At every Grand Prix weekend, Formula One fans fill the stands to watch the excitement. But what fans don’t see is the behind-the-scenes virtual testing that plays a critical role in unlocking the performance they are watching.
At their headquarters, the majority of teams have sophisticated simulators, which replicate the cars, circuits and conditions, and they are used to accelerate the learning process.
“Simulators allow you to set the car up and use a driver, a real human, injected into a world of simulations,” Anthony Davidson, a simulator driver for Mercedes-AMG Petronas, said in an interview this month.
“Part of my job, and of the other simulator drivers, is to be able to set a car up, get the tires into a good window, make it all feel pretty sensible and make the car feel decent enough, so George Russell and Kimi Antonelli – whose time is much more limited than any simulator driver – can then just jump in and take that further and work with their race engineering team.”
The use of simulators in Formula One emerged in the early 2000s, and teams gradually recognised how the virtual world could aid real-life progress.
“They’ve evolved immensely, mainly through the software side of things,” Davidson, who has had an affiliation with the organisation, based in Brackley, England, since the mid-2000s, said. “There’s tyre models, turning what happens on the track into ones and zeros for simulation. Then the hardware as well.
“The first iteration at Brackley was a static simulator. It was one of my old Super Aguri, or Honda, chassis that had a TV screen in front of it and a Logitech steering wheel. It was really what would be considered today as a basic home simulator setup. And now you’ve got four axis, multiprojection screens, even virtual reality for some teams.”
The role of simulation was heightened in 2026 because of new Formula One regulations. The chassis have changed, the cars are lighter, and there are active aerodynamics, which means the front and rear wings open in what is called straight mode.
Overhauled engine regulations mean there is now an about 50/50 split between the internal combustion engine and electrical power. Drivers must grapple with new systems, such as battery management, energy deployment settings, and boost mode, to extract maximum performance.
“We’ve sort of been finding issues along the way that only because we did it and it happened in the sim, it didn’t happen in reality,” Fred Vesti, a reserve driver for Mercedes-AMG Petronas, said in an interview this month. “That way we’ve sort of prepared ourselves.”
Vesti and Davidson reckoned they each had about 60 days in the simulator in 2025, an increase of 50% from last year, because of the complexity of preparing for the new regulations.
“The biggest difference is on the power unit side, how much in control the driver is,” Vesti said about the 2026 rules. “Usually it was just ‘brake, full throttle.’ Now there are so many things you can do, and also do wrong. It’s about being precise and very, very technical, and understanding the systems, because if you don’t understand the systems behind you, you probably trip up the systems quite easily.”
So there are extra tasks that must be done on the simulator.
“You have to now come to the circuit with a clear idea as to what the car is going to feel like in terms of [battery] deployment as well as the balance,” Davidson said. “The places of deployment are probably [found] in the initial phases of the weekend,” he said, during practice. “That’s the low-hanging fruit.
“Then you can work on the balance of the car as well to work out which of your setup options could be viable or not. You have to learn how the car is going to feel in racing, and on a qualifying lap, which are two very different feelings. And then how you’re going to race that car with a boost button, and all those things. There’s an awful lot of homework for the drivers.”
There can even be subtle, but critical conclusions that ensure there are as few surprises as possible when real competition begins.
“In our preevent simulations for Melbourne, I picked up the fact that the front of the car was feeling quite light in the high-speed turns seven and eight, when we were running the straight mode open,” Davidson said. “That’s exactly how it played out in real life. You can start to pick up these smaller details now in the sim that would have been impossible years ago and also give the drivers some indication as to what that might feel like in the real car. That’s a human feeling. That’s something a driver in a simulator is going to pick it up.”
Teams use their simulators in advance of Grand Prix weekends, and race drivers are regular visitors, though they have less time on account of their other commitments. During race weekends the simulator remains a vital tool, most notably after the opening day of practice on Friday. The crew at the factory can run extensive virtual miles before practice resumes on a Saturday. Vesti attends the engineering debriefs and driver meetings to ensure he fully understands what Russell and Antonelli require.
“Typical race support is after second practice,” Vesti said, correlating the simulator to the qualifying lap. “Then you spend the next five hours doing test items. The drivers and the engineers come up with a list of things that we need to go through. It could be any setup change on the car, it could be power-unit related, it could even be weather and wind.
“There’s an engineer running me, and two or three engineers writing a report that, wherever the race is, when they wake up there is a long report of what the sim suggests would be the best next step about it.” – 2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
