An Interview With Alison Hine

The scene is a secret Vroc chatroom, the victim is none other than “The First Lady of Simracing”, Alison Hine (AH). Our tenacious reporter Lasse Gram-Hansen (LGH) has finally caught up with her, and this is the outcome of that meeting.

Anyone even slightly interested in the sim racing community will find something interesting here, but especially GPL aficionados will want to buckle their seatbelts before starting this read. Enjoy, and give Alison a well deserved hand for playing along.

LGH: First off, can you tell me about your background?

AH: I am a software engineer who majored in engineering, physics, and then English in college. I come from a family of 5 kids, and grew up mostly in upstate New York and New England. I’ve been racing since I was 14, starting with slot cars, then a Formula Vee that my brother and I built, then karts, then sports cars and Formula Ford. My brother Nate and I also built a sailboat, and we built a Cobra replica in the summer of 2000, as you know. I also built an airplane and flew aerobatics for several years, but racing is pretty much my major interest these days. It has been most of my life, except when I was flying

LGH: When did your interest in racing begin?

AH: I was 14 when I visited a cousin who had a slot car set. I was fascinated! I had already read about Jim Clark and the Lotus invading Indianapolis, in a Sports Illustrated magazine in the school library. That got me hooked, and then I read Wilbur Shaw’s autobiography and then everything about racing I could get my hands on. Our local library had a good section on racing. I remember reading a lot of books by Dennis Jenkinsen, especially about his adventure in the 1955 Mille Miglia with Stirling Moss.

I liked learning to work with tools, and building things. My father was an electrical engineer who tinkered a lot, and I spent many happy hours with him in the basement, building things or fixing things. That got me interested in mechanical and electrical projects, and understanding how things worked. I think this was a basis for the interest I developed in cars and racing as well as airplanes and flying – interests that I realize are unusual for a girl!

LGH: Can you provide an overview of your racing career thus far?

AH: I started with slot cars, as I said. I eventually got my own set, a Revell 1/32 scale set, with a 289 Cobra and a Porsche 904, and a Ferrari 275P. Still have it, too. Then I got into racing 1/24 scale slot cars in stores, then met some guys that raced HO slot cars in their basements on huge layouts. I raced with them a few years, but then I met a guy who was running a sports car in SCCA regionals. After crewing for him for a while, I thought, I can do this! So I asked my brother if he wanted to build a race car, and he said yes.

We bought an incomplete scratch-built Formula Vee and completed it. I think a lot of people, probably most people racing Vees at the time, bought complete cars, as there were several manufacturers, Autodynamics/Caldwell, Zink, Lynx, etc. But the really fast cars that won the SCCA Runoffs were often one-off homebuilt specials. The main reason that we built it ourselves though, was that we could not afford to buy one.

I ran the Vee for several years in SCCA, and then started racing dirt track karts as well. The karts were cheaper and I could afford the equipment to be competitive in that series. I couldn’t afford the engine and tires to be competitive in the Vee, but we did learn a lot about suspension from that car. It was really evil when we first started running it.

Because of the VW-derived swing axle suspension the Vee handled terrible, with dreadful oversteer at the limit. The rear end jacked up at the limit and caused the rear tires to go into extreme negative camber. Nate almost decapitated himself by running under a guardrail when he lost it in a slalom at an autocross. He was very, very lucky not to get injured or killed.

We researched and learned how to control the suspension so it behaved. We went through a couple of iterations, and with the last configuration it was extremely stable.

Before we got that far, though, I lost it in the downhill at Lime Rock due to an aerodynamic imbalance, spun into the bank, and rolled it. Luckily there was very little damage to the car and none to me! That taught me an important lesson about aerodynamic balance and how important it is to high speed handling.

Along with the Vee, I continued with the karts, which were great for learning to deal with traffic because we were on a very small dirt oval with lots of other karts, and they used inverted grids. Once I got fast, I was always having to work my way up through the field. That was where I learned to pass in a racing environment. Apart from learning to deal with traffic, racing on dirt is also great for learning car control.

Then I got involved in racing Showroom Stock sports cars in endurance racing, first as a crew, then as a driver. I drove in several 24 hour races. I generally drove cars in the slower classes, and there were much faster Corvettes and turbo Porsches.

That’s when I learned how to be passed! I learned that you can really lose a lot of time if you don’t plan for where you’ll be passed, because the faster cars will just barge right by you as soon as they get to you, no matter where you are. If this happens in a corner it can put you way off line or even force you to brake when you would normally be accelerating. But if you plan it right, you can ease off a little on the previous straight and let the faster car by before you get to the corner, and then the pass has almost no impact on your lap time.

After that I did the Skip Barber race school, and ran most of a race series one year, until I ran out of money. By then I was a bit burnt out on racing, so I decided to learn to fly, then built my own plane. That took me away from racing for several years. Unfortunately, I then got sick and had to quit flying.

While I was stuck at home, I discovered Papy’s Indy Car Racing. That got me hooked on racing again. When ICR2 came out, it was even better! After I got into ICR2, I got my brother to come visit and try it. Fortunately he liked it, and we started racing together via modem. That kept my interest going, because I had someone to race with. Then I heard about GPL, and was, like everybody else, dying to get a look at it.

About that time MS CART Precision Racing came out. I tried it and posted a fairly negative review on my Web site. I was shocked at the controversy that ensued, with serious flames on r.a.s. Something good came out of all this, though, because the controversy brought me to the attention of Papyrus, and eventually I was invited to visit them.

While talking with Matt Sentell, Randy Cassidy, and Mike Lescault in Randy’s cubicle, I said something or other that impressed Matt enough that he decided to invite me into the GPL beta program. I was ecstatic!

In retrospect I think my previous real-world racing experience carried some weight, plus the fact that I’m a software engineer. These things probably lent credibility to my comments and perhaps made Matt and Mike think I could be helpful

LGH: Tell us the whole story about beta testing GPL for Papy.

AH: When I left Papyrus after my first visit I had a precious CD with a pre-alpha version of GPL in my hands. I couldn’t wait to try it!

After that, every so often – a few days or a week or two – they sent each of the beta testers a CD containing a new build. This is a new version of the sim, and you have to install it (sometimes you have to uninstall the old one) and test it. You look for bugs, problems, and you write up feedback if you find a bug. Sometimes they tell you what they’ve been working on, or what to look for, what area to look for problems or an area that is done and should be bug free.

