gets to the point where college is winning will become something.

That’s the long short of it. You have to figure out what they’re looking for. When you’re selling eSports or selling sim racing, what problem are they trying to solve that you’re trying to solve with eSports or with sim racing and work backwards from there? Or just hit them over the head with better knowledge, better numbers.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s an argument to be made that at certain universities where SAE programs, whether it’s Formula SAE or Baja SAE exist. That sim racing could be used as a feeder or an augment to those programs. Like learn how to become a race engineer by doing the tuning, right. You could use the simulators to simulate that part of the responsibility of being on the race team.

You know, now they’re [00:24:00] doing it, let’s say pen and paper and TI graphing calculators, you know, that kind of thing. How do you break down that barrier? How are you working towards a better aligning? Let’s say the e sports teams with the SAA teams at colleges that have those types of programs.

Trevor Marks: So I recently started to partner with a group called Simcraft and Simcraft makes very exquisite high end rigs out of Atlanta.

And the reason why I mentioned them is because they are a technology company. They are not a SIM manufacturer. They manufacture the hardware and write the software that dictates what moves on the rig. They are one of the partners that I would take and say, they do the math to figure out what you need to feel in the SIM that translates to the actual car.

They have the pedigree to do that. They’ve done it with different racers. They’ve done it with different racing teams. So this particular problem for SAE has something that is an ongoing facet of the motorsport industry. Multiple racing teams, NASCAR teams, 401 teams, Indy teams are currently in the [00:25:00] process of lowering their driver development costs, increasing their chances of being successful.

And the big math problem is how in the hell do we figure out if we’re fast on the sim and we’re slow on the actual track, what’s not translating? So there is a translator position. It’s an engineering position to figure out. What do I need to do to calibrate the sim to better replicate the data we’re getting from the track and then vice versa?

And you just kind of rinse and repeat. You take data from the track, you apply it to the sim, you take data from the sim, you apply it to the car, you go into the track and you do that process. That is an existing process that’s happening that’s growing. So if I’m going to an SAE program, I’m saying if you want your students to be job ready in three years, you need a sim.

You need a motion sim. You need a damn good motion sim. You need something that’s very competent and very real to life because these teams are currently in the process of evaluating what sim they’re going to use and this problem that they’re solving is a unique problem and hasn’t been around that [00:26:00] long.

Yes, teams have had simulators have been dialing it in, but not to the nature of doing it now. Before you needed a big multi million dollar sim. Now you spend 150, 000 on a SimCraft, Apex 6. And you can buy four or five of them, some price you were paying for one simulator. And you can start dialing that in per driver, per team, because every driver has a different calibration, that opportunity to do that, the cost of entry for SIM coaching for pro teams is dramatically falling every year.

And the proliferation of it is growing every year. Former SAE teams, if they’re trying to do their job, which prepare these students for real life activities and real life engineering, they have to get with the program. So I would use that to say your industry is already doing it. If you want to be state of the art industry, then you have to start to catch up and implement this process because this is something that’s currently going on by not having it.

You’re doing a disservice to your students because they’re missing out on this calibration period.

Crew Chief Eric: You were talking earlier about being in the boardroom with folks and trying to convince them to spend money on sim programs. Now we’re talking about SAE and how there’s this constant feedback loop between the SIM and the teams and vice versa.

You’ve done some racing. You mentioned you did 24 [00:27:00] hours of lemons. What’s the missing link between being behind the wheel of the car, being behind the wheel of the SIM, taking into account some high end equipment that you’ve been in as SIM rigs and then the car itself.

Trevor Marks: First of all, I would like to shout out myself that I’m totally built for racing.

One of the first things that the guys that I was learning from were saying when I was talking about getting into racing, they say, look, before you spend money, before you build your car, you got to go out there and see if you got the gumption to actually do it. A lot of people get out there and you see them all the time on the track days with their Porsche 911 GT3s, Porsche Cayman GT4 RS.

And they drive like grandmas.

Crew Chief Eric: They’re giving a point by to a guy in a Miata, right?

Trevor Marks: Yeah! I saw a dude at Hyperfest giving point bys to a Honda Odyssey. Like, dawg, what? But you’re in a C6 Corvette. What are you talking about? But they’re just not built for that. And so I am foolhardy. I think maybe because I also ride motorcycles.

I don’t know. There might be a couple screws loose there. I got in the car and it was road Atlanta and I was just immediately comfortable. And I was uncomfortable at first, but [00:28:00] once that green flag and I knew the track, I just kind of started to dial in and I just became the race. I don’t know. I, you know, Brock, you know, understand I’m talking about, you get that tunnel vision, you start listening to the engine of the car, you’re constantly checking your rear view cause you’re racing in traffic and you just start coming in the zone inflow state and drive.

I do not want to come out of the car. I did my stint and I wanted to keep driving. But the biggest difference between real life activity and the sim racing is you’re using all of your senses. You’re using your sense of direction. You’re using your sense of orientation. You’re using your sense of balance.

You’re using your sense of smell. You’re using your sense of friction, touch. When your rear end is starting to slide, not sliding, starting to slide, you’re sensing through your hips and your butt and your legs what that friction translates to your body. What is that sense? Oh, it’s just a touch. No, not really.

Cause the car is not sliding. I’m not getting the feedback. Car sliding, starting to rotate, starting to rotate. There’s a distinct feeling of like, Oh, it’s a, Oh, it’s sliding. Now the rear is gone. In that moment. I did not listen the first time I spun out. I listened the second time, [00:29:00] but I had to learn what that feeling was.

Those feelings and those sensations are, you know, in some instances, impossible to replicate and in other instances, very possible to replicate. Lewis Hamilton doesn’t like the sim. Why? At his level of performance and at the G forces that those guys are going through, to him, it’s not adding anything because I have so many other variables that deal with in real life that are not present in the sim, I cannot push.

