Buemi: "Reality looks different"
SIMRACING BEGINNER In real life, Sébastien Buemi often sits in Red Bull Racing's high-tech F1 simulator. In the virtual Formula E Challenge, on the other hand, he still has a bit of a hard time. There are reasons for that. The one-minute highlights show the turmoil right after the start. In reality, the race would have been stopped to clear the debris. On the fourth lap [...]
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The one-minute highlights show the turmoil right after the start. In reality, the race would have been stopped to clear the debris.
In the fourth round of the ABB Formula E Race at Home Challenge, in which all 24 real Formula E drivers took part at the wheel of their private simulators at home on May 16, Sébastien Buemi scored his first points on the virtual Hong Kong street circuit in ninth place. In fact, no other active Formula E champion has ever achieved this!
The fact that the Vaudois is not yet one of the best in simracing had a decisive advantage this time. Starting only eighteenth in his virtual Nissan, Buemi escaped a carnage in the first hairpin that involved half the field.
Mortara misses out on victory
Despite braking, Edoardo Mortara made it around the first corner in one piece as pole setter. After a few laps, however, the driver from Geneva touched the walls without any external impact and dropped back to fifth place as a result.
Pascal Wehrlein gratefully accepted this gift and took the second consecutive victory for Mahindra at his home in Landschlacht. Nico Müller (14th) and Neel Jani (16th) lost quite a few positions in the starting tussle, which they were unable to make up in order not to be eliminated early.
A good platform for attention
However, Sébastien Buemi doesn't take sim racing quite as seriously as real racing, although he does have a lot of positive things to gain from it. The man from the canton of Vaud commented on this in an Internet interview.
Sébastien Buemi: "The second race two weeks earlier was my very first virtual race ever. It didn't go so well at the beginning, but I'm trying hard to improve. It is good to have this. Formula E is very good at creating something like this. It's not as good as real racing, of course, but it's a good platform for our sponsors. And people are reminded that Formula E very much still exists. Maybe we can even use it to attract new viewers to it."
No feeling for the car
Of course, this has nothing to do with reality. It makes no difference whether the cars are racing cars with sonorous gasoline engines or just quietly whirring electric runabouts.
Sébastien Buemi: "The car doesn't move, you don't feel any forces, no slide. You only get feedback from the steering wheel and the graphics. But the graphics are impressive. Over the years, simracing has made enormous progress, and it's nice to be part of it now. But it doesn't reflect reality. So we all hope to compete on the track again soon."
Practice makes perfect
For the next three Saturdays, Buemi will once again be sitting in his game simulator at home in Aigle, virtually battling for points for Nissan Motorsport. Whether he will make further progress without pushing the training remains to be seen.
Sébastien Buemi: "Even if you're only sitting at the simulator, you want to be up front. An athlete always wants to win. But you have to learn a lot of details in simracing to become faster. But I don't want to invest endless time in it."
He prefers to do this when the season continues on the real race tracks, back in his team's simulator in France.
Sébastien Buemi: "The Nissan eDams simulator is of course much more advanced. We can try out and evaluate all sorts of things with it. A private simulator with the program we use for the Race at Home Challenge is good if you want to familiarize yourself with a new track. But the real preparation for a Formula E race happens at the team base in Le Mans. Then I sit in the real race simulator for about three to four days at a time."