If you get in early, you see the sim grow from a fairly basic thing with only a few cars and tracks, and a lot of menu items that don’t function. Gradually more things start working, more tracks appear, and the cars get completed, but sometimes you get incomplete tracks; often they are unfinished but recognizable. A few times they accidentally sent us tracks that were just a “ribbon in the sky”, with no scenery or ground or whatever, just pavement. I remember the first version of the Nurburgring I got was like that. It was interesting to try, but very hard to drive!

For me it was fun and exciting to test GPL, because it was such a big advance over what came before, and because I love the era – it’s when I first got interested in racing. Now that I have driven good sims of the modern era – N4, F1 2002, etc., I find that I still love the pre-downforce formula cars best.

Tracks were much more interesting then too; modern tracks, especially F1 tracks, are very boring compared to the old tracks like Spa, Nürburgring, Kyalami etc. Most of the ones that have survived, like Le Mans and Monza, have been ruined by chicanes… But I digress…

The testing itself didn’t demand much preparation, as we were less sophisticated in those days. I know it’s only 1998 we are talking about, but it’s amazing how things have accelerated since then. In the beginning I had to upgrade my computer to run GPL well though. (Amazingly, four years on, GPL keeps getting better and better as the hardware improves!)

Anyway, you just copied the new build from the CD to the hard drive, and started testing. In addition to driving, we’d all poke around in the menus and find various bugs to report back on them. When Nate got into the program we immediately started trying to race with each other via the Internet. As soon as the Setup menu got put in, we all started experimenting madly with setups.

I struggled to learn how to drive the car as well as struggling to learn all the tracks. Often we’d find invisible obstacles at random places in the tracks and have to try to explain where they were. When replays started working, we could send a snip showing the car driving along and then suddenly leaping inexplicably into the air. That usually got results!

Later when I tested N4, Papyrus was a lot more organized. They had a private news server with sections for bug reports, announcements, discussion, setups, etc., but we didn’t have anything like that for GPL. It was just emails, pretty informal. Often I would report things or make suggestions, and I’d hear nothing back. Then sometimes a month or two later, the fix or new feature would appear in a new build! It was sometimes frustrating to get so little feedback on our reports, but very gratifying when the change appeared in a build.

With N4 there was much more of a conversation between the beta testers and the test team at Papy, rather than “here’s the new build, let us know if you find anything” that we experienced with GPL. I even got some posts from Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick! This was before Kevin got famous.

Both Kevin and Dale were very enthusiastic about N4, and I heard later that Kevin admitted privately that practicing in N4 on one of the tracks he’d never seen before in real life contributed to his getting his first pole in the Busch series. He said that after doing hundreds of laps in N4, when he drove out onto the real track for the first time he just started laughing, because it was exactly the same as in N4!

Also in the N4 beta program, Papy regularly scheduled online testing, in which most of the beta testers would log on at an appointed time and race together on one of Papy’s servers. This was great because it helped ensure that N4’s multiplayer code worked very well online. With GPL, all this was much more informal. Generally when there was any online testing, the beta testers organized it themselves.

LGH: How long did they work on GPL before it was published?

AH: If I recall correctly, I got involved in late January 1998, and it was published in early October of that year. I don’t know exactly when Dave started work on it, but I heard it was somewhere in the vicinity of 4 years total. At first I think it was just Dave, working on the physics model, and only the last 18 months or two years they had a full team on it.

Dave described testing the physics model in the early days, when it was built into a test version of ICR2. The hardware was so slow, and the preliminary, non-optimized code so slow that it took 30 minutes for the car to drop onto the track when you entered the pits! Dave did a lot of work to speed up the physics code!

LGH: Did you notice any major faults or omissions in the game during the beta testing?

AH: Well, the first thing I did when I got into the GPL beta program was to get Nate into it too so we could test GPL’s online capability. That was really key, because it turned out that GPL didn’t have any online capability! Nate and I discovered that the first time we tried to hook up via the Internet. It just didn’t work. I asked Matt about it, and he said that Internet racing involved a host of difficulties and they didn’t have time to solve them. I got the strong impression that GPL was never intended to work on the Internet. This was after Papyrus had already made a big deal about how GPL was designed from the ground up for multiplayer. They just neglected to mention that “multiplayer” meant LAN racing. It looked to me like they did the LAN implementation mainly so they could race with each other in the office!

Also I was frustrated that in multiplayer racing the host did not get more control of race length, damage model, repair (Shift-R), and other factors. We fought very hard to get Shift-R put into Intermediate mode. It almost didn’t happen! That would have been a disaster, IMHO!

Furthermore, I was frustrated by the way the AI behaved. There was no AI slider, and the AI got faster and faster the more you raced. I felt it was very unfriendly and poor game design. Definitely not oriented toward the beginning user, and even not very good for the expert user, because the rate that the AI got better was faster than the rate at which most humans would improve. It presented a moving target, which is arguably realistic, but the target moved in a way that was not at all like real life.

We fought very, very hard for an AI strength slider, as was in ICR2 and the NASCAR sims. That was the most controversial battle of the whole development, as far as I know. Almost all of the beta testers and most of the Papy employees wanted an AI slider, and I heard there was a big, very heated meeting at Papy about it. The AI slider contingent managed to convince everyone, except one guy who had veto power… Had that gone through, I’m convinced that GPL would have sold many, many more copies, and Papyrus might very well now be working on a GPL2 because GPL would have been a bigger commercial success.

LGH: Is there any particularly interesting you remember from the beta testing period?

AH: One of the most memorable things was that I got invited to participate in the internal race series they ran, once GPL was working well enough over their LAN – It was called the Papy Cup. I’d put my setups on a floppy, load up my wheel and pedals, and drive down to Papy, where someone, usually Scott Sanford, would find me a computer to race on. That was fantastic! I loved being there with the developers and testers and racing with them.

We tried letting other beta testers join us via the Internet, but at that point the multiplayer code wasn’t good enough and there was too much warping. It really didn’t get good enough until Randy’s GPL 1.2 patch was released, but by then the GPL Papy Cups were over and they were running a Papy Cup for the next NASCAR sim.

I also got to hang out in the evenings after the Papy Cup races, and had a great time talking with some of the developers. I learned a lot of interesting things that way, most of which I probably can’t repeat!

LGH: Do you intend to beta test other games in the future?

AH: I did beta test a number of other sims after GPL, but eventually it became more tedium than fun – maybe that’s because nothing I’ve tested has come close to GPL in terms of enjoyment, for me, anyway. I still beta test some tracks, and a few other things for GPL.