We’re talking about probably one of the greatest drivers of all time, if not the greatest. In the premier sport, Zenith of Zenith of Zenith, 1 percent of 1%. But Max loves it. But what does Max love about it? Max loves the race craft. Max loved the decision making, the application of the brakes, when in traffic, what decisions do you make in the line?

He’s not hot lapping and working on timing. He’s working on under race conditions. This guy is trying to overtake me in this position. I’ve only encountered this two times in real life, but in the sim I’ve encountered it 15 times this week, right? And so now I get to deal with that situation and dial it in.

At the core of it, base level sim racing, learning the art of race [00:30:00] crafts and learning the basics of racing lines or in drifts, learning how to drift and how to carry the car. You can learn almost everything you need motion to get you to that top 10 percent and to the really dialing it in where you can drive the car just as hard on the sim as you can in real life.

You need a well tuned motion sim to dial that in beyond that I’m in a sim craft rig. I can feel the rear end. I’m listening to the car. I’m listening to my body. When you’re not doing motion, you’re just focused on your hands and what’s in front of you and what you can see with your eyes and getting into motion sims.

And training lets you learn how to use the rest of your body to pay attention to the car because you’re not driving with your hands and your feet. You’re driving with your ears, your sense of balance and all those other senses in combination.

Crew Chief Eric: So it’s interesting about what you said is, and I agree with all of it, is that the Sims that you’re describing basically replace what we used to tell people all the time.

You know, you’re talking about race craft and feeling the rotations. We still people all the time. Just go. Get started in go karts because go karts do [00:31:00] exactly that. So what you’ve described is a virtual version because go karts were always used as a feeder and a trainer for other motor sports. You know, you went to autocross and then club racing.

So on that line, what I’ve always found that never worked for me. And I love Sims and I love gaming and I will get on anybody’s Sim and test out a rig. And I enjoy it, but the elevation is never parallel because you go to Rhode Atlanta in real life and you come out of turn 10 and it’s not the same in the Sim.

Trevor Marks: Yo, turn 10, Rhode Atlanta. I thought I was going to die every time that is a rollercoaster man coming up the hill out of 10 a 10 b and pointing the car to God because it’s just the sky. You can’t see anything and then cresting the hill, the weightlessness at the top of the hill. Then you’re coming down.

The car doesn’t have grip until halfway down the hill. Cause the suspension is still unloaded as you’re cresting over the hill, as you carry momentum. And then as you’re getting on the power, it starts to squat. And then when it does squat, then you can really get on the power. Turn five, same thing coming through the S’s and getting to the bottom of turn [00:32:00] five, hitting on the brakes hard.

You feel it in your gut. Yeah. Elevation. Jesus. Yeah. So there is an argument. It’s almost like truncation error. You’ve ever done any type of physics programming. I was a physics major in college before I dropped out. You can never get a hundred percent to the number. So you can only carry the decimal place.

Of how accurate your simulation is to so many decimal points. And at some point you have to truncate it and you’ll have to account for truncation error. Right. And iRacing has this problem a lot where they try to like, according to the math, this is how the tire should react. And the driver gets in there and goes, absolutely not.

So then you have to fudge the math to make it feel right to the person. But then the math is wrong. And it’s like, well, how can the math be wrong? Well, the math is an approximation, right? There is a lot of sense of speed and sense of orientation that in order to. Really show that in the sim, you’d have to make the elevation way more distorted or like you see this in a lot of simcade and arcade racing games, you play Need for Speed, you hit the boost, it blurs, the sound gets quieter, the engines revving, you can hear the whooshing sound of the cars that creates [00:33:00] a sense of speed.

Sim racers may say, that’s not really accurate. I’ll be damned. Get in the car on the track and go fast. And you see, you get tunnel vision. You can’t see things. Everything on the side becomes a blur your noise. Cause you’re moving so fast. You don’t hear the, hear the engine as much. So thinking about motorcycles, I’m on the bike.

I can’t really hear the Doppler effects behind me. There is a case to be made in an attempt to make Sims more realistic. They’d have to deviate from some of the realism that they’re choosing to display. A lot of wind sounds. More blurring of the side. The car’s moving to scale in the game accurately. I’m like, yeah, but I’ve been in the car at that speed.

It feels a hell of a lot faster. You take an E30 around the track road Atlanta, a stock E30, you’re gonna have a blast coming down 10 8. You take it in the sim, it looks like you’re putting her about because if you’re not going 41 speed in the sim, it doesn’t feel like it. Everybody’s chasing realism to a fidelity point that Almost circumvents the immersion of realism.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s an interesting point because the big claim to fame with all the sims is, well, we laser scan the track down to 0. 000 of a [00:34:00] millimeter. And I’m like, first of all, it’s like when you’re trying to train for any track in real life and you watch somebody else’s YouTube video. Everything looks flat.

You don’t realize how steep Road Atlanta, Lime Rock, Watkins Glen, any of these tracks are until you’re there. And you’re like, man, it’s like falling off a building because the car compensates and then the camera becomes basically linear. So yes, it is laser scan to the nth degree. But it’s completely flat, just like it is in a video.

So that’s the problem. And to your point, you would have to severely distort the track. But what I’ve noticed is on a motion sim and the ones I’ve been on, what they try to do is compensate with more gross movement to give you that sensation that you’re going downhill, but then it’s like, but the car doesn’t do that in real life.

Because again, it’s going with. The grade and the terrain, and you get a more subtle transition in the suspension, because if it unloaded that fast in real life, you’d be dead.

Trevor Marks: Yeah. I was talking to Sean about that and Sean CEO of Simcraft. So what that comes down to is calibration. [00:35:00] Some drivers like to have, like, they want it to be like a big impact.

