Sim racers have been able to compete in iRacing with the development model of the new BMW M4 GT3 since the beginning of the year. The simulation platform has now published an upgrade of the vehicle in the current BMW M Motorsport design. This version of the BMW M4 GT3 comes very close to the driving behavior of the real car, which will celebrate its racing debut next Saturday. The reason for this is the close and intense collaboration between BMW business driver Bruno Spengler (CAN) and the developers of iRacing during further development in the past few months.
About half a year after the virtual BMW M4 GT3 debuted on iRacing, the car’s upgrade began, with Spengler working with Chris Lerch (USA), the lead car dynamics engineer for the simulator platform, and the in-house iRacing test driver. The team focused primarily on working on driving physics, chassis and optimizing selected areas of aerodynamics. “The goal was to make driving behavior as close as possible to the behavior of a real car,” Spengler explains.
© BMW Motorsport
The basis for further development of the virtual BMW M4 GT3 in the past few months has been Spengler’s autonomous driving expertise. iRacing developers used the comprehensive vehicle data they received from BMW M Motorsport last year to turn Spengler’s detailed feedback into tangible numbers for the upgrade. The team worked its way from one version of the BMW M4 GT3 to the next until Spengler’s vision of realism was perfect. The job of the iRacing test driver was to gather impressions that would help classify the car correctly in the balance of performance which is crucial to GT3 racing. Lerch himself brought the view of the sim hobby racer, whose BMW M4 GT3 should also be drivable.
“It’s been a great challenge to bring sim and real racing together in this way,” Spengler sums up. “Working with iRacing has been great and a lot of fun. From my point of view, the virtual BMW M4 GT3 is now very close to reality. I’m curious what sim racers have to say about it.”
The real BMW M4 GT3 will celebrate its racing debut next Saturday as part of the Nürburgring Series of Power in the new BMW M Motorsport design. The same design is now available to all sim racers on iRacing.
BMW Motorsport
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