I would be very interested in beta testing another sim like GPL: one that is focused on road racing, using formula cars or sports cars, and one that really moves the standard forward as GPL did.

LGH: Tell me about your Cobra project.

AH: The Cobra has been one of my favorite cars ever since I can remember. I always wanted to build one, and actually looked into doing it in the mid 80’s, but it was too expensive and then I got into flying.

In the spring of 2000 that I found out about the Factory Five Racing kit, a very clever concept which used inexpensive Mustang 5.0 parts and modern manufacturing methods to control costs. I realized I might be able to do it, with Nate’s help.

Actually Nate did about 90% of the work building it. I helped, and I also did most of the research and parts acquisition. It was finished in the summer of 2000, so we have had one full season with it so far, plus the late summer and fall of 2000.

LGH: Why a Cobra – does it hold any special history to you?

AH: I’ve always loved Cobras since first reading about them in the 60’s. I think it was partly the way they look – both brutal and graceful at the same time – and their history and mystique. I remember when the Daytona Coupes took 2nd and 4th at Daytona in 1965, for example, with the GT-40’s in 1st and 3rd. That was so awesome! I liked the concept of a big American V-8 in a small car, and I still do.

The Smiths and the team at FFR have done a great job of upgrading the original concept, piggybacking on the huge aftermarket supply of performance parts for the Mustang 5.0. The 5.0 engine is a small block Ford 302 which is very, very similar to the 289’s that came in the original Cobras. Also the FFR design uses a lot of other Ford parts, including suspension and brakes, which keeps the cost down. You can build an unbelievable car for $25-40,000, one that will outperform far more expensive cars. Using a small block engine makes the car a lot more practical for street use, and it still has awesome performance. Of course, it’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and if it rains you get wet, but it’s still a fantastic car. On a nice day, it’s just fabulous!

Building the Cobra and driving it on real world tracks has been immensely rewarding, especially since we developed the suspension last summer. We worked on it all year, and by the end of the year, it was handling great, and it was very quick. I wound up taking 3rd place in our club’s championship, in Street Prepared A, which is their biggest class, with about 25 competitors. That was incredibly satisfying.

At the club’s annual banquet Nate and I were awarded the American Iron trophy, for the driver(s) that best exemplify competitive spirit with an American V-8. Since there are a lot of people running V-8’s (it is the “Corvettes of Massachusetts” club, after all!) that award is a really big honor!

LGH: Earlier you told me that you built your own airplane, and on your web page, I also read that you built a boat yourself! How did you ever come up with these ideas, and don’t you ever buy anything from the factory?!

AH: LOL! Yeah, Nate and I buy lots of tools and stuff like that ;-)

The boat was our very first project, and as for the airplane, I always wanted to learn to fly. When I was in school, and I got bored, I used to daydream about building an airplane. I would imagine a tiny powered model airplane flying around the classroom and buzzing the teacher’s head.

Nate built his own house, and although he wound up contracting most of it out to friends who are carpenters. He and his wife designed it and acted as general contractors. My father built his own house too, with the help of a friend so I guess it runs in the family; we like to build things. My father was always tinkering with the cars, lawnmowers, building electronics projects, etc.

Nate and I have worked on a number of projects together, including the Cobra and the boat. We are very close. We think similarly and have similar interests, and we have always communicated very well. We have done several big projects together, although Nate didn’t get involved in the airplane at all. He isn’t really into flying.

LGH: Are you conscious of making a statement about women in motorsports, or is it something you don’t think about much?

AH: I definitely think about it, and I hope by seeing me do it, it will help other women who want to race or fly decide they can do it. I don’t think of it as making a statement; it’s just that I hope that by pursuing my dreams I can help other people believe they can pursue theirs.

It’s a way of giving back, because knowing about the achievements of other women helped me so much. I definitely felt that Patty Wagstaff’s success in aerobatics helped me believe I could do aerobatics, even though I never expected to reach her level. Just seeing her out there winning national championships – beating all the men in what most people considered a man’s sport – helped me when I was building my plane, and when I was deciding to compete in aerobatic contests. So I hope that some of the other women who belong to COMSCC and other clubs who see me out there driving, and want to do it themselves, will decide to go ahead.

I think a lot of people would love to do something but for many reasons – time, money, aptitude – are not sure they can do it. For women, there is an extra hurdle when the thing they want to do is something that’s been dominated by men, like flying or racing. So I think we need to push ourselves and believe we can do things that are difficult like that, things which not many women are participating in. I have been very excited about every woman who has reached a high level in racing – Lella Lombardi, Desire Wilson, Janet Guthrie, Lynn St. James, Sarah Fisher

I race because I enjoy it, not to prove anything. I know I’m good, but I also realize I’m far from the best, and I think I know my limits. The thing that appeals to me most about racing is driving the car at the limit – the sensual pleasure of it. I get that out of sim racing too. The competitive aspect of it – racing against other people, winning, etc. – is great, but it’s secondary to me, although of course it’s impossible not to get drawn into it when you race. But to me it’s just ecstatic, a fantastic feeling, when you are driving the car well, right at the limit, feeling the tires right at the peak of their slip angle curve, nailing the line. I just love that feeling. I just wish that more women would get into sim racing. It’s a terrific way to learn, and get experience that is at least somewhat relevant to the real world.

LGH: For good or bad, do you think you’ve ever gotten special treatment because you are a female sim racer?

AH: Well, when I’m in a chat room in VROC, and someone joins, I often see a greeting something like “Hi, guys!” (Pause while they review the occupant list.) “And gal! Sorry Alison!”

Seriously, I feel I’ve gotten a lot of respect from people in the sim community, but that’s probably largely because I was fortunate to be involved in GPL at the time I was, and because I put together my GPL Web site, with all the information that’s on it. It’s hard to say if anyone in the sim community has treated me different because I’m a woman. Maybe people notice me a bit more just because it’s unusual for a woman to be involved in racing and especially sim racing.

LGH: Why did you become a simracer when you were one of the lucky few to be racing IRL too?

AH: I wasn’t racing in real life when I decided to give sim racing a try. I had quit racing several years before and started flying. When I got sick and had to give up flying, there was no way I could race in real life either. But sim racing was perfect because it occupied my mind, satisfied (somewhat) my need for excitement and challenge, but didn’t tire me too much.