They want it to feel like, Oh my God. And that’s to them what it feels like in the car. And then other drivers like, hell no, it doesn’t move like that. Like I just a little bump. The point is. You get it to where it feels good to you. Like for example, road Atlanta, turn five coming up the hill. There’s a dip after the end of the track edge and you can watch the GT three and LMB cars hit the dip.

How big is the dip? I don’t know. I’d have to estimate probably with their suspension set up like four to six inches from the baseline of the track. It’s probably a little bit less than that based on the way the cars move. But a driver might be like, no, I’ve hit it. Make it feel like it’s a foot deep. You know what I’m saying?

And they want a big reaction when they’re in the rig and other drivers are like, Oh, it’s not that big a deal. They want a lot, a lot of reaction. So part of the motion SIM experience is calibrating the motion SIM to react the way that you feel comfortable that translates to what you think makes sense.

For your car and your driving experience instead of just taking a blanket calibration and going from there, dialing that calibration in, getting it tuned to what you feel is [00:36:00] real and what will help you train is the most important part of that.

Brockton Packard: We kind of talked about the Simcade and Arcade and the difference between that, but you mentioned you kind of started on the Forza Motorsports and that’s kind of been your entry into sim racing.

And it just so happens at the time of recording this, the new Forza Motorsports game just launched. Have you had a chance to mess around with that? And if so, what are your thoughts?

Trevor Marks: All racing games are equally inferior and superior to each other in a multitude of ways. There is no superior sim. I don’t care what anybody says.

because they all do things so differently. Forza has been doing a lot of things really well over the years. Personally, I’ve transferred over to Gran Turismo because of the user experience. One of the things that’s huge for me, and because of being brought up in eSports environment, brought up in the Dreamhack family, they’re super big on user experience.

They’re super big on, when somebody comes to the show, when somebody’s on the website, when somebody’s watching, I’ve been groomed to pay attention to user experience, and I’ve been more keen [00:37:00] to it. When you boot up GT seven and you’re going in the menus, the music, the sounds from just clicking on things, the way that they have the menu set up, the way that they have the driver licenses set up the way that they have.

You can learn tracks. I can pick a track and break it into three or four segments and learn each second, I can hot lap a segment at a time. Nobody else does that. Where else can I go hot lap a segment of the track? At a time there in totality and infrastructure grand turismo is the ultimate driving simulator in my opinion Grand turismo 7 had eclipsed that title from forza motorsport now the new forces out I have not got a chance to try it.

I’ve seen some of the videos and it does look promising So i’m excited to see what that’s like and to see what that looks like. How does it handle? How does it feel? And it’s so interesting because If you ask somebody who does set of Corsa or R Factor or iRacing about GT7 or Forza, they’ll say, Oh, it’s an arcade game.

But then like largely by most people, you know, understanding Gran Turismo is a simulator, Forza is a simulator. Now Forza [00:38:00] Horizon, that’s the arcade game. And Need for Speed, that’s an arcade game. It’s not a, uh, snobbish pedigree, but there is a delineation of realism based on where you stand. So if you have real life racing experience, then yeah, Gran Turismo 7 is gonna feel like an arcade game to you.

But if you’ve never owned a wheel and you buy that game, it’s gonna feel like the realest thing in the world. There’s a time and a place for SimCades and for Sims, and I think that the ultimate game would be Gran Turismo 7. Experience with iRacing physics and simulation.

Crew Chief Eric: But not their graphics.

Trevor Marks: Not their graphics.

Not their graphics and not their menus. I feel like I’m at the DMV. Like how in the hell you made a racing game? I feel like I’m filling out form. Looks like Windows 95. Awful. It’s awful. They stand on the fact that they’re… iRacing is the best racing simulator. It’s not the best car simulator. It’s not the best driving simulator.

It’s just best for racing. I would say the best driving simulator is Gran Turismo 7. And the best car simulator is obviously Assetto Corsa because of all the mods and all the flexibility. I grew up [00:39:00] on mods, you know, Half Life and Counter Strike and Dota, all those games and mods, you know, League of Legends was originally a mod.

So the fact that, that of all the games. A set of courses carrying forward that mod legacy. That’s the number one, that’s always going to be number one game. And then also accessibility. If I only have enough money for a console and a Logitech G29 wheel, I can have so much fun with Forza or Gran Turismo.

The other issue that those games have is They’re closed loop systems. So like if me and you wanted to create a league in Gran Turismo, it’s a lot of work to set that up. It’s a lot of work to organize that to get people in line. Like none of the infrastructure is set up for that. If we wanted to do a Gran Turismo 7 event and had to get 10 game, we had to have 10 licenses, 10 different account.

Like it’s a pain. If you want to do a settled course that we can do that tomorrow. Like it’s so easy to do with the PCs. And this has been a problem that’s been ongoing in eSports console versus PC for certain games, fighting games, consoles are relatively easy and very simple to set up for other more complicated games, Call of Duty or any type of game where you have multiple people in a lobby, [00:40:00] then PC is where it’s at.

It’s just way simpler format overall. But the accessibility point means that lower price sims matter, lower price games matter because they create the feeder network for everybody to get in. I’ve talked to some people at iRacing and they do see themselves at the pinnacle. They are happy that Forza is coming out.

They’re happy that PlayStation is coming out with Grand Theft Auto 7, because those games prop them up. If Grand Theft Auto 7 and Forza Motorsport weren’t around, iRacing would nowhere near as much money, because they wouldn’t have as many people getting into sim racing and getting into the sport and getting into that.

All that comes from theater from the other games precluding them, and they recognize that. So I think that’s important to understand that this is an industry and we’re all in this together and we need multiple different components to feed into this. Like you need NASA and you need SCCA to create a driver pool.

You need the smaller, the lower ranks of NASCAR to get a Chase Elliott, to get a Kyle Larson, those guys, they can’t come up on circle track and funny car and the midget series. Like if they can’t do that, then they can’t become pro drivers. In that same way, you have to have sims and sim experiences, the [00:41:00] racing experiences that afford everybody to have a chance to touch this and experience it.

And then it’d be like, okay, I’ve been doing this for a while. Is there something else out there that’s better? And then somebody opens the door and says, here’s a set of course.

Crew Chief Eric: I think something that people often forget about the sim world and you know, we throw title names out there and you’ve hit us with like 20 of them from Gran Turismo to R Factor to iRacing to everything in between.

But really you have to boil it back to the physics engines that are running these titles. And there are family trees that they come from. R factor as an example, comes out of the GTR series, GTR two, there were a bunch of spinoffs of those. Then you’ve got Sim bin, which was a derivative of that too, which became project cars, cars two and three.

And now all that stuff is dead. It got absorbed by code masters, which has the ego engine, which was lifted from dirt. Then you’ve got Forza’s engine, the Gran Turismo engine, iRacing and stuff like that. So realistically, even with a set of Corsa in there, there’s maybe 10 different physics engines. And then there’s a bunch of games that are eye candy on top of that.

Who’s menu system are you going to use? Even Forza [00:42:00] Horizon was a joint venture between. Microsoft and Codemasters, they develop playground games, right? So they took all the Codemasters UI and then the force of physics and some of the ego engine and they made horizon. You’re like, okay, which is really project Gotham.

Let’s be serious. But

Trevor Marks: yeah, for sure. Or if we throw it back,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s test drive, right? From the old. Yeah.

Trevor Marks: Yeah, absolutely.

Crew Chief Eric: So that being said, one of the houses that you didn’t mention. Was Codemasters.

Trevor Marks: Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Have you always stuck to just road racing titles or have you ventured away maybe into rally and some of the other sims that are out there and what your thoughts are on that?

Trevor Marks: I have not spent enough time in the dirt considering I grew up in it. I grew up riding dirt bikes and just kind of, that was my first really into anything motorsport and motoring as a kid. And always been, you know, in rapture with rally, you know, one of my goals as a human is to one day complete the Dakar rally on a motorbike, which is fricking insane.

And that is a crazy thing to do. And I love it. I follow it every [00:43:00] year when I get a chance, a couple other rallies that I’m interested in. There’s a guy by the name of Eric Hubbard. He and he runs this group called the Backroads of Appalachia, and they’re doing some really awesome things in that country, Kentucky and West Virginia and Virginia, and trying to build a ecosystem to attract more motorsports to the region to help the people that are there.

Cause Appalachia has always been like an overlooked part of the country. All the way up from the South, all the way up to North. And so he’s been creating some seedlings to bring FIA rally out there and to do more rallying events. So rally is something that I keep seeing it echoing again and again, and I’ve tried it, but it’s something that I, it’s like drifting, like you have to do it.

And drive it consistently to get a feel for it. Just like F1. I’m a GT3 DTM guy. I like the classics. I like the old things. I do a lot of Touge driving. I love that. Chasing people down, uh, Mount Akagi, I think it is. Or Mount Kahina for sure. There’s a couple other passes. But I’m pretty calibrated for door slammers.

in sims up to gt3 cars the moment i deviate from that i have to like have a new calibration [00:44:00] period i was just hot lapping from f1 earlier in the week and i was like dang i have to like get used to the car when i jump in the rally cars i love them but getting used to where grip is and listening to the car it’s just a whole different experience i do like the idea of stage rally going against the clock and trying to Find your best line, listening to the notes.

It is, it’s exciting and enrapturing. The new WRC game is out or coming out too, right?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Which they’ve said is going to be the last one. I guess they’re pulling out, which only leaves Codemasters with the dirt series to remain in the rally scene now that. Has gone back forever. I mean, if you look at Codemasters, they were one of the leaders starting way back when, and Dirk came from Colin McRae rally, and then there were some previous titles to that.

I mean, I’ve been playing these since I was a little, little kid. So, you know, it’s kind of funny to see the evolution of them all. But to your point, making the adjustment period, what I find is funny. I play a lot of ACC because I do like GT3 racing. And I think for me, I could never get the same feel of the real [00:45:00] cars as I could with ACC when I compared it to iRacing, like the physics just didn’t seem right.

Cars weren’t right. But oddly enough, because I grew up watching group B rally and I wanted to be a rally driver and whatever. When I prepare to go do a race on, let’s say ACC, we’re going to go to spa and go do an hour there. I don’t do an hour of training at spa. I go do runs up Pikes Peak. Really? I know it sounds completely counterintuitive, but what it does for me is it gets me in a mindset of that catch release, feeling the car, even though the physics engines are different.

Yeah. There’s this. Translation that when you’re driving a GT three car with no traction control and it snaps, you need to be ready to catch it and be able to power slide out. So I use that as a training tool. And then I jump over to the other title and it feels fine.

Trevor Marks: That’s brilliant. I’ve definitely noticed that when I’m learning how to drift.

I’ve been able to catch more would have been a spin out, but I’m like, Oh, and I throw the wheel and I catch it. I’m like, Oh, I only got that from drifting. I couldn’t have got that any other way.

Crew Chief Eric: Funny. I had somebody actually critiqued me once I was on a SIM. We were doing some head to head stuff and [00:46:00] he’s like, why do you hold your hands like that?

You know, you should be really. Gripping the wheel. And, you know, I had this conversation with him. I said, even in real life, it’s a dance with the car. If you fight the car back and you’re mid spin, you say, you’re going to be stubborn. It’s not going to work. You have to feel it. You have to work with it, which means you have to relax a little bit.

And in the SIM, I do the same thing. Sometimes you just got to work with it. You just got to work the car, work the throttle. Sometimes it’s more throttle than it is steering input. Right. Just like it is in real life.

