Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

CXC

For a while now, racing games have been pretty good. Good enough to be of value as practice tools for those of us going to the track for real , and even as a tool to find fresh talent like the long-running Nissan Playstation GT Academy. But as plenty of readers have mentioned in the comments, if you want real accuracy, you need to ditch the console and move to the PC. You need something like iRacing. Even then, sitting at your desk with a wheel and pedals will only take you so far.

Enter CXC Simulations.

The company has been around since 2007, and it custom-builds racing rigs that are as close to the real thing as it's possible to get, short of the multimillion dollar facilities you might find in a Formula 1 team factory. I first got to sample one of CXC's rigs at an event hosted by BMW during last year's New York International Auto Show. I put in a couple of messy laps of Sebring in a BMW Z4 GTE race car. But that was just an amuse-bouche, which is why, a few weeks ago, I found myself on the outskirts of LAX airport at a nondescript industrial building—CXC's HQ—to find out more.

CXC's main product is the Motion Pro II. It's 550-pounds (250kg) of steel and aluminum with what looks like the contents of a race car's cockpit transplanted on top. There's a Sparco race seat, complete with four-point harness. In front of me are a set of racing pedals that wouldn't look out of place on the grid at Le Mans, a racing wheel protruding from a carbon fiber dash, and a trio of 55-inch LED screens. (The company wasn't forthcoming about the PC specs, unfortunately.) A pair of hefty metal actuators connect from the base to the back of my seat, and speakers for a 1,500W surround sound system are dotted about the place. Time to see if I'm any good.

The Motion Pro II rigs can run a variety of racing sims, but the most common is iRacing, which we fire up. We select the Nürburgring, because everyone likes a challenge. A little over 15 minutes later, I've finished a couple of laps, and my back and arms are sweaty from the workout. This is no toy. The Motion Pro II is a proper race simulator and the closest thing to actually being in a car on track, driving in anger. Yes, you can feel every bump and rumble strip through the rim of the steering wheel. But there's more to it than that; you feel those bumps and curbs through the seat as you pitch under braking and acceleration.

But I'm not done yet. Now it's time to forget those massive screens and don an Oculus headset, which adds even more to the immersion, particularly since it keeps fogging up just as my glasses do from time to time when I'm wearing a helmet. After another lap of the 'Ring, and then some time at Road America, I feel spent. I climb from the chair wondering where I might find the cash and space required to get one of these for the house.

CXC Simulations is the brainchild of Chris Considine. Like many aspiring racing drivers, he found the costs associated with practicing his craft spiraling rapidly out of reach.

"I was racing and instructing at the Bondurant school," he explained. "Like most drivers, [I] was struggling to find funding to practice. If you want to be a professional football or basketball player, you can go down to the park and practice any time you like. But, in racing, we don't have that luxury. We have to have a car, we have to go to the track. There are consumables; it's horrendously expensive. I was struggling to pay for my test days, and, by the time I got to Formula Mazda, it was almost $10,000 a day to test.

Considine was also a bit of a techie, and he started building his own racing sims. "Along the way some of my clients from the racing school encouraged me to build some for them, and eventually I started a company in a shed in my back yard," he told me.

"The prototypes were all radically different, but by the time we got to production, we whittled it down to what was possible. We always wanted to build a haptic feedback simulator, a physical simulator. Because for me, that's the best information you can give a race car driver; how it physically feels [to be in a race car on track]. So our simulator is built around that premise," he said.

In those early days, CXC would use components from other gaming companies. But, before long, the company decided to move everything in-house. That includes custom-coded motion control systems for every game, since those systems have to be accurate enough to be of use to the practicing racer. However, this means plenty of late nights when a new game is added to the Motion Pro II's repertoire. "For example, Project CARS 2 is coming out," Considine said. "That'll be a radical step for them. But it has a new telemetry application protocol built in, which means our force feedback system, also our motion control system, our vibratory feedback system; basically any active feedback devices need to be rewritten for that new generation platform. It's a lot of work."

That work doesn't come cheap. The least expensive Motion Pro II starts at $49,000 and rises to $60,775 if you want three screens. While that is a hefty amount of money by any standards, it's still cheaper than writing off your race car at a test day, and it's more convenient to boot. The company sells its rigs to professional race teams and wealthy amateur drivers, as well as more commercially oriented setups like the one BMW brought to New York. While I was visiting, I spotted an old Formula 1 chassis in the workshop that's destined for a life entertaining passengers on a cruise liner.