About my illness: I don’t know if I feel that it’s part of me as a sim racer, but the illness has definitely contributed to my getting involved in sim racing. When I was healthy, I was very busy working, flying aerobatics, working on my plane, and doing various social activities. I didn’t have time to do anything on my computer at home.

After I got sick, I was struggling to fill the time. When you are stuck at home, the hours go by very slowly! I somehow stumbled on a copy of ICR – I don’t recall where – and got hooked. Eventually, when I got involved in GPL, sim racing gave me a reason to live. It was something I could do that was moderately exciting and very challenging, yet didn’t overtax my body, which had been so weakened by the illness. It helped keep my spirit alive, gave me something to do, and a way to contribute. My GPL beta testing, my GPL Web site, and VROC are all an expression of that.

It’s no accident that the most crucial role I played in GPL beta testing was to help make GPL work on the Internet! It was a way of bringing a community together, a group of people all over the world that could race together, talk together, share the fruits of their labors. It has turned out to be much more than I envisioned. I didn’t plan it to be like it has become; I just wanted to race, and I wanted to race with other people, not AI, not the machine. GPL’s Internet capability plus VROC made that possible. It has given me a social life that would have been impossible otherwise. I remember someone telling me shortly after I got sick, “your world is going to get very small”, but she was wrong. Instead, it got much larger – but in electronic form.

Now that my health has improved a little, in the last year and a half I’ve been able to emerge a little bit into the real world, and helping my brother build the Cobra and driving it on local tracks has been a continuation of what started with GPL. I’m still learning, still growing, despite the limitations of my body. I have to rest for two to three weeks after each track event, doing as little as possible, so my body can recover, because it recovers very slowly from any exertion. But it’s worth it – it keeps my spirit alive and strong. I’ve had to give up any dream of flying – I know my body will never be strong enough again to do that – but racing gives me an outlet for my passion, and keeps my dreams alive.

LGH: Still, many consider simracing to be a poor substitute for real life racing – do you agree?

AH: No, I feel that with the right sim, it’s a very good substitute! There are many things racing in GPL has in common with real life, especially with a FF wheel and many of the graphics upgrades available for GPL now. But it’s still not like real life in some important ways.

In sim racing you do much the same things with the throttle, brake, and wheel that you do in real life, and you have to understand car physics, the proper line, etc., just as in driving a real car. In that way it’s very much like real life. Also, the psychology of racing – the need to concentrate, attempting to pressure the driver ahead into a mistake, the ability to withstand pressure from behind and the ability to find your own limit and drive to it consistently – all these things are just like real world racing.

But it differs in some important ways, too. Obviously there is no risk in a sim, and that’s a big psychological factor. You can drive much closer to the limit, sooner, in a sim. I discovered that this summer when I was testing and practicing in GPL for the events we went to in the Cobra in real life. I had some early beta versions of Lime Rock, Loudon, and Mont Tremblant and was able to run on them before going to the real world tracks, and after getting back.

In November at the real Lime Rock were going fast enough to be 3rd and 4th in a class of about 16 drivers; we both did 1:05’s, which is not bad around Lime Rock. But we both felt that there was a lot more in the car, despite the fact that we did probably close to 100 laps there each over the course of 3 days in November. We bought a video camera and taped several of our sessions at Lime Rock. Watching the video, I could see that I never really got to the limit in several of the more intimidating corners, even on my best laps.

In GPL, I can get on the limit and over it in a couple of laps. But if I spin or crash it doesn’t matter, whereas in real life, if we crash the Cobra, we’re probably done for the season. So this a major way that driving the sim is different from driving in real life.

Also running back to back, sim vs. real life, made it very clear how much greater the sensation of speed is in real life. Our Cobra weighs 2300 pounds and has 225 hp. I have the ability to run a very accurate model of this in GPL, with the same engine, same weight and weight distribution, same wheelbase, etc. (I can’t say how I was able to do this, and please assure your readers that I am not cheating online!)

We drove the same car in GPL and in the real world, back to back, on the same tracks. It was amazing, really. I used the GPL testing to help sort out the suspension on our real world car. I could test things and see their effect before we spent the money and time to put them on the real car. But it was also very illuminating about how much of the real-world experience you miss in a sim.

Don’t get me wrong – I love sim racing! Driving at the limit in GPL, with my ball bearing Logitech, and my Voodoo5 with 4x FSAA turned on, is a great experience. I love it, but as seductive as this is, the real world experiences are so much more seductive

LGH: In your opinion, do you need the same skills in simracing as real life racing

AH: Yes and no. The two worlds have a lot of skills in common. You need to understand the line, tire behavior, etc., in order to drive fast in either a good sim or in the real world, for sure. You also need to understand something about car setup, although you can get away with relatively little if you have a good engineer (in real life) or some good setups (in GPL, heehee). Also you need to be able to withstand pressure and to apply pressure, as I mentioned before when talking about race tactics. If we had a sim that had a more flexible race control mechanism (pit stops, tire wear fuel strategy, etc.) then you would need to apply the same thought to the sim as real life. I would guess N4 does this well, although I don’t race N4 much.

At the same time, both the real world and sims require some unique skills. In sims, you need to be able to control the car with far less input from the car than in real life. This is more difficult. You have a much smaller window into the world, and no seat of the pants feel. And if you don’t have a force feedback wheel, you have even less information. Also even with a large monitor you don’t have as much visual detail in front of you, and you have no peripheral vision. All this means you must develop a new skill even if you’re an experienced race driver: you need to be able to drive the car at the limit while using much less input data.

I’ve seen real world race drivers struggle with GPL. I demonstrated GPL to Hurley Haywood, who has won Le Mans something like 6 times, and in GPL he kept crashing. After a few laps he gave up… So sim racing isn’t easier in that way; it takes some extra effort even for a top real world race driver to get good at this aspect.

On the other hand, in the real world you need a bunch of skills you don’t need in sim racing. First, you need to be able to discipline yourself to ignore the risk of physical harm, to yourself and to your car. You cannot drive at the limit if you are thinking about what will happen if you crash.

I can relate this to my experiences in the Cobra. In the real world, the 225 hp Cobra is something of a monster. It is extremely fast, with enormous grip and cornering power. It does 13.7 at 99 mph in the quarter mile, on street tires. Given a stretch of winding road, I can easily scare just about anyone half to death inside of two minutes, without even trying hard. At Mont Tremblant in real life, it is very, very intimidating. Those fast, blind corners that crest hills and then drop away out of sight are totally scary.