Trevor Marks: When I’m watching hot version on the Japanese drivers, it took a drivers. They kind of do the same thing with their hands.

They’re not really like gripping. They’re kind of around the wheel. Sometimes they grip it in certain conditions, but in the most of the time it’s dancing with the car. So they’re not, they’re like guiding the wheel instead of steering the car.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, as we kind of switch gears in. To our last segment here, I want to kind of change the tone and get back into talking about e sports, which we started with at the top of the conversation as we were talking about these different titles.

And you kind of made mention, and we talked about this on Brock’s episode, you know, is iRacing still the king? And [00:47:00] you sort of alluded to, they viewed themselves as the top of Mount Everest. But when you look at the top e sports titles, Even in 2023, and then obviously they’re going to get updated in 2024.

You don’t see iRacing on the list. You see Fortnite, and you see League of Legends, and Counter Strike, and all these other games. They’re not Sims. They’re games on that list. How do we… Get iRacing or Assetto Corsa or ACC on that list. How do we get better acceptance in the eSports community for the motorsports and sim racing folks?

And how does that tie into what you’re doing at TOR?

Trevor Marks: Well, first of all, iRacing gotta add rain. Like, come on guys, what the hell? Like, you can’t be Top Dog, you don’t have rain, you can’t drift. They got some big problems to finish. Like, yeah, so if I want to go race at Laguna Seca in the middle of the summer and no precipitation on the ground, it’s great.

But if I’m doing Road Atlanta during the raining season in August, like, that ain’t gonna happen. I’m not gonna be able to prepare for anything. This question is almost like a cultural question. And the reason why these [00:48:00] titles are big is because they’ve entered the cultural zeitgeist of esports. The trick to all of these games is that the community comes first.

So League of Legends and Dota love this conversation. We’re talking about different sim racing companies that have, they’re all forks of the same branch. League of Legends and Dota, much to League’s chagrin because Riot likes to pretend like they invented this game and nobody ever, I don’t know. Actually, I can’t say that they feel like this, but they don’t mention that they came from a mod.

You had Warcraft 3 and then you had Defense of the Ancients, which was the mod. And you had Icefrog and some other team members, and they had a big schism. Just like in Dota 2, the schism between the Dire and the Radiant. You had a big schism between these two groups. And one group thought that Dota should be one way, and be more consistent with the original game.

And the other group wanted to build and do something different. The team that wanted it to be more like the same became Riot and created League of Legends. The team that wanted to be different became Dota, got acquired by Valve, and continued to grow that way. The key factor that both those games have is that they built on the community.

The [00:49:00] Dota community is what built those games. Counter Strike was a Half Life mod, and built from there. You know, Fortnite became a Battle Royale, but the Battle Royale… Franchise started with PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale on Arma 2 servers back in 2009, 2010, 2011. And there was this growing community of people playing Battle Royale games.

And then, obviously, the emergence of DayZ, which was the progenitor of all the Battle Royale games, created this big hype, and then Fortnite came to fill a void where… The Battle Royale community needed a home on console and on a different platform. And they were able to take that and run with it. Call of Duty with the MLG initiative back in the day, built a large community.

FaZe Clan was born out of Call of Duty. Optic Gaming was born out of Call of Duty. The only game on here that I would say is kind of void of that is Overwatch, because that was more of a corporate push to like build like a community by force. And they still built a community, but it wasn’t organic by any measure of the word.

They kind of advanced things a lot. Valorant has a diehard community from League of Legends. So the League of Legends community fed the Valorant community. Rainbow Six Siege is the only title On here, that [00:50:00] Ubisoft, you know, sweat and tears, built that game into an eSport over six years. My hat goes off to them because I remember watching that while I was there at Dreamhack and just like, damn, like, they’re really gonna just make this, they’re gonna make this eSport.

You know what I’m saying? Like, they’re gonna, and they did it over time. What catering to the community. So the point is that all of these games come from this feedback loop of community involvement, community engagement, and then, you know, reflecting that with the games, you know, with patches and with the different events and the battle paths and different skins.

And just, there’s a lot of community building. And then there’s a lot of community overlap. When you go to esports conferences, one of the big charts they show you. That’s super interesting to me is they’ll show you a heat map of all of the people that are playing different games. So they’ll say like, okay, of the people that play Call of Duty, less than 5 percent of that community plays any other shooting game.

So on this list, let’s say Fortnite, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, Overwatch, Call of Duty. Rocket League and [00:51:00] Dota, a tiny percentage of Call of Duty will play any other shooting game, but then a large percentage will play Rocket League. So you might have 30 percent of Call of Duty players that play Rocket League every single day or play Rocket League once a week.

Why is that? There’s an overlap. The problem with iRacing and the other sims is that we’re on an island. Where there’s very little overlap between the hardcore sim racers and the community around them, because there are a lot of gear heads and motor sport guys in that community and people that play games.

So there’s this idea that because it’s a video game, because you can play it, because it’s streamed on Twitch that, Oh, it should be as big or the community over, I know it’s an Island. It’s on its own little cubicle. Sim racing, all of sim racing is here. And then you have like sim racing and then you have like motorsports and then you have driving like actual getting in the car.

And they’re all in a triangle and they’re slowly coming together. And part of K 53 is to start to make that overlap more pronounced. But when you take all of the iRacing community and overlay it over the Rainbow Six Siege community, like what, that’s probably a half a percent of people, I guarantee 10 percent of the iRacing community didn’t even know what Rainbow Six Siege is.[00:52:00]

Let’s be real. If 10 percent of iRacing community can recognize the logo for Rainbow Six Siege, I’ll give you a hundred dollars. I don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think that’s a realistic goal. But everybody in every one of those other communities, like everybody from League of Legends knows what Rainbow Six Siege is.

