In motorsport, as in all sports, there is generally a good level of respect for the rules of the game, what English enthusiasts call fair play. However, as the saying goes, "there’s a bad apple in every barrel." As in all areas of life, there are drivers who vent their frustrations and personal conflicts through what they do. Perhaps this isn’t as noticeable in Formula 1 or top-tier championships because the organizational weight is so strong—we only see what they want us to see—or because the drivers there tend to be more professional and/or more tightly controlled. But in single-make cups and "lower-tier" championships, these unsportsmanlike attitudes occur more often than desired, mainly because they are learning environments where there’s a lot of mechanical parity, close racing, and drivers who have yet to master either their vehicles or the psychological aspects of competition.
In simracing, too, there are drivers who, before hitting the Escape key to flee, vent their frustrations by racing dirty or without proper control, being overly aggressive, or deliberately harming other drivers on the track, seeking a false sense of satisfaction they couldn’t achieve by doing things the right way. In this sense, both disciplines share the same problems. And this happens because, in both, the protagonists are people, and in many cases, it’s their frustrations that lie behind these behaviors. Frustration that, more often than not, stems ultimately from poor race planning and management. In both real and virtual racing, the main way to counteract this is by enforcing rules and penalizing offenders. However, we want to emphasize that each driver’s individual work and honest reflection on what they’re doing are key to minimizing these issues.
Overcoming Yourself as the Key
When we arrive at a track and focus on beating our first rival (which is none other than ourselves), we will always make progress in our driving skills that will lead us to keep improving. Believing you’re the best blinds you to all the improvement opportunities still left to explore within yourself. This ultimately blocks you from keeping up with the progress of other rivals. If we only race with the goal of beating everyone else, sooner or later we’ll fall into the trap of not advancing our own driving skills because there will always be a driver out there improving themselves, while we’ve stagnated, fixated on what we knew about them before hitting the track without considering their potential evolution. This will pause or even reverse our own progress.
In simracing, it’s common to see drivers in many championships using the Escape key too lightly. As soon as things don’t go as planned, that resource is "fantastic!": we disconnect, and the problem confronting us disappears. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Joaquín Capsi, a professional driver and administrator of the Cracs.net championship, aptly puts it: "Abandoning a race is just an act of hiding, ashamed and frustrated with ourselves. Plus, by doing so, we miss the chance to keep learning and improving in the best possible environment: full-on competition." Capsi adds: "In racing, we’ve all heard that second place is the first of the losers. Taking that phrase literally as the sole measure of success is a mistake. The day the rest of the rivals stop improving, the concept of competition in this sport will vanish. You have to know how to be second, as long as you accept that this fact should be leveraged as one of the best reasons we’re here: to keep fighting to improve, since they’ve shown it’s possible to be faster. See it as something positive that keeps competition alive." He concludes: "The driver who truly loves competition is the one who wants to be beaten at some point, so they have a goal that motivates them to surpass themselves."
Values and Discipline in Simracing
In the Cracs.net simracing championship, hitting the Escape key to leave a race mid-session is penalized. The value of facing races with fairness, seriousness, and sportsmanship is rewarded because the ability to adapt to circumstances carries weight. When you love this sport, your first option can’t be to walk away and do something else mid-race—at the very least, you stay and reflect from the pits about what happened. Being fast and securing good positions is important, but it can’t and shouldn’t be the only thing that matters. Just as you need to practice a racing line or test different tire pressures to shave off tenths of a second, you also need to learn to manage your nerves and always keep in mind that you’re not alone—you’re practicing a sport, so there are many factors beyond your control. Competition and rivalry, yes, but also discipline and a sense of honesty and the values that inspire any sport. Simracing is motorsport through and through. Some people forget this, as well as the fact that, ultimately, everything we do in life is meant to enrich us and bring enjoyment through positive experiences and values. If simracing doesn’t collectively provide that for you—if it only brings bad vibes and an unhealthy obsession with winning at all costs—perhaps it’s time to consider finding another activity or improving by learning to shift your approach. Julián Rodríguez, a driver from Ibérica Racing Team, points out: "To avoid unnecessary frustration, it’s important to set goals that depend solely on you, like spending a bit more time practicing, getting a few tenths faster in certain sectors, or managing tire wear better. If your only goals are to win races or championships, it’s easier to fall into frustration even when giving your best, since there are external variables you can’t control, like your rivals’ skill level, some accidents, or even technical issues."
