The secrets of the simulator: A peek behind the scenes

Sergio Sette Camara stands up, shows his legs and says: “Do you see?” Indeed, the Brazilian is in shorts. Immediately, he has debunked a possibly existing prejudice: In the simulator of a Formula 1 or Formula E team, a driver does not wear his full racing gear, but only with racing shoes and gloves on. He also does not wear a helmet.

Immediately, the Brazilian reveals another secret: sometimes, in video footage shared by a team, a simulator can be seen. But according to him, that is never the actual simulator. “They will never show on camera to the other teams to see, or for the whole world to see what the platform they're actually practicing on because it's secrets and a lot of study and investment goes into making them,” says Sette Camara.

The third driver of the Nissan FE team has spent plenty of time in a simulator. Sette Camara, in the past, was a test driver for Toro Rosso, McLaren, and Red Bull Racing; teams for which he clocked up the necessary miles in the simulator. Just as he is currently doing for Nissan, who have Oliver Rowland leading the championship.

The Brazilian explains to GPblog at the end of a day's work that there are roughly three different types of sessions to do. To begin with, there is the preparation simulator session for an upcoming race.

“And [once] you have achieved a baseline, which means it's a setup, a virtual setup on the car, track condition, everything, [with] which you're doing consistent laps, and now you can start testing the test items that you want to have fixed before you go to the actual event,” says Sette Camara who - because he is currently not racing - usually works on the overall setup for the team and the drivers who will be active on the track.

Another type of session in the simulator takes place during the race weekend. “On those sessions it's a lot less intense, there's less running, we only run when the team from the track asks us to do a run. So I always bring my computer on those days to do some work, to also watch the races, but it can get boring, or it can get all of a sudden super intense if they're demanding something from me. I can be stuck two, three hours in the car in a row in a very weird time.”

The third and final type of session focuses on correlation, where the test driver works on making the simulator as realistic as possible. “You need to get the simulator in a place where you say, 'okay, I actually trust this thing, I can actually work from there.' You will get data from real life, let's say, I test in Barcelona, I have the labs, I have the data, then I'm driving in Barcelona on the simulator, and I drive and the engineers pick the simulator until the data sets are comparable. And now I know I can use this for a proper session.”

Using his experience in the Nissan Formula E simulator and that of Red Bull and McLaren, Sette Camara can compare the differences between categories.

“It is one tiny step down at the moment, but it's catching,” says the Brazilian about the FE simulator. “If you look at the simulators in the beginning, it was comparable to a Formula 3 or Formula 2 teams had better simulators than a few teams at the time. And then once you started to get in Gen 2 [FE cars] there's a crossover moment, then you start to get the simulators in an F2 level.”

Ultimately, as Sette Camara predicts, a simulator for an FE team can play a more important role in the development process for a team in Formula E than for a Formula 1 team. “I think because F1 there's a lot of aerodynamics, modeling, design behind the doors, really focusing on downforce, aero components, so on. Formula E is a software series, this car is a computer and that means you can benefit more from the simulator.”

What an engineer from Red Bull expects from the simulator driver, for instance, is different from what is expected at Nissan, as Sette Camara acknowledges. He explains: “Almost everything you change in the car is changing something in the behavior of the car that supposedly you should be able to feel as a driver - if the change is big enough. But in Formula E, most of the time those changes are coming from something in the software. So nothing has physically changed in the car, position, a bar, a wing, nothing. Everything is the same, just the line of code is different or a setting is different.”

Unlike Formula 1, Formula E is a spec series, with virtually all cars being the same. This also makes the way simulator tests are set up in FE different. “The holy grail of F1 is aerodynamics”, says Sette Camara. “ In Formula E that doesn't matter. Pretty much doesn't matter. It's one of the last test items you would do because like you said it's a spec series so you cannot change nothing in the body of the car.“

In his career, Sette Camara has worked with various teams, each with their own way of using the simulator. At one team, a driver might be doing 250 laps per day on the sim, at another team, it could be less. One day is more enjoyable than another, he admits honestly.

But all in service of the team. And who knows what it might bring him in the future? Sette Camara gives the example of the session he just came out of. “I've been entertaining myself because I know more or less, okay, in these circumstances, this is the best lap I've done, I want to beat that this session, and I don't want to spin. So I make these little objectives in my mind, and you're always forcing yourself. And it helps to know that I need to do that for when I get into the car that I'm in shape.”