Every single person that’s in Fortnite knows what Hearthstone is. Every single person in Counter Strike knows what Rocket League is. Every single person, whether they play it or not, they know the game. Sim racing is more the car motorsport. Sim racing community than it is an actual active participant in the gaming community.

And that’s why it’s not a top game.

Crew Chief Eric: So therein lies the problem. The people that end up in the motorsports community are now much older. Maybe they’re professionals of driving age or close to. Granted, you can get on any of these servers and be literally racing against a 12 year old and probably getting their podiums taken away from you.

But the reality of the situation is how do you cater to People of our demographic of our age group, [00:53:00] and that’s where it goes back into that conversation we were having earlier about the realism and all those things, because we are spending time at the track, driving our cars. And we’re going, man, this doesn’t work.

Brockton Packard: Trevor, you kind of talked about it a little bit earlier in the episode with your involvement with torque motorsports at Duluth, Georgia based sim racing facility. Talk to us about that because. I’m up in North Carolina. I have my sim racing stuff over here, but I’ve never really heard about Torque.

What’s it about? What do they offer? And then how can someone become a part of Torque maybe as a client or as a sponsor?

Trevor Marks: Torque is the brainchild of Jamal and Will and a few other parties, but those are the two primary founders. And they recognized that during the pandemic, there was a big hype for sim racing and something that they wanted to do.

For a long time, and they decided to put the money together and put their money where their mouth was and build a sim racing facility. And coincidentally, and I’ve been doing my research over the past, like five or six months, Torque Motorsports is one of, probably in the top 1 percent of sim [00:54:00] racing facilities in the world because they have 15 motion rigs.

Just like that. Most sim facilities have between six to eight rigs. If they do have motion, they usually have between three to four motion sims. A lot of facilities have one motion sim and then the rest are static. So by having 15 full motion rigs, there’s two degrees of freedom. By having a motion rig with that much degrees of the movement puts them in the top 1%.

The point of the facility is to allow an entry point where, Oh, I thought about sim racing, maybe I watched Jimmy Broadbent on YouTube or Twitch, or maybe I watched super GT, or maybe I heard about it, you know, here in Atlanta, we have a lot, it’s a big motor sport culture here. So you have a lot of actual drifters and actual drivers.

And some people ask them, how do you get better at that? Oh, I have a sim at home. What, what is that? There’s such a big cost of entry to sim racing, right? I mean, racing is just experience in sim racing is, you know, you can spend 500 on a budget set up and that’s a console. So you’re making a decision between a new console or a sim setup.

So what this allows is allows you to come in [00:55:00] and have a really robust, great sim racing experience for a fraction of what you paid to have a rig itself. And I got involved with them. I was a client at first. And I was one of their first clients. I got the notification. I think I saw it on Instagram, and it was like SimRacingFacility.

I was like, oh, hell yeah. And I signed up. I was at the pre grand opening, pre pre grand opening, then grand opening. And I got a membership, and I was one of the first 50 people to get a membership, first 25, whatever. And I started to come and just compete and race and have a good time. And I, over time, I was like, man, I really believed in this.

And I, I want to see this grow. I want to see this do more. And so I began to have a relationship with Jamal and Will, and that eventually, you know, when I started my company and they were, they’re trying to get ready for the next version of this, the facilities will be moving here shortly and they’ll be going to a bigger facility.

And so they’re like, Hey, we really need somebody to help deal with the partnerships and relationships and people hit them up and say, Hey, you know, I need to see. Sim rig. Hey, can I, you know, we do this and can we partner? And it’s like, well, what does that mean? Well, that’s where I come in to help facilitate those conversations [00:56:00] and to bring those partnerships to either become a partner, become a vendor or something a hybrid of in between, and to help grow revenue through events and other activations that we can do by making best use of the space.

Crew Chief Eric: Having a facility in your backyard is awesome. I mean, obviously Brock has the university at his disposal, but not all of us have sim centers close by. Correct. For those of us. That are wanting to evolve the gear that we bought during COVID. Cause now it’s already three, almost four years old at this point, or we’re still looking to get in any tips and tricks on what you should buy.

Some recommendations, things to stay away from when’s the right time to upgrade. You know, we have some philosophies when it comes to cars. When you do upgrades, I think the same applies to sim racing.

Trevor Marks: Yeah. I look at getting your sim rig. Put together the same philosophy that I would use for building a gaming PC.

You have good, better, and best, and you’re going to hit that target and stay within that price range. I think setting a budget and what’s most important to you is key. I like having a [00:57:00] good chassis. So I would take a good chassis and a cheap wheel over a great wheel and no chassis all day. Just not having to have the seat roll back or the chair, like being able to keep in a solid seating position, be able to apply pressure to the brakes.

And then it’s easy to upgrade the chassis when you get into that personally, I feel like picking a chassis that you can start with and you can grow with that chassis and add and modify it as you over the years, as you own it, if you get a next level rig or one of these track racer rigs. Those rigs with the 8020 rail, highly customizable.

They can be kind of pricey to get into around 400 to 600. But for that investment, you have something that you can keep for the next five to 10 years, and you can even add motion to it with the box. So there’s a lot of options, a lot of verticals through that channel. If you don’t have that capital or you’re not willing to spend that, getting in where you fit in and getting an affordable wheel that lets you get time in, you know, I have an old Thrustmaster T300RS.

That’s a phenomenal wheel for 300 and that does everything you need it to do. I just can’t stress it. It’s a phenomenal wheel. You know, the old trusty Logitech [00:58:00] G29. That’s a great entry point wheel to get in for Forza or for Gran Turismo 7. So the point is it’s a hierarchy of these. If you’re building a PC, you’re going to say, what game am I playing?

What specs am I playing at? If you’re doing a sim rig, it’s what game am I playing and what level am I racing at? If you’re just starting out and you’re playing Ground Seasonal 7, you don’t need a Fanatec DD1, DD2, 1, 800 wheelbase. You don’t need these high end materials. You can get by with the regular.