Learning from Mistakes
Álvaro Fontes: "Always look for a positive take on problems, calmly analyze what happened or what I could have done differently, because that’s how you learn from mistakes and find solutions. If you weren’t the cause of a problem and couldn’t have avoided it, why burden yourself with frustration that doesn’t belong to you and won’t do you any good?"
Julián Rodríguez, from IRT: "Try to learn from every race, especially the ones where the result wasn’t positive. If you weren’t as fast as you hoped, analyze what you did differently from those who took the top spots (lines, gears in corners, braking points, ...). If you had an accident, even if it wasn’t your fault, see if there was anything you could have done to avoid it. With this mindset, you’ll manage to take something positive from every race, helping you improve in the next ones."
Joaquín Capsi: "When a driver hits the track and works to understand the car, reads the asphalt and the practice or race situation, that’s when they manage to push their own ability and the car’s to 100%, and then the results come naturally. Thinking it’s frustrating to never win a race in competition is a mistake. Always winning is more frustrating because it means competition has vanished since all the rivals have hit a ceiling."
Excuses and Motivation
Fatal pile-ups and bad luck certainly exist, but it’s all too common to look for external excuses for what actually depends on us. Joaquín Capsi notes: "Hiding our poor performance in competition behind easy excuses like an inferior car or setup only slows our ability to improve. To become a better driver, we always need rivals ahead of us—they’re the motivation to push ourselves and reach where they are." He continues: "Like any job or activity in life, you have to know how to love and enjoy competition. When that daily struggle to be better becomes our goal without forgetting to enjoy what we do, we’ll always leave the track eager to return and see how far we can improve, whether we’re close to or far from the limit. If the limit stops moving further away, we’ll stop enjoying it and, therefore, stop improving." These are undoubtedly master lessons from someone with vast experience in the motorsport world and a driver and coach with extensive expertise in simracing and simulator training. Álvaro Fontes adds something equally valuable: "When you’ve done everything in your power, when you’ve given it your all, bad experiences and challenges are faced with a more constructive spirit that also keeps frustration at bay. You have to keep in mind that, as a sport, there are factors beyond your control. That’s how sports work. The sooner you burn that into your mind, the fewer problems you’ll have shaking off the setbacks."
"When we hit the track, we should focus on feeling the car, not constantly exceeding our limits or the car’s, and making every driving action a reflection of our ability to extract the most from what we have in our hands at that moment—all without obsessing over others or their records or times. Only then, without even realizing it, will we find victory within our grasp." (Joaquín Capsi, Driver and Admin of Cracs.net)
Complexity and Commitment
The world of motorsport is highly complex, mainly because it’s underpinned by powerful companies and economic interests. The automotive industry and motorsport as its primary showcase create business synergies that go beyond the purely automotive and sporting realms, crossing into many other economic sectors. This is why the movements, strategies, and tensions present form a world that’s not easy to enter, navigate, or sustain oneself in. Despite the obvious differences between real and virtual racing, the latter also has its own degrees of difficulty in many aspects and shares many psychological similarities for the driver if the discipline is approached with commitment and seriousness. Does a simracing enthusiast really understand what they’re getting into when they decide to compete? Unfortunately, in most cases, no—and that might be the root of the attitudes and frustrations we’re discussing. Being a virtual driver involves an effort that perhaps not all drivers have fully considered or are willing to take on. If that effort isn’t embraced, sooner or later frustrations, occasional dropouts, and eventually complete abandonment will follow. Of course, this shouldn’t discourage beginners—ultimately, it all depends on the level of commitment and goals one chooses to pursue—but it’s essential for each person to clearly define their path. That way, if things don’t go as planned, they at least understand why and can react with a positive attitude.