The same car in GPL is almost boring at Mont Tremblant… it feels like you are sort of droning around. When I go back to an F1 car in GPL at Mont Tremblant, then it finally feels exciting! But still, of course, nothing nearly as scary or exciting as the Cobra in real life.

I remember cresting the hill and going down into turn 10 at Mont Tremblant, and it feels like the whole world is rushing at you so fast it almost makes your head spin. It’s truly frightening. I think it’s because not only is there real physical risk, but you have so many more sensations. Lateral and longitudinal G forces, the wind rushing past you, the vibration in your seat and the steering wheel and – most importantly – peripheral vision. The stuff beside you is going by you so fast! That really gives you the sensation of speed, and you don’t get that in a sim. If you had two extra monitors, one on each side, that would help a lot, I’m sure.

Also in a real car you need to have physical stamina that you don’t need in sim racing. And you need to have the ability to raise cash – lots of it! This is a very real skill. You cannot race in the real world for nothing, or even next to nothing, whereas a very small outlay gets you into a sim racer. You need to be able to either buy your own car, or rent a ride, unless and until you become one of maybe a couple hundred or so people in the world out of thousands who can actually make money by driving a race car.

In the real world, you need to be able to work with a team of people, unlike in sim racing where you are your whole team. In the real world, you need to be able to get the mechanics and engineers to set the car up the way you want – being able to describe the car’s behavior, technically knowing what you want, and being able to motivate the team to support you and do what you need. You don’t just click some items on a screen; it’s the same kind of interaction you would have in any team, except in racing you are the focus and you have to convince everyone in the team that it’s worth it to them to work hard for your result. Unless of course you run your own car and engineer and maintain it yourself – but you’ll never become a pro that way.

LGH: Don’t you regard the fact that a fair deal of the simracers seem to drive over the limit as being something negative?

AH: I think you miss out on the best of the experience when you are over the limit. The best part of driving a car at the limit – real or sim – is the feeling of being on the peak of the slip angle curve. It’s a totally delicious feeling… but if you are sliding around and sawing at the wheel, all screeching tires and locking brakes and wheelspin, you’re not there – and you’re probably slow.

One of the great things about GPL is that if you have the car set up fairly soft and high, like I used to do, you can actually feel the rear of the car jack up when it’s on the limit – and it drops down if you go over the limit as the grip goes away. It’s awesome! So you dance with the car to keep it up there on the limit…

By “jacking up” I am talking about the swing axle effect, same as we had with the Vee, and almost killed Nate. It’s present in any independent suspension that has its roll center above the ground. As the car transfers weight to the outside wheel, the suspension tends to lever the chassis up. The inside wheel wants to do the opposite, lever the chassis down, but it has less force acting on it, so it has less jacking down effect. The net result is that the rear of the car raises up.

With IRS like the GPL cars, the effect is small, much less than with swing axles like the Formula Vee. It’s amazing that you can feel it at all, and I didn’t notice it for at least a year. Now I feel it and use it all the time, although it’s less because I use low ride heights with relatively stiff springs now, so the suspension moves less.

LGH: Why shouldn’t the simracers try and live out the dream of driving in real life? Aren’t we contending ourselves with the next best?

AH: Because it’s cheaper and has less risk, and you can do it all the time. For example, it will cost Nate and I each about $6000 or $7000 to run the Cobra in our club’s events and a few other events this season – and that’s not even racing, it’s only time trialing. Even karting costs several thousand dollars.

On the other hand, if you can afford real-world racing, whether it’s karts, autocross, time trials, Legends cars or Caterhams or 750 Motor Club – whatever – then do it! But please don’t stop sim racing!

LGH: Do you think there’d be more people out on the race tracks if there was no such thing as simracing?

AH: Actually I think there will be more people racing real cars about five minutes after more people discover sim racing!

I think sim racing has the potential to be like sand lot baseball, or basketball in the streets. Think about playing amateur sports: it gets people hooked, gets them interested, allows them to relate far better to what the pros are doing. How many people would be interested in football if they never played touch football (the American football)? Playing football, even just in the playground in school, helps them to relate to what the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants are doing. Or to you Europeans, playing football in school or wherever helps you to relate to what Manchester United are doing (just showing off that I know the name of at least one European football team ;-))

Sim racing could do this for racing. Once people get hooked on the experience of racing, even in a sim, they are more likely to start autocrossing, doing time trials, going to Jim Russell or Skip Barber racing school or whatever – as well as going to watch real races. One enthusiasm feeds the other, and vice versa.

That’s what happened to me when I got into ICR2 – I was only casually watching races then on TV, but once I could drive Laguna Seca myself in a Reynard, I got much more interested in watching it. Soon I was watching all the CART and then F1 races religiously. Then after a few years of tinkering with setups in GPL and trying to find my limits as a driver, when I realized I could actually build and drive my own Cobra, the idea was irresistible. And I’ve learned far more than I could have imagined, both from GPL and from the real Cobra. One thing feeds the other.

That said, I think that we have to remember that sim racing is not a substitute for real racing. It is very important that sim racers not fall into the trap that slot car racers did. You may not remember, but there was a Pro slot car movement for a while there. It lasted about 10 minutes… Ok, maybe 5 years or so, but they found that no one wanted to pay to watch slot car racing and sponsors didn’t want to pay to advertise their products to a tiny group of pro slot car racers.

I think the same thing is likely with sim racing. I don’t see a future in pro sim racing at all. Who is going to want to watch sim racing when they can watch the real thing? Sim racing is about doing it yourself. It’s a chance for anyone who wants to hop in a car and drive it at the limit – it lets you experience it yourself.

I think young racers will use sim racing to train themselves for real world racing. Actually it’s already happening. Many of the top young racers – Jacques Villeneuve, Juan Pablo Montoya, Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and many others have publicly acknowledged that they use racing sims to learn the tracks. I’ve also heard from a reliable source that almost all the top young Formula Atlantic and CART drivers use GPL to keep their reflexes sharp. There are already racing schools using racing sims to train their students, and I think this trend will continue and will expand as people discover how much cheaper it is to teach using sims

The flying schools have been using sims in pilot training for ages, and now the sim racers are catching up. The reason why it hasn’t been done before with racing is that it’s much more difficult from a computing point of view to simulate the parts that matter in racing than it is in flying. In most flight training, it’s straight and level flying that’s important, and that’s not too difficult to simulate. In racing, the important part is limit behavior – essentially what the tires are doing at the limits of their performance – and that’s very complex and difficult to model.