G29 or T300, T400 RS or something like that. One of the entry level Thrustmaster or Logitech wheels. So it’s about knowing number one, where you’re racing, what game you’re racing on, and number two, how long have you been sim racing? What are you getting into? If you, we start with those two questions, you, Oh, I’m just starting out.

And I want to do, you know, a set of course, well, a set of course, it has a lot of feedback and a lot of granularity. So you can go with a higher end wheel and you’ll get a lot with that, and then you can add to it. You know, is it something you’re trying or something you’re making an investment into, right?

So, Oh, I want to try it out. Go buy a cheap wheel office. Off your friend, off your buddies, off of eBay and try it out and see if you’re [00:59:00] interested in, if you’re super serious and you’re diehard, then I would take the time to get to a solid chassis and get a portable wheel to mount to that chassis and then go from there.

Upgrading is tricky. I wouldn’t be upgrading. If you’re not within the top 5%. Of any leaderboard for whatever game you’re in and you’re trying to upgrade. It’s not going to help you get up there. Let me put it that way. Like you should be able to take a G29 and get within top 10 percent of pretty much any leaderboard on Gran Turismo 7 or Forza Motorsport with a base wheel attached to a table.

And you know, that’s a big problem that a lot of people think is like, Oh, my gear holding me back. Like no dudes. This 1, 000 wheel is just going to make you feel bad in a 1, 000 wheel feel. You know, it’s not going to make you a better driver or make you a better racer or better at race crap. There’s a lot of other things to focus on until you’re really pushing the cars and pushing the, pushing the limits of what the game is capable with.

Right? So if you’re in the top 5 percent of Grand Swizzle 7 and you’re pushing, pushing, pushing, and you’re, Oh man, I’m having trouble controlling the car at the limit here. When [01:00:00] you’re driving cars at the limit on Grand Swizzle 7 and you’re complaining about funky physics. Maybe it’s time to step up to a subtle Corso or to a real factor, because that’s one of the places where Gran Turismo doesn’t really shine as much as at the limit with the car, with the wheel, that package of having a low end entry level wheel with a entry level sim, and you’re pushing at the limit.

That’s where things get funky. That’s another thing that’s like, when we’re talking about sim racing fidelity and what’s good, what’s bad, and iRacing being the best, it’s like, for 90 percent of driving, Gran Turismo 7 is phenomenal. It’s when you get to that last 10 percent of at the limit, where it’s like, okay, this is…

Completely fabricated. We’re jumping curbs and I jumped the curb 10 times and it was fine on 10th time. The car just did a backflip. Like, I don’t understand why I did that. That’s what makes it funky. If you get into the point where you’re driving at the limit and that’s continuing to become a nuisance, that’s when it’s time to upgrade your rig, upgrade your game, get to a different game platform and doing that.

But for the vast majority of people. I would say starting out Grand Theft Auto 7 and Forza Motorsport with an entry level wheel and an entry level chassis is a phenomenal way to start or, you know, F1 [01:01:00] 2023. Those are great games to start with for somebody starting out that will give you enough of a feel to decide if you really want to make the investment.

If you do, if you are ready to make that investment, I would get a solid cockpit and I would start to play a slightly more serious sim like Real Factor. A set of Corsa, ACC, or even potentially iRacing a race room.

Brockton Packard: Let’s say you just get done with your 24 hours of lemons and a young enthusiast comes up and says, why do you race?

What would you say to them? And how do you help encourage more young people, especially women in motorsports, get into it? Because it’s a very male dominated space right now. And sometimes that can be a little bit intimidating.

Trevor Marks: You know, I think it’s been described a lot. It’s like a certain type of feeling that you really can’t get anywhere else.

And it’s a little different from other types of competitive feelings. Like, I have been boxing on and off for the last 12 years or so. And I love fighting. And there’s something special about boxing that you just, you can’t get that. You can’t really get that feeling [01:02:00] anywhere else. And driving, particularly motorsports, is in that same field.

There’s something about it that’s got a, you know, je ne sais quoi, there’s something about it. There’s a little bit that’s like, I can compete. And I can be competitive and I can learn a skill, but competing and learning this skill is just a little bit different. And that little bit of sauce, that little bit of feeling is what you’re chasing.

It makes things a lot of fun. As far as how we can encourage more young people. I think it’s very, very, very interesting. So as a black man in e sports in sim racing, it’s been very interesting to hear the women problem come up. Cause there’s been times where I’ve been in a room that’s for women in e sports and I’m not.

Only black person in the room that isn’t cleaning up the room. That’s happened to me on multiple occasions. So imagine how I feel a panel full of white Asian women, no black women on the panel talking about women, inclusion in e sports, and I’m looking around the room and the only little black people in the room are the janitors and nobody talks about that.

It’s difficult to get a race class breakdown of gamers, like you can’t tell me how [01:03:00] many Hispanic kids that come from a household makes less than 50, 000 a year play Call of Duty, but you can tell me exactly how many women are playing Rainbow Six Siege. And I think that those are good questions to ask, but there is a racial component to things that I feel is just being ignored.

Because it’s like, Oh, it’s hard for women to get in there. I’ve done activation with Steffi with, uh, in e sports. We did a really cool activation for, it was women only. It was a leaderboard challenge. It was 15, 000 cash prize. It was sponsored by Pennzoil. We did it at the NASCAR, Pennzoil 400. And I’ll never forget, Steffi kept saying, if you can see it, you can be it.

If you can see it, you can be it. And we’re getting these young women into the space. I met Kelly Moss, racing CEO and the rest of the team. And again, I’m the only Black person in the room that isn’t sweeping the floors. It’s a crazy thing. So it’s, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t focus on women or things like that, but it’s really interesting talking to someone who is a minority about another minority.