Managing Expectations
Both conventional and virtual competition involve many factors. At certain levels, the complexity of each can be quite high, but from the most basic to the highest levels, a driver must manage their limits and find positive takeaways from what they do. Otherwise, they won’t achieve consistency in their project or enjoy the process.
Although we classified drivers in another simracingcoach article back in 2016, in this context we could simplify it to say there are only two types: those who use the Escape key—figuratively speaking—and those who don’t. Some drivers approach competition feeling like they’re betting everything on a single card, and these are usually the ones who end up deeply frustrated, hitting Escape when things go wrong. But if we accept that this is a sporting discipline with many factors beyond our control, perhaps we could handle adverse situations more constructively. On the other hand, the driver who typically avoids the Escape key doesn’t approach the race with that anxiety, mainly because some of their goals are already met by the time they start. They’ve enjoyed all the prior stages, trained and prepared meticulously for the race, felt good during that pre-race process of practice and adaptation, and patiently worked to extract seconds from the car and the track. For them, the race is the culmination of prior work. It’s very important, yes, as it measures all or part of the effort put in, but it’s not the only thing that matters. For that process to be effective and bear fruit, time and certain sacrifices are required—nothing good comes on its own. When this doesn’t happen, we see what many drivers do: improvise. They try to tackle an activity that’s not simple as if it were, and that leads to failure. That recurring "escape" as a knee-jerk reaction, throwing everything out the window in a fit of frustration, leads sooner rather than later to frustration—and it stems from a poor approach, bad planning, and failing to grasp that being a competitive driver isn’t just about putting on gloves and grabbing a wheel. Álvaro Fontes notes: "Competing is a sport, the world of motorsport is a sport, and as such, we drivers—whether professional or amateur, conventional or virtual—must first and foremost seek to enjoy what we do. If what you do enriches you, frustration will struggle to show up and stick around. The keys to success lie in understanding what you’re doing. Prepare, motivate yourself by achieving challenges, and give it your all. Enjoy! That’s the first race you need to win. With that approach and attitude, frustration will knock on someone else’s door, not yours."
The Virtual Driver’s Challenge
Traditional drivers, with rare exceptions, begin their professional careers at a very young age, and their training is guided or structured to learn all the intricacies of competition. In contrast, the vast majority of virtual drivers neither start from the same point nor have the background that comes from years of experience climbing from the bottom. However, at certain levels and with some differences, both face the same adverse factors and inherent challenges of competition. Their starting points differ, but their goals share many similarities. One of the first hurdles both conventional and virtual drivers face is balancing their racing commitments with work and family life. Despite the differences, both encounter the same issues. Except for drivers contracted by a team, where their dedication is (or tends to be) full-time, making that balance requires sacrifices and personal trade-offs for both profiles—though with a slight nuance: a 45-year-old simracer, as an amateur, has a harder time explaining and convincing their circle about what they do, especially when the goals and results aren’t tangible, which they often aren’t. Many simracers treat it as a hobby to which they dedicate significant time and effort, and therein lies a potential contradiction: the challenge and sacrifice are sometimes immense, yet there are no concrete material goals or results that justify such effort to outsiders. This demands a counterbalance: the enjoyment and positive sensations from the practice must be maximized, or else the whole endeavor will collapse, with frustration or eventual abandonment looming.
Planning and Commitment
When a virtual driver passionate about motorsport decides to take on a season in a simracing championship, beyond investing some money in equipment (PC, cockpit, wheel, etc.), they need to plan to make time for it, fitting the activity into their schedule. Of course, you can compete without this planning in many simulators and simracing championships, but those organized with a clear focus on serious, high-level simulation—doing things right and with rigor—have regulations that limit or prevent such improvisation. You’re either all in, or you’ll pay the price. So, beyond equipping themselves properly, a driver must plan for the necessary practice time. Their level of commitment will largely determine their progress and results, and the only thing they must avoid is setting goals disproportionate to that planning—because that will only lead to frustration.