In his maiden season in IndyCar, Romain Grosjean has spent a lot of time in the simulator getting a handle on his new office.
The sim he uses most often is the state-of-the-art Honda Performance Development’s Driver-in-the-Loop simulator, which has six degrees of motion and a wraparound screen.
That kind of immersive simulator will not be new to the French driver who spent over a decade in Formula 1, which has some of the world’s best technology and expertise at its disposal.
After becoming accustomed to that high level of accuracy, he wasn’t sure if he would have the same ability to prepare when he moved stateside this year.
Now over halfway through the season, Grosjean is still impressed with how much knowledge he is able to gain from Honda’s simulator before he even lays eyes on the track.
“Some of the tracks are amazing in terms of how representative they are and how much setup work you can do,” said Grosjean.
“That’s one of the first things I was really impressed with when I started IndyCar. Barber – from the setup I ran in the winter test when we got there, we made a lot of changes and had a really aggressive setup.
“We didn’t start Barber [race weekend] with the setup we designed in the sim, and we ended up with that setup. I was quite shocked.
“Detroit, for example, was a bit more complicated, because of the bumps and change of tarmac.”
Grosjean spent time in the sim preparing for this weekend’s inaugural Music City Grand Prix as well, even though the track wasn’t fully constructed until earlier this week.
Honda laser scanned the roads and built out a version of the track that was as accurate as possible given the circumstances.
Much of the purpose of Grosjean’s running was to familiarize himself with the new layout and feel out where the all-important braking points are.
There is enough trust in the model, however, that car setups were also trialed and were the starting point for this weekend’s running.
“We do start with the setup we ran in the simulator,” continued Grosjean.
“There’s a couple of things on the car that are probably a bit less aggressive, because we know the track is green in the beginning, so we’ve made a few adjustments on that.
“The simulator setup and the thinking behind it comes from what we ended with in Detroit and what we fine-tuned with Honda.”
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