Until recently we didn’t have the computer power to do that in real time. Now we do. GPL and N4 demonstrate that conclusively.

It’s only a matter of time. I am convinced that in 10 years all racing schools will use simulators as an integral part of their curriculum, and students will come to class knowing that they are expected to have X hours of sim time before they get there.

How’s that for going out on a limb? ;-)

LGH: When talking about professional sim racing: What do think about FILSCA? Do you applaud their goals?

AH: To me the technology is what’s important. When that comes together, then the organizations will arise to use it. As I said I don’t think there is much future in pro sim racing. I cannot see any justification for a big sponsor to spend money on sim racers. Sponsors spend money to get their name in front of spectators, not racers.

How is FILSCA going to get spectators? Even with utilities like GPLProxy, the only people I can see watching sim races are other sim racers. I am aware that people like Wolfgang Wöeger have managed to get sponsors for their sim racing, but I have to say that I think Wolfgang is the exception. I’m delighted for him that he’s got a sponsor, but I find it hard to see a lot more of that

LGH: What are your views of the GPLProxy then?

AH: I love the idea of GPLProxy. Steve Smith and I have been talking about being able to be spectators in GPL races since we were in the beta team. I’m delighted that someone has built a mechanism to do it – and very cleverly, too. I hope it takes off. I’d love to watch some races some time, but I doubt if I will be able to get any of my racing buddies hooked on watching sim races, since I can’t even get most of them to try GPL!

Steve and I have even fantasized about getting sim racing coverage on Speedvision (before Fox gobbled it up) but realistically, who would watch it? Would you rather watch Wolfgang and Greger slug it out in pixels and electrons and packets, or watch Michael Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya, or Dale Jr. and Kevin Harvick slug it out in the flesh, steel, and carbon fiber?

Bottom line: I believe sim racing is and always will be a participant sport, not a spectator sport. Or maybe I should say, for the foreseeable future.

That said, I think sim racing has enormous potential as a participant sport – racing is a wonderful, addictive, immensely rewarding thing to do, and sim racing makes that experience available to many more people than before. I’m really hoping Sony does a great job on the Internet implementation of Gran Turismo, because that will bring true worldwide multiplayer sim racing into millions of living rooms. I hope that will give a boost in public consciousness that will eventually lead to a huge, persistent online world of racing, where you can go find someone to race with, any time, in any kind of car, on any kind of track.

VROC, in a way, expresses my vision in this regard. It does exactly what I envisioned it would: it lets me sit down and find someone to race with, just about any time, but it’s only a small step.

LGH: How did the vision of VROC arise?

AH: I wanted very much to be able to race online, but John O’Keefe, who was one of the GPL beta testers, was the catalyst for what became VROC. John had experience with some online first person shooters that had matchmaking services. I was focused on making GPL work online, and I put a lot of effort into figuring out what it took to make that work: getting online play smooth, minimizing warping, etc. But I thought that we would just connect using IP addresses, which we’d swap around in chats.

John made a very big, important leap beyond this. John thought of having a matchmaking service, which would show a list of races, and anyone could host a race there and anyone could join it. He said we needed to have one central place for everyone to gather, so the community could grow; otherwise it would fragment and die out.

Once I understood what John meant, I wrote the original VROC Java applet, and John wrote the CGI scripts that formed the original VROC race list server. Then my brother Nate, and Larry Holbert got involved, and we developed WinVROC and JavaVROC, changed John’s CGI scripts into much more efficient daemons, and eventually Larry wrote VROCDB, the current race list server.

Equally importantly, Randy Cassidy at Papyrus became convinced of the potential of the idea, so he wrote many extensions into GPL and issued them as GPL 1.1 and 1.2. He basically gave us every feature we needed to make VROC what it is today – and a few more, because we have the capability to capture results and accumulate statistics, but we haven’t done that yet.

Larry made some great contributions, particularly the IRC chat built into VROC. He wrote that chat himself, and he said it was the hardest part of developing WinVROC, and he also helped us organize and structure things better.

I basically designed the interface between WinVROC and VROCDB, with input from Nate and Larry, and I also passed on to Randy the concepts of what we needed. Randy came up with the very clever implementation that allows us to pass ini file parameters to GPL through the command line, and he put in the features we needed to launch GPL automatically and pass it stuff like IP address, etc.

We always knew and envisioned that we could do more, but building the current VROC system turned out to be a huge amount of work, and once the current VROC was up and running all of us moved on to other things. I would like to take it further, but sadly Larry left the team and took the WinVROC and VROCDB source code with him. To go any further will require almost starting from scratch.

LGH: How did VROC turn out in comparison to your vision of online racing as presented at your website?

AH: I think it’s very, very close. It does all of the basic things I wanted to see happen in sim racing online. You can join other people who are qualifying, you start the race in qualifying order, you race together, you get your results and lap times. You can save a replay of your best lap or the entire race. You can chat before and after, you can trade setups and (until Shadowworld broke it) results.

But I would like to have more, and I have lots of ideas for a VROC 3: I’d like to be able to watch the VROC race list and see the qualifying times and positions in each race. And then I’d like to be able to see who’s in what position, by what margin, as the race is under way. I’d like to be able to click on a race and be a spectator. I’d like to capture statistics, as I said, and give hosts the ability to host races restricted to certain skill levels. I’d like to be able to choose between different car sets, with actual physics and graphics for each car. Early 60’s sports cars: 427 Cobra, Cobra Daytona Coupe, Ferrari GTO, Corvette Gran Sport, etc. Later 60’s: GT-40, Ferrari 275 LM, Porsche 908, etc. 50’s F1 cars. 1965 F1 cars (I think those cars would be awesome!).

LGH: Your comments about the cars you want to drive, somehow triggers the inevitable question – What do you think about WSC? Will it bring us all those cars?

AH: Ahh, I don’t know. I really, really hope it does.

Actually, I thought you were going to ask about GPL2, but if you want good news, then don’t ask me about it… I would absolutely love to have GPL2, and I am very sure that Dave Kaemmer & co. would be delighted to do it. But from the best that I can determine (and this is not official!) it is not going to happen, at least any time soon.

I think there are also people in Europe that want it to happen, but at the corporate level, there are too many other projects that have higher priority and get the resources. Don’t forget, developing a game is not just development costs, it’s marketing and distribution costs, and that comes out of corporate budget. The corporation looks at all the proposed games for a given year, and says, “which of these games have the best chance of a good return?” The ones that look like the biggest sellers get the resources, including marketing and distribution resources.

