A video of a five-year-old sim racer gunning a truck down Daytona has surprised viewers with the skills and precision seen in the clip. Competing in the NASCAR Truck Series in the virtual world, Emerson passed several competitors at once to finish eighth – impressive at such a young age.
The Instagram account, Emerson Drives, managed by the young racer’s parents, has made him a sensation with over 20,000 followers. In the video of him racing at Daytona, his focus is fully fixed on ensuring he passes the trucks ahead on the final lap, while the person recording the video, likely his father, provides instructions on when to accelerate and lift off the gas pedal.
He makes some brave moves and brushes the wall in the end. One thing is certain: his throttle-happy right foot should take him to the places in the racing world he currently dreams about.
While karting has been one option for aspiring drivers to start young, the increasing accessibility of advanced simulators in the past decade is being seen as a major boost to help young and veteran drivers train themselves. Max Verstappen is an ardent sim racer, and through the countless hours of racing at the Nürburgring on his sim setup, he was able to win his first GT3 race at the ‘Green Hell’ last week, alongside his teammate Chris Lulham.
Nürburgring content creator Misha Charoudin believes Verstappen’s GT3 win opens up many drivers to the world of sim racing, which has the potential to change the future of racing, especially since it has been proven how sim racing influences track performance in the real world. Explaining his perspective on his YouTube channel after listing drivers who rose to fame through sim racing, and emphasizing that sim racers are not mere gamers, Charoudin said:
“So the result of last weekend and all the other achievements of other drivers that I mentioned should definitely by now kill the stigma of the fact ‘oh, sim racers are just some gamers’.
“I believe as a matter of fact that in between now to the next 10 years, it’s going to be mandatory to be a sim racer before you’re going to be considered a professional race car driver I would say by teams so you can start competing in real-life racing and people would not really look at it, ‘oh sim racing is just a game,’ because let’s face it: the reality is you only need a sim hardware – electricity bill of course – and you can drive as much as you want.”
Misha suggested that a sim setup would be a wiser investment for budding racing drivers than track programs that require huge funding. He said:
“If you crash you just hit the restart button and you go again. The reason why it is so hard to become a professional race car driver and to make it up to Formula 1 is because the running costs and travel costs. If you go into karting championship, I believe the first racing years cost you already quarter of a million euro to the world karting championship.
“You might be spending up to a million euro a year because you have the team cost, travel cost, the running cost of a kart purchase, tyres, brakes, fuel, you name it. And in case of a sim, again, just electricity and the purchase price of the sim.”