There are many obvious benefits to sim racing, but the two primary ones are safety and cost. Safety is obvious, as there is no risk of physical crash or injury in sim racing. Cost is also obvious, since it is far less expensive to have a home sim racing setup than it is to buy, maintain, and run a race car. With that in mind, sim racing can be a fantastic way to improve high performance driving skills. Can Sim Racing Help in Real Life? Absolutely. Nissan and Sony ran a driver training program called Nissan GT Academy which ran for six seasons and helped develop and train successful Sim Racing competitors into real world race car drivers and establish experience gained through sim racing as valuable training time for actual racing in the real world. The program had more than 5 million participants (Wiki). Earlier this year (January, 2019), Enzo Bonito – an eSports sim racing competitor – competed against Lucas Di Grassi – a professional Formula E Champion – and beat him at th
Mitsubishi Evo X GSR at Atlantic Motorsport Park - Kevin Doubleday © If you live in Canada or the US, you'll find that plenty of people hold sacred the terms '4x4' and '4WD' to describe a 'true 4x4', where you have a butch transfer case with a low speed, perhaps a body on frame chassis, and ideally a solid axle or two. I'm not sure how that translates to the rest of the world. My extensive research into the motoring industry in Europe (which exclusively consists of watching Top Gear and The Grand Tour...) concluded that most people across the pond simply refer to any vehicle that is capable of sending any power to all four wheels as a 4WD vehicle, further muddying the waters. Where I grew up, 4x4 was more or less synonymous with 'Jeep' so that's not much help either. However, despite all various systems attempting to do the same sort of thing - distribute power between all four wheels instead of two - not all systems are created equal,