06/01/26 - 22:00
Today I had my first experience of driving a car. I did a few laps around a near-empty car park, getting the hang of starting, stopping, and changing gear. I barely touched the accelerator, mostly just letting the car crawl forward at idle, with one or two jumps up to around 10mph, but in the small car park even 3mph felt very fast.
I have a basic sim racing setup at home, with force-feedback wheel, and pedals and gear stick. I thought, even if my ~200 hours in Forza don't count, then perhaps my 80 hours in beamNG, a game praised for its realistic physics and driving simulation, might prepare me just a little for actual driving. It did not. At least, not in terms of acceleration and deceleration - turning was roughly what I was used to/expecting, at least at these low speeds.
The first big difference I observed was that the pedals in a real car are much, much more sensitive than in a game. The clutch felt like it descended into some kind of mush several feet down into the footwell, while the brake and accelerator seemed to be calibrated to respond to millimeters of input. Never mind tapping the brakes, I found I needed to sort of hover my foot just off the surface of the pedal and telepathically ask the car to gently slow down. Anything more forceful than that resulted in slamming to an abrupt halt.
The accelerator was a similar story. Luckily I had the foresight to stop the car and try gently revving it in neutral before I actually tried going faster than a crawl, and once again, as soon as my foot approached the same county as the pedal, the engine growled threateningly.
This does leave me wondering what this level of sensitivity is needed for (and why the clutch has fifteen miles of travel behind the bite point rather than, say, an inch or two), but I suppose that's something an actual instructor can explain once I start proper driving lessons (this little intro session was with a family member).
The second big difference, is g-forces. I knew intellectually that sitting at my desk looking at a screen is not going to feel anything like moving off in a real car, but I hadn't really realised just how much physical feedback you get from g-forces. Even at a fraction of a mile an hour, you can tell exactly how the car is speeding up or slowing down. You feel a lot of information when cornering, even slowly, too.
All of this conveys a suprising sensation of weight and power. The car I was driving was pretty small, but it definitely felt like it weighed the ton that it does, and I could also feel how fast the engine and brakes could throw all that mass around.
Unfortunately, my sim racing setup is now totally ruined for me, as I'm now keenly aware of how innacurate and weightless it feels, even if the driving physics are technically accurate. I dare not touch it again until I get my license, because I can already see it has instilled some bad habits I'll need to un-learn.