I would suggest a giant letter-writing campaign, to all branches of Sierra and Vivendi – hard copy, not email! Bury them in a blizzard demanding GPL2. A very large pile of hard copy letters on the desks at corporate headquarters will make GPL2 look like a much better risk, in my opinion. It will give Papy more leverage to push for something like GPL2, something other than NASCAR.

I think Papy learned their lessons with GPL. They know they need to make their sims accessible to a wider audience. They realize now that they can’t just write a sim for the simmers and expect to get big sales, but sadly now they don’t have the freedom to show that they’ve learned this lesson.

LGH: You are obviously acquainted with both sides of the story: both Papy (the developers) and VROC (the simracing community). Why don’t you start developing your own game – you have all the visions and ideas!

AH: I would love to, but my illness is in the way. I cannot reliably focus on a project for a sustained period. Essentially I need to rest approximately one week for every day of activity – and even that one day almost never has anywhere near as much activity in it as a normal person’s. Probably the most painful thing to me in my illness – next to having to give up virtually everything in my life, which I loved – was that I could no longer keep commitments. My body became too unreliable. I hate failing to keep commitments! So I have to be really, really careful about what I commit to.

LGH: Talking about WSC and GPL2 – Can you give me a 2002 version of “The Ultimate Racing Sim” described at your webpage

AH: Well, I’d like to combine a persistent online world like that of Motor City Online (although I don’t really want hot rods; I want F1 cars and sports racing cars) with physics and Internet play from GPL. Actually, N4 has better physics and graphics than GPL, and some improvements in online, so if I could do anything I wanted, I’d base the sim on N4. But it would have sports cars, formula cars, etc.

I would try very hard to leverage the skills of the user population. Look at what people have done with GPL, with very little help from Papy – literally hundreds of tracks, and gorgeous graphics updates for cars and the original tracks, plus dozens of utilities, including the awesome GPL Replay Analyser, GEM+, and my brother Nate’s GPL Race Engineer, to name a few of the most useful.

I’d build a core sim engine that could run any cars, and I’d make it work on the Internet. If I could, I’d take the N4 code base and I’d strip out the NASCAR specifics. I’d build a few cars – a stock car, a couple of sports cars, a couple of formula cars, and a few tracks. I’d build a module implementing the “server is God” concept [more on this below], to ensure fair play online.

I’d build a Race Control module that was programmable, like the level and mission builders in other types of sims. In other words, the user (the host in multiplayer races) could click on a few choices – X minutes or laps of qualifying, X laps for the race, yellows yes or no, etc. – or they could use a programming language to write almost any kind of race control they wanted.

Then I’d sell this via the Internet. Forget about boxes in stores; you have to sell your soul to do that these days. Every advantage you get in distribution clout is more than offset by the loss of freedom in what you can do in the design and implementation of the sim. Instead, I’d sell it via a Web site, like X-Plane did for years. Ship a CD in a jewel case or allow the user to download the whole thing, then let the user community build on it.

I’d have an approval program so if someone builds a really good car or a really good track, the developer certifies it so you know it’s accurate and good. The developers then focus on the next generation of the sim engine, instead of investing huge time in building lots of cars, tracks, paint jobs, scenery, etc. and instead of investing big bucks in licensing.

And that’s another thing: why are the sim manufacturers paying to have cars, tires, whatever in the games?? This is where sim racing should be getting sponsorship: if Goodyear, Ford, Castrol, whoever, want to have their products in the game, they should pay the developer, not vice versa! Don Panoz is smart enough to see that having his cars in racing games is to his advantage; why can’t the rest of them see this?

LGH: What do you think of Ruud Van Gaal’s “Racer” project then?

AH: I think it’s great! If enough people jump on that project – if everyone who is now building tracks, car paint jobs, utilities, etc. for GPL were to suddenly switch over to Racer, in six months we wouldn’t need GPL2 or WSC, because we’d have something just as good. Or even better, because we could make it whatever we wanted, without any market pressures.

Don’t get me wrong – I really, really hope WSC does come out and does succeed, but it has been literally years since the Wests promised a demo, and I’ve still never seen it. The Wests are clearly very talented, and they are perfectionists, but there are only two of them – and they are perfectionists.

From what I have seen, if the Wests are going to get something to market any time soon, they are going to have to change their priorities. You can see that WSC is planned to be, and has the potential to be, much like the Ultimate Sim that I was describing. But in order to be that, it has to be in the hands of the public.

LGH: What do you think of the simracing community that has arisen?

AH: I think the sim community is great! I love to see all the club racing on VROC, and it’s great to be able to dig through the Web sites, forums, Yahoo groups, r.a.s., and other places to find out the latest on what’s happening. It’s an amazing community, worldwide and yet very close knit, constantly sharing stuff with each other, improving everyone’s racing experience. I love it!

I also love the fact that there has been so much work on enhancements for GPL. The improved car graphics, and all the new tracks – I love being able to drive so many of the world’s great tracks, and the minor tracks as well!

The utilities are great too! GPL Replay Analyser is one of the most brilliant and useful tools ever devised for the racer. Racing schools like Skip Barber should be using it, IMHO. Also I love GEM+, and my brother’s GPL Race Engineer – I use these all the time. And the sound patch, of course.

It’s amazing, really, what the sim community has become, and what it’s done. This body of skill, knowledge, and enthusiasm is a huge opportunity just lying there for some smart game developer to come along and capitalize on. I can’t for the life of me figure out why no game developer has taken advantage of this. It must be because the marketing departments don’t see the numbers that they like to see. They can’t see the long term potential.

LGH: Since you have always been one to set some new visions and goals for the simracing community to strive for, what are your visions for the future? What is next in simracing?

AH: The frustrating thing for me is that sim developers seem to keep developing some new sim which simulates some real world series. I think that’s a gimmick, really. It’s a limitation, not a selling point!

Think about it. The most successful simulator of all time is Microsoft Flight Simulator. Note that it’s not “Microsoft Reno Air Races” or “Microsoft’s Lindbergh Across the Atlantic”, but just plain “Microsoft Flight Simulator”. No gimmicks, just flying. A handful of airplanes – and the entire world.

Why can’t we have “Universal Race Simulator”? A handful of cars, a handful of tracks – and editing tools that allow the users to build any car they want, any track they want? I believe the West brothers want to go in that direction, but I don’t know when they will get there.

