Having shown great speed last week in the opening round of the E1 Championship, GT Radial Eurasia Motorsport are looking forward to this week’s challenge as the series moves on to Shanghai, China.
With a fantastic start to the e-sports campaign, the team has secured 36 points from the two Malaysian rounds courtesy of Inigo Anton and Joaquin Garrido. The former took a superb second position in the opening round and battled hard to finish fourth in the second. Garrido finished ninth in race one but was unfortunate to be hit in race two, resulting in a 14th place finish.
The team now look forward to Thursday’s Shanghai double-header which gets underway at 22.00 local time, 14.00 GMT.
Q&A with Tan Lip Han, Eurasia Motorsport’s Data Engineer
You have been involved in the Asian Le Mans and 24 Hours of Le Mans programmes recently with the team, how much crossover in terms of data is there between an e-sports event and real-world racing?
“The crossover is high. Most e-sport or simulation racing software is now capable of generating most of the data parameters that you would find in a real race car. In fact, it is not uncommon now to see entry series race car in e-sport generates more data than the actual car does.
“These parameters can range from the basic throttle and brake traces, speed traces, through to more advanced parameters such as suspension movement and tyre temperatures. Most of this data can be used with real world motorsport software. such as the MoTeC i2 platform. This means techniques used for motorsport data analysis in real life racing can also be used on e-sports, while data from e-sport can also help to expedite driver training and setup development for the real car.”
In terms of car setup, what adjustments are you and the two GT Radial Eurasia Motorsport drivers able to make within the confines of the Race Room platform?
“The setup parameters in Race Room closely reflects on what you can or cannot do with a real race car. Parameters such as suspension settings, aerodynamics, driveline settings etc are all present and adjustable to a finite region, as you would in a real-life car. The effects of changing these parameters also correlate to real life motorsport, so we can employ our factual motorsport knowledge and theory from actual racing experience to produce setups in e-sport to great results.”
Are you able to compare the data between the two drivers and see who can make gains where in terms of driving skills, or do they run differing setups that render the comparison as not comparable?
“Yes. For sure the benefit of using data to help one driver improve from another is unparalleled; both Inigo and Joaquin have managed to learn from each other and improve their own respective driving to great effect. Unfortunately, I cannot divulge more information regarding the nature of the setups they ran but what I can say is both drivers still managed to learn from each other at the end of the first round of E1!”
We saw some of our rivals complete the second round of the championship on the harder tyres and without making a tyre change, is that something you will look at for Shanghai?
“For this race, and any other races as well, tyre planning and testing is part of our test and preparation program so we will always go into a round with a tyre choice that we are confident will give us the best possible result. During the preparation period all tyre choices are considered and simulated so the same treatment goes to the hard tyre compound too. If we think it will give us the best result, then there’s no reason why we would not use it.”
