Entering the matrix: CJ Wilson Racing launches a virtual racing series

If you're an up-and-coming racing team, and you want to make new fans, what better way than to set up an e-sports series featuring a digital version of your real race car? The team in question is CJ Wilson Racing, which has partnered with Logitech and The Online Racing Association (TORA) to run the CJ Wilson Racing Cayman Cup—a 10-race series that gets underway on April 27th. We spoke to some of the people involved in order to find out more, particularly about how they arrived at their Forza Motorsport 6 version of the real race car.

The e-racing community might not have the same following—or prize fund—as something like Dota 2. But e-sports are being taken more and more seriously by the people that run real-word racing. As far back as 2008, Nissan and Sony in Europe were using Gran Turismo tournaments to find promising young racing drivers. TORA was officially recognized by the UK's Motor Sports Association in 2010, and even the FIA (which runs international motorsport) recently announced it would sanction a new series in the next Gran Turismo game.

How accurately racing games recreate the experience of driving the real thing is a topic we've tackled a few times. For 2016, CJ Wilson Racing switched cars, from the Mazda MX-5s it had been running in the Continental Tire Sportscar Challenge to a pair of Porsche Cayman GT4s. The Cayman GTS just came back to Forza 6, but there isn't actually a Cayman GT4 in the game. So, we wondered, how did the team recreate it?

The work started in the UK with Matt Hunter at TORA. "With this car specifically we start with our baseline figures that we want to reach, in this case similar performance to the real world Cayman used by CJWR," he told us. "Initially we sourced the specs for the race car and through the Forza 'tuning' section built the car to a specification that was, in terms of the numbers, as close as we could get." Others at TORA created a livery based on CJ Wilson Racing's #35 car—a light blue-and-white sister for the imposing Darth Cayman, which entrants into the series will have to use (although there's room for some differentiation).

The next step was testing, and who better to do that than one of the drivers of the real Cayman? Driver Danny Burkett tested both the real and the virtual cars on the Sebring International Raceway in Florida. "When I was racing on the Xbox, we had only left there about 10 days prior in our real car," he said. "So I still had a fresh imprint in my mind as to how real Darth Cayman and virtual Darth Cayman compared!"

The modifications that Matt added to the stock car in the game were transformative, Burkett told Ars. "The first time I heard our car was even available to drive in the game I just jumped in with the stock setup on," he said. "While it was extremely cool to see my race car in a video game, the car was only decently fun to drive because I knew it was so unrealistic. With Matt's changes we got the car to be only eight tenths off our fastest lap from the race at Sebring. Now I absolutely love driving the car."

Although everyone in the series will have to use identically upgraded cars, there is total freedom in how one tunes them. Ars is planning to enter a round or three of the Cayman Cup, so we built our own entrant and got a feel for it by running laps at the site of next week's first race: Daytona. It's a fun race car to hustle, and I was comforted that my lap times were in the same range (1:58 minutes) as Burkett and his team mates at January's preseason test.

But a glance at the TORA forums was a wakeup call. Entrants are starting to post their own preseason testing times, and it looks like yet again I've got to find several seconds a lap to be competitive. The Cayman Cup even has that aspect covered. CJ Wilson Racing told us that Burkett and his team mate Marc Miller are hoping to run some virtual coaching sessions using Forza's online lobbies.

Listing image by CJ Wilson Racing