First, let me set the scene: It’s about 5:50am, still dark, it has been raining all night and as I was warming the car up at 5:20am, it had turned to snow. I have just dropped my wife off in Boston and I am on 93 North, in the fast (left) lane going about 50mph, keeping a safe distance behind the guy infront and just following his lights. We’re about 2mins outside of Boston and there’s trucks in both of the right lanes who’re kicking up a lot of spray, the 3rd lane is empty and I’m in that 4th lane just staying out of the truck spray…

[googlemap lat="42.384311" lng="-71.076454" yaw="343.74193548387154" pitch="4.27419354838711" zoom="0" width="508px" height="150px" type="STREETVIEW"]Boston, MA[/googlemap]

As we reach the brow of a hill (where we’re blind as to what is ahead) I notice the SUV infront slam it’s brakes and then slam into two other vehicles, stopping almost immediately and blocking the 3rd and 4th lanes. I have a timed distance of probably about 5-seconds to react; I touch the brakes while I checked I am clear and swing over into the 2nd lane behind the truck, lift off gently and then merge back to the 3rd lane once clear of the accident.

On the rest of the drive I replayed the incident in my head a few times and felt that everything I did, I did right. I have a tendency not to want to run side by side with others (this allowed the lane next to me to be empty and is definitely something I have learned from sim racing – don’t be side by side if you don’t have to be), I didn’t slam on the brakes like the car infront (which would have instantly made me lose control of the car in those conditions), and I didn’t put too much steering into the car (which would have caused me to lose control). But most importantly, I didn’t panic, I felt I had seen it all before.

When I thought about that further, it made sense. Although I make my fair share of mistakes in racing sims, most of the situations I see are ones where someone else has lost control or made contact with another car; my job at that point is to avoid them – which I am able to most of the time. Today was a prime example of not only how simulations can help you with car control and learning the car and race track characteristics, but also how they can train your brain to make the right decision. This isn’t a new concept, flight simulations are used for this very thing and allow airline pilots to make the miraculous decisions that they do at times which save lives, but it was interesting for me to see this happening for me, with racing sims.

It also reminded me of the iRacing work outing at Lime Rock Park in 2006. It was horribly wet and we were out there in open-wheel Skip Barber 2000’s. Although I had never had to put opposite lock into any car in my life up until that point, my brain had been trained from years of simulations to make the right instinctive move with the steering when needed, as shown in this video: