When the team behind RaceRoom Racing Experience announced it was bringing Super Tourers to the sim in November last year, thousands of motorsport fans of a particular vintage rejoiced.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Super Touring was far and away the most popular form of touring car racing in the world, featuring national championships in Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Spain, Japan, Belgium, and South Africa, as well as South American and the Asian-Pacific regional series.
But it was in the UK where Super Touring really took off, with the ‘two-litre formula’ concept borne from the need to attract more manufacturer interest in the British Touring Car Championship.
Fans loved the concept, as they could see their daily runabout pushed to its limits on track by professional drivers, and the racing was often qual parts spectacular and boisterous.
After the 1992 BTCC finale, where John Cleland and Steve Soper clashed to gift Soper’s teammate Tim Harvey the title, touring cars were front-page news in the UK — it caught the public’s imagination.
Sadly, the increased competition led to a spending war between the manufacturers, and the formula spectacularly imploded in the early noughties.
We sought to find out how RaceRoom has managed to keep the spirit of Super Touring alive in virtual form.
Homologation papers, please
The peak of Super Touring was nearly three decades ago, so, naturally, reference materials are increasingly hard to come by. However, RaceRoom’s developer, KW Studios, still had various avenues of research to wander down.
“Luckily for the Super Touring cars, the FIA homologation database holds PDF files of each car,” states KW Studios’ Physics Designer, Alex Hodgkinson.
“They’re super useful, probably the single most useful source of information. Those documents are so detailed you could use them to build a replica car yourself if you had the means to,” he suggests.
However, there are some challenges associated with using this method.
“The Super Touring era was a fast development race… so new parts were often introduced and things like gear ratios and brakes were free of any homologation requirements,” said Hodgkinson, decrying the monumental number of specification changes that Super Tourers underwent in-period, stymying the modelling process.
“Cars became much quicker during the course of the Super Touring era. Cars from 1996 wouldn’t be competitive with 1999 models [for example]. Therefore, we had to pick a point in time we wanted to represent,” he continued, explaining how KW had to draw a line in the sand for its Super Touring offerings.
Well, there really could only be one year, couldn’t there?
“1998 felt like a prime candidate”.
The pinnacle of Super Touring?
For many, 1998 stands out as the best year for Super Touring, particularly in its best-supported national series, the BTCC.
The ‘98 season saw eight manufacturers, including Honda, Vauxhall, Volvo and Audi, battle across the UK’s best tracks. The driver lineup was star-studded too, with the likes of Derek Warwick, Yvan Muller, Alain Menu, Rickard Rydell and Paul Radisich competing for glory.
A certain Formula 1 world champion, Nigel Mansell, also joined the fray for a couple of rounds…
Mansell had previous BTCC experience (which ended in a Donington Park wall in 1993), but Round 6 (again at Donington Park) was his best showing in the series.
In an event that was quickly dubbed ‘the Mansell race’, the Ford Mondeo driver scythed through the field in wet conditions to take the lead. As the battling intensified at the front, the trackside crowd and live TV viewers were captivated as first place repeatedly changed hands.
It was an excellent advertisement for the BTCC, with the post-race interviews featuring the eventual winner, Cleland, his teammate Warwick, and the laconic Mansell, the stuff of touring car folklore.
Yes, 1998 was indeed a very good year.
The massively popular TOCA 2: Touring Cars video game was also based on the ‘98 season, inspiring younger motorsport fans to appreciate the category and its protagonists, helping drive the success of events like Super Touring Power, based annually at Brands Hatch.
1998 was the ideal year for RaceRoom to pick, then.
The process
KW models each car as accurately as possible based on its requisite FIA homologation papers, and has added examples from Opel (Vauxhall in the UK), BMW, Audi, Volvo, Honda and Alfa Romeo thus far. But what comes after the modelling process?
“Once all the information is gathered and the 3d models are as required, we port the car into the game and can get to creating the handling,” explains Hodgkinson.
“[The] first step is usually generating the engine files, as that enables sounds to be created and refined while liveries are painted, the model is refined, and the handling is dialled in,” he continued.
“[The] next step is calculating and filling in parameters for weights, inertia, friction, brakes, aero, generating tyres, and suspension layout. These are things which are at the core of a car’s behaviour and won’t change all that much once worked out the first time,” concludes Hodgkinson.
This is when the real magic happens: simulating car physics. It does come with challenges, however.
“Creating behaviour for any new car always starts with a huge amount of information gathering,” he said.
“Internet searches, books, calling people who work with the real cars, drivers, anything related to build up a picture. The final phase is all about dialling in and fine-tuning the handling and is what takes the longest by far,” he explains.
Nordschleife testing
RaceRoom does a good job of simulating the diverse handling characteristics of cars from this era, with rear, front and all-wheel-drive cars all competing together. However, such diversity requires a significant amount of setup work:
“Sometimes, all the number crunching that has happened up to this point gives something really good from the start, but not always. The go-to track is the Nordschleife for most of the suspension work as the data you can gather there is unparalleled at any other circuit,” he reveals, showing that it’s not just OEMs that head to the Nordschleife to test vehicle dynamics.
“It’s so long and varied that whatever works at the Nordschleife works anywhere else too, but it takes maybe 50-100 laps of the circuit per car to get them fully dialled in. There’s also some short circuit work to make sure cambers, tyre pressures and differential behaviour is as required,” he said, emphasising the effort that goes into ensuring a single car operates and behaves as it should.
“I have a few contacts who had driven the cars in period, worked on them, as well as a few historic racers to chew over how they handle,” explains Hodgkinson, revealing that although it’s tricky to define how Super Tourers felt in their heyday, there are still several primary resources to call upon.
Rose-tinted spectacles
Hodgkinson elaborates further: “Sometimes with well-loved historic cars, the most challenging part is separating the legend from facts. It feels like horsepower numbers can get bigger each time people talk with rose-tinted glasses, and lap times become ever quicker.
“Thankfully, Super Tourers were recent enough to be able to find plenty of solid facts to go on,” he states, assuredly.
“Besides that, the suspension layouts were quite varied and unusual. Rules stated that the original layout had to be retained, so the manufacturers came up with all sorts of solutions to optimise them for racing,” emphasising how difficult it is to nail down the precise handling characteristics of a Super Tourer in period.
To finish, does Hodgkinson believe we’ll see more RaceRoom Super Tourers in the future?
“We actually are creating more!” he replies, emphatically.
“So far, it’s been great fun to work on, they have been really well received by our users, and I couldn’t feel more proud of the end result. I think there were 48 different vehicles homologated for Super Touring, so we’ve only just scratched the surface of the class,” which is good news for Super Touring fans.
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