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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

In the Netflix series, Drive to Survive, you could see one of the younger drivers (I don't recall who it was) play the Codemasters game at home. It didn't look like exposition or product placement, but rather like something that they regularly did to train.

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I think they showed Max or Alex but I don't remember for sure - but that was certainly product placement/he was just playing it for fun. Lando and Max play alot of iRacing which is the most comprehensive and realistic simulator which can actually help you train for motorsports (I use it to learn tracks before I race in a miata) and I think they recently got Carlos and Alex into playing.

Besides, all the teams have their own non commercial simulators miles ahead of what you can play at home

I think that's mostly to build familiarity with the tracks. Many games have done excellent jobs of mapping the tracks to high precision including the backgrounds. So, all the visual cues will translate well to real life.

I've done this myself for some track days (not races) and can tell you it absolutely helps even at my tragically amateurish skill level.

Both Max Verstappen and Lando Norris does this regularly. Lando also stream at times.

Season 2 - Episode 5, they showed Pierre Gasly with his basic home setup. ~25min

Playing video games isn’t a good way to practice F1 racing, but it’s probably a great to memorize a track layout.

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