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GTP Goes Virtual with iRacing’s BMW M Hybrid V8

The New LMDh Is Available to Race on the Online Gaming System

 

By David Phillips

 

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – While drivers of IMSA’s new hybrid prototypes rushed into the unknown in last month’s Rolex 24 At Daytona, the first race for the new Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) class, thousands of sim racers already had a leg up on their real-world counterparts. That’s thanks to the fact they’ve been driving iRacing.com’s virtual BMW M Hybrid V8 since early December.

 

The digital LMDh BMW is the latest product of a successful partnership between IMSA and iRacing dating to the earliest days of the popular online racing service, witnessed by the fact iRacers have raced the virtual Riley Mk XX Daytona Prototype and HPD ARX01c for over a decade. iRacing and BMW M Motorsport have enjoyed a similarly fruitful relationship over the years; the iRacing catalogue includes the BMW M4 GT4, M8 GTE, Z4 GT3 and M4 GT3.

 

Now, at the dawn of an electrifying new era in sports car racing, this latest collaboration between BMW, iRacing and IMSA is enabling racing fans to experience the awesome performance of the new BMW M Hybrid V8 for themselves.

 

Although the more than 225,000 iRacing sim racers are free to practice, test and even race the latest Bimmer in private sessions, the BMW M Hybrid V8 was or will be featured in several “official” iRacing events including the iRacing Daytona 24 (that ran on Jan. 21) as well as the VRS European Endurance Series and the IMSA Online Sports Car Championship featuring digital versions of the tracks on the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship schedule.

 

Cooperation Makes Digital Development Seamless

 

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In some respects, the development of the digital BMW M Hybrid V8 followed the same basic pattern established with previous iRacing Bimmers. First, BMW provided detailed computer-aided design (CAD) files to iRacing’s vehicle dynamics and graphics professionals, along with detailed physics information on the car’s aerodynamics, suspension and power unit.

 

“We’ve been eagerly anticipating the LMDh class for a few years now,” said iRacing Executive Vice President Steve Myers. “BMW M Motorsport’s support has been indispensable in helping us to bring both their entry and the new class to iRacing. Building this car in the sim has been a joy for our team.”

 

Needless to say, confidentiality was paramount.

 

“When it comes to introducing real BMW M race cars to the virtual world, BMW M Motorsport and iRacing have been close and perfectly attuned partners for many years,” said Maurizio Leschiutta, LMDh project leader at BMW M Motorsport. “As the head of such an important project, confidentiality is my No. 1 priority; it would be fatal if the competition discovered the technical details of our car that we want to keep secret. In that respect, I came away really impressed by iRacing’s professionalism.”

 

The hybrid power technology is something of a brave new world for IMSA and, in this case, the BMW M Team RLL team that is campaigning the “real” BMW M Hybrid V8 in the 2023 WeatherTech Championship. But hybrid race cars are familiar ground to iRacing’s vehicle dynamists who have created digital hybrid Formula One McLarens and Mercedes-AMGs in recent years.

 

“Thankfully our hybrid system, because we’ve done Formula One cars, is in a pretty good place,” says Chris Lerch, vehicle dynamics engineer at iRacing.com and former race engineer on a number of F1, IndyCar and IMSA teams. “Of everything that was different on the LMDh compared to what came before, the hybrid system was plug and play. Literally, we put the engine in place, defined the hybrid and said, ‘Wow, this works! So let’s move on.’

 

“I really like the way the sanctioning bodies have spec’d the basic system for the LMDh. There’s going to be quite a lot of strategic use of the hybrid in iRacing and real life. It may be that, eventually, people will settle in on the best strategy and it becomes pretty formulaic, but at least at the beginning it feels like there’s going to be some variation. And people who are able to take advantage of understanding the system will be able to gain a competitive advantage, especially late in the race.

 

“The other big piece of the development is the rules developed by IMSA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO),” Lerch continues. “Just by reading the rules you have a good idea of quite a lot of the constraints. An example of that is the power curve: It’s literally a spec power curve. So that’s quite useful for us. There were a lot of areas where just reading the rules gave us all the information we needed.”

 

Making It Look, Feel and Sound Like the Actual BMW M Hybrid V8

 

After digesting and processing all the data from BMW to create a virtual prototype as a baseline, the next step was to gather real-world information. At the behest of BMW and the Rahal team, a group from iRacing attended a test of the BMW M Hybrid V8 at Watkins Glen International in September to acquire additional information on the car, including hundreds of photographs of the interior and exterior as well as audio recordings – including some unanticipated sounds.

 

“It’s always good when we can see the car up close, ask questions and do sound recordings,” says Lerch. “I feel like (our) sound on it is really quite good. We had mics in the car all day.”

 

Where the development window for some of the previous iRacing BMWs took a month to six weeks, that window on the BMW M Hybrid V8 was closer to three months. In part that was due to constant advances and refinement in iRacing’s approach to building meticulously accurate virtual race cars.

 

And just as the iRacing cars have advanced, so has iRacing’s understanding of the four most important aspects of just about any car’s performance: the contact patches where the virtual rubber meets the virtual road.

 

“At a top level, our car development these days is largely pinning everything down except for the tires,” Lerch says. “So, we were able to gather information from BMW that enabled us to do that. We knew the power unit. We knew the masses. We knew the aero quite well. At that point the only real unknown is the tires. So quite a lot of the development from that point was developing and optimizing the tires. It’s now to the point that our vehicle dynamicists are tire designers in many ways. We spend a lot of time with construction and compound trying to make the tires as good as they can be.”

 

iRacing released the virtual BMW M Hybrid V8 to its members in early December, and the reaction was overwhelmingly favorable. More than 20,000 iRacers purchased the new BMW in its first two weeks of availability. That was possibly a window into the future of what would be a record-breaking number of fans on hand to watch the actual BMWs take to the track against the other GTP competition two weeks ago at the Rolex 24.

 

Next up for BMW M Team RLL and the rest of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is Sebring in March, but iRacing fans already the jump on learning the best way to “respect the bumps” thanks to the release of the digital BMW M Hybrid V8.