Playing can drive a NASCAR win
The car that Denny Hamlin drove to victory in a NASCAR auto race in June costs around $150,000. But Hamlin paid a lot less for the other machine that helped him win -- a good personal computer with a make-believe steering wheel attached.
The 26-year-old Hamlin has been driving race cars ever since he discovered go-karts at age 7. But that's still not enough practice for flinging a NASCAR Nextel Cup car around a racetrack at nearly 200 miles an hour. So Hamlin warms up with Sierra NASCAR 2003, an auto - racing game so realistic that many fans prefer to call it a driving simulator, or sim.
It's Hamlin's first full year on NASCAR's elite Nextel Cup circuit, yet he's won two races in just over a month, both at the Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. Hamlin gives part of the credit to the hours he's spent ``simracing" at a virtual Pocono. ``I think it definitely has helped me," said Hamlin. ``It's given me a lot of great experience, and it never hurts to go out there and get on the track a little bit earlier than the competition."
Hamlin's one of many NASCAR drivers who use video games to warm up for race day. The reason is realism. Today's games go to remarkable lengths to reproduce the major auto racing tracks with exceptional accuracy. A driver who hasn't driven at Bristol, Talladega, or Darlington for months can get an instant refresher course by just booting up.
``Before I go to road courses and stuff, I'll use it just to freshen up my eyesight," said NASCAR veteran Elliott Sadler . ``Sears Point, for example, has a lot of elevation changes, uphill, downhill, things like that. That's something you can really pick up on the game, to get used to before you go there."
But while there's broad agreement over the value of simulated racing, there's a sharp difference of opinion over the best way to play. Sadler does his digital driving on a
That may not be a good thing when you remember the ``Madden curse," a series of misfortunes that befell football players whose pictures appeared on the covers of EA's best - selling Madden NFL football game. Sadler laughs it off. ``I'm willing to take that chance," he said. ``It's a once-in-a-lifetime deal."
There's no danger that Hamlin will suffer some terrible fate after appearing on the Sierra NASCAR cover, because that game has fallen under the EA curse. In 2004, EA persuaded NASCAR to grant it an exclusive license. Now only EA can make NASCAR games. That meant doom for Papyrus, the Watertown-based software company that had produced the game for Sierra.
And yet some games simply refuse to die. Thousands of avid digital racing fans have hung on to their cherished copies of Sierra NASCAR, refusing to play anything else. Because the game allows players to race one another over the Internet, Sierra NASCAR buffs have created a nationwide community of loyalists. The more technically inclined among them create software modifications that they share with fellow racers, in an effort to keep the game reasonably up to date.
Hamlin insists on Sierra NASCAR. This sim doesn't run on a video game box; you need a good, beefy desktop PC. Hamlin supplements this with a $500 heavy-duty steering wheel and pedal set from Thomas Enterprises Inc., an Iowa firm that caters to computer car racing fanatics.
``Nothing else can compare," Hamlin said. ``EA came out with their version of sim racing for the computer, and I just didn't like it that much." Indeed, he uses the ultimate term of contempt for EA's NASCAR sim, calling it ``an arcade game," a dumbed-down product designed for casual players only. ``They went for the arcade approach to it to sell more copies," Hamlin said. But in the Sierra game, said Hamlin, cars are programmed to respond almost exactly as they would in the real world. That makes them much harder to keep on track, but far more challenging to serious racers.
Sadler stands by his Xbox game, and the EA engineers who designed it. ``What I like about the EA games is they come to us for help, they come to us for suggestions," he said. ``What I see inside the race car is what you guys can see at home playing it. I think they have done a great, great job."
Who's right? Hamlin's won two races so far this year, Sadler none. But given the Darwinian ferocity of the NASCAR circuit, that proves precisely nothing. Sim racing fans will have to make up their own minds, but that's not easy when the Sierra game is long gone from retail shelves.
Still, hard-core race fans can scare up a used copy on 