I would love to see the sim community get more involved with Racer. As I said before, if half the effort that is going into new tracks and other stuff for GPL was going into Racer, soon it would be an amazing sim.

If we all developed Racer so that it was the Universal Race Simulator, then we would have it – a generic racing sim that let the users race any car they wanted, on any track they wanted, with any rules package – pit stops, driver changes, refueling, tire changes, whatever. Yellow flags, car repairs allowed/ not allowed, etc.

As I’ve been testing my simulated Cobra at Lime Rock, Loudon, Bridgehampton, and Mont Tremblant, I’ve been wishing I could try different tires and tweak the motor, or try my friend Gary Cheney’s Daytona Coupe to see how much faster it is due to its lower drag, and how the longer wheelbase affects its handling.

Can you imagine if anyone could do that? Put your own Honda Civic or BMW M3 or whatever into GPL or Racer or WSC and thrash it around your local track, or Le Mans or Spa? Again, I can’t understand why this concept hasn’t been jumped on by the game developers. I would think that an awful lot of people would want to do this.

Also, I’d like to see another version of GPL, one that can do aerodynamic downforce. Then we could have that 1972 season that we’ve heard about. I think that era is probably the absolute pinnacle of the entire downforce era, right up to today, in terms of sheer driving pleasure. Think about it: fat, sticky slicks – but with lots of drag – and big wings – with lots of drag. The slicks are bias ply, so you run at large slip angles. And the downforce increases the slip angles because all tires’ peak slip angle increases with downforce.

We’re talking major sideways driving here – and we all know how much fun it is to drive sideways! Plus the drag makes it easier to draft, so you get giant drafting battles at places like Spa, Monza, Rheims and Le Mans. One of the great things about sims is that you can take the greatest cars anywhere, to the greatest circuits, even if they never went there in real life.

Beyond that, we need a much larger, more enveloping world, with more stuff built in. I want to see exchanging cars, setups, tracks, etc., built right into the sim. The ability for users to add their own cars, as people have figured out how to add their own tracks, will dramatically broaden the appeal of the sim.

To make this work, we need ways to make sure everyone is racing on a level playing field: some way to ensure everyone is using the same track, and a car from the same set of cars. For this, I propose a concept I call “the server is God”. When someone hosts a race, they declare a carset of X number of cars that can be used in that race. Joiners have to choose one of those cars, and the physics on their machine are checked against the servers to make sure they are the same. VROC (or the sim itself) would also check to make sure that joiner has exactly the same track configuration (scenery modifications are ok) as the server.

With regards to the “server is God” concept and VROC, I have to say that I don’t think cheating is much of a problem in GPL/VROC, but that’s because it’s a small community and because the nature of the community is very sporting. Furthermore, the people who developed such powerful tools as GEM and GEM+ have closely guarded the knowledge of how to tweak other physical parameters in GPL.

That said, I do think we need to move on from where VROC is now. We really do need a mechanism to check all the clients and make sure their tracks and cars are the same as everyone else in the race. That will accommodate a much larger racing community.

In my concept of the sim of the future, statistics are gathered from every race. Drivers get skill level rankings, and also some sort of ranking about how much they crash. This way you can have races among people with equal or similar skill levels and you can avoid people who crash a lot, which gives an incentive to not crash.

In order to make the drivers respect their own limits I’d make the penalties for crashing more severe, and I’d penalize tire and brake wear, as well as transmission abuse – all at the discretion of the host, of course!

As I mentioned before, Motor City Online has a very good foundation for this – a fairly complex online world with “money”, and if you crash, it costs you. If we could somehow link GPL’s superb physics, graphics, and online play with MCO’s online world, we’d really have something. Sadly, though, MCO’s car physics are more like those in Need for Speed.

My vision for the future is that people come home from work and instead of sitting down to watch a sitcom or a rerun of last weekend’s Grand Prix, they sit down to race with their friends all over the world. We in the VROC community are doing this now, but we’re a tiny number, maybe 100 to 200 a night, total community size maybe 10,000 max. It could be hundreds of thousands, if all the people in the world who love racing knew how much fun they could have doing what we’re doing.

LGH: What projects are you working on presently?

AH: In sim racing I am helping beta test Brent Adams’ Lime Rock and Lou Magyar’s Bridgehampton and Loudon. I’ve been able to give Brent a lot of feedback because I drove the Cobra there last November, and was able to drive his track just before and after driving the real track. Also Nate and I have driven Loudon a great deal, and have gathered a lot of data – photographic, GPS, and even angle of inclination and banking measurements – and I’ve passed all this on to Lou.

Plus, I have been testing Act Labs’ excellent GPL USB Shifter and their innovative three-pedal setup.

Outside of sim racing, I am planning our upcoming season with the Cobra. I’m working on the schedule and researching some improvements we want to make on the car. I’ve acquired the parts for a front brake upgrade, and plan to help Nate install them once the car gets back from the body shop.

And I bought a bread machine and am learning to bake bread!

LGH: What is the future of Alison Hine and (sim)racing?

AH: I don’t know. I don’t have the excitement about sim racing now that I did when GPL was being developed and for a year or two after its release. The Cobra has captured my passion, I think, but I still really, really enjoy racing in GPL on VROC a few times a week.

If a new sim comes along that is as good as GPL in all the important ways, and moves ahead in some significant way – and simulates cars and tracks I enjoy – then I will definitely get into it.

LGH: Your best moments with simracing so far?

AH: Hmm. That’s hard to pinpoint. Racing with Nate in ICR2. Going to Papyrus and getting invited onto the GPL team. Racing with Nate in the early GPL at Spa. Racing on VROC in the early days.

Having Randy Cassidy give us what we needed for VROC 2. Racing at Papy in the Papy Cup, nearly winning one of the Papy Cup championships, and hanging around at Papy talking to the engineers and other folks there.

Getting all the positive feedback on my GPL Web site and my GPL setups. Racing in the various clubs on VROC, and my most recent races on VROC.

Winning the VROC F2 Club Gold race at Monza yesterday!

LGH: Do you have any good advice you’d like to pass on here?

AH: That’s a hard one. Follow your dreams… and try some stiffer springs and shocks!

LGH: Alison, I’d like to thank you very much for taking your time participating here… It was really nice of you

AH: Thank you!

Our first introduction to Alison was the Silverstone replay included with GPL. View this video on YouTube. Please consider subscribing to RSC’s channel.