Crew Chief Eric: I think the overarching theme that you’re hitting on, Trevor, is we need more diversity in the paddock [01:04:00] across the board.

Trevor Marks: I think we need more opportunity and I think we need more points of ingress. How we encourage more people, I think it’s just accessibility. It’s just about giving them a chance to even see if they’re interested.

I’m not gonna take a young black kid that’s dead set on being a veterinarian and be like, you need to do motorsports. Like, no dude, go fix dogs. But if it’s a little white girl on the side of the road that’s like, loves it when the cars rev it, like, let’s give her a chance to see. Maybe she’s an engineer one day.

Maybe she’s changing the engines for the top fuel drag racers, disassembling them. We just have to create more points of entry. At every level, but most importantly, creating more points of entry at the base level, I was doing an event at revolt fest and revolt is this, this hip hop music festival. And we did a gaming activation and the number of people, men and women in that festival is predominantly black people that didn’t even understand what a gaming PC was like, they didn’t understand.

They were like sitting down, it was their first time ever on PC and learning how to look with the right hand and walk around with the left hand. Like. That’s a [01:05:00] infrastructure issue. Like we don’t have enough PCs in these people’s households that they have an opportunity to even try this. The number of women that don’t even get the opportunity to see if they’re interested in motorsports is the issue.

The solution to this is something like Torque Motorsports is a great problem solve. We can do activations there to provide a point of ingress without this investment of having to buy this equipment and get invested in this and provide an opportunity for different communities to come find a home and learn how to race and learn how.

to participate. So creating different points of ingress, particularly for sim racing, because e sports is a different problem because there’s no barrier of entry. You sit down and you game with sim racing. There’s a barrier of interest and then a barrier of entry. I view one of the biggest key factors to solving this is the proliferation of sim centers.

The more sim centers that come online and the more we can link. The do good in the sim, get a chance to earn seat time. As long as we continue to build that pipeline, we will start to see this change and we’ll start to see more and more people get opportunities.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I know you’re in a period of transition and you’re quickly ramping up [01:06:00] K53.

But I have to ask, what’s next, Trevor?

Trevor Marks: I’m excited to answer. I’ll be at SEMA this year. And I’ll be wheeling and dealing and talking to people and having a great time. I’ll be at PRI as well. And the capstone at the end of the event is going to be DreamHack Atlanta. There’s an e sports summit there, and that’s the record for the rest of the year.

And then for next year, I’ll have a new litany of events and motorsport events that I’ll be at and starting to chart that path forward. So going to these events first. Making the connections and then taking those connections into 2024.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Trevor, we’ve reached that part of the episode where I like to let my guests tell us about any shout outs, promotions, or anything else we haven’t covered thus far.

Trevor Marks: Yeah, I like to shout out DreamHack Atlanta. December 15th to 17th. Sim craft is a wonderful software development company, making some awesome Sims and I’m partnering with them and helping them out. And I also like to shout out MIE racing, which is a education based STEM training program to help bring kids into STEM via sim [01:07:00] racing.

They’re doing some really awesome things and they might be doing some things at Torque. Who knows we’re working on that. That’s about it.

Brockton Packard: Torque Motorsports Atlanta, which is the largest simulation racing center, delivering the thrill of automotive racing through advanced motion simulators and virtual reality.

Enjoy a risk free environment where you can improve your performance driving techniques for much less than a typical track weekend. And you don’t have a fear www. torqueadlanta.

com. Or follow Trevor on social media at k53consulting on Instagram and at trevorlmart on LinkedIn. Check out his website www. k53. com or stop over and visit the Torque Atlanta’s YouTube channel at Torque Atlanta as well.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Trevor, I can’t thank you enough for coming on break fix and sharing your road to success story with us.

And I want to congratulate you on your most recent successes and look forward to the [01:08:00] future and probably seeing you again on the show and talking about more things in the sim world. But also I want to thank you for what you’re doing in terms of giving that accessibility to young folks and to everyone that has an interest.

In simulation and e sports. This is really, really awesome. And we look forward to seeing more sim centers throughout the United States that may be overseas with your name on them. So thank you again for what you’re doing.

Trevor Marks: Thank you so much for the opportunity to come here and speak. I definitely need to do this more often.

And I love to advocate for the little guy that’s trying to get started because. I once, and to some degree still am. So it’s wonderful to be able to provide that, which I was lacking as a younger kid and being able to push that forward. I love groups such as this and having a platform to give people like me a voice as we’re building out.

And this is part of that sim racing, racing community that we definitely need to continue to build on here in the United States, so I’m just so happy to be here. And thank you for the opportunity to come and speak on your podcast.

Crew Chief Eric: And Brock, thank you again for coming on and co hosting with me.

Brockton Packard: My pleasure, Eric.

And I’ll do [01:09:00] it anytime.

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of break fix podcasts 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 BreakFix Podcast
• 00:37 Meet Trevor Marks: Founder of K53
• 01:36 Trevor’s Journey into Esports
• 05:50 Rediscovering Sim Racing
• 10:29 Impact of the Pandemic on Sim Racing
• 14:15 Challenges and Opportunities in Sim Racing
• 19:55 Bridging the Gap: Sim Racing and Real Motorsports
• 35:08 Calibrating Motion Simulators
• 36:03 Forza Motorsport vs. Gran Turismo
• 38:21 The Best Racing Simulators
• 42:27 Rally Racing and Personal Goals
• 46:45 Sim Racing Community and eSports
• 53:09 Torque Motorsports and Sim Racing Facilities
• 56:19 Building Your Sim Racing Setup
• 01:01:21 Encouraging Diversity in Motorsports
• 01:05:54 What’s Next for Trevor?
• 01:06:30 Final Thoughts and Shoutouts

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