Drove the world-famous Laguna Seca race track with the Northern California Racing Club (NCRC) last week. I’d been “practicing” for it using Sony’s Gran Turismo 3 driving simulator for the PlayStation 2. I was warned—and did note—several important differences between the GT3 and real-life versions of the track:

• Turn 2, the “Andretti Hairpin”: easier in real life; although the virtual and real versions are fairly close, the turn is tight enough that being able to look out the side window makes it much easier to feed in the right amount of brake, steering and throttle inputs to hit the apex and drive the turn correctly.
• Turn 5: easier in real life, as the turn is more on-camber than in the game. It took me a few sessions to learn to trust in this and start applying the throttle earlier.
• Turn 6: in GT3 this turn is flat-out in the Evo, but it is rather different in real life: just before the turn the track “falls away” a bit and goes off-camber, making the car rather light and requiring a modest amount of braking to make the turn.
• Turn 8/8A, the famous “Corkscrew”: there were some differences between the virtual and real-life versions, but I found that having practiced the turn so many times in GT3 made it much less daunting in real-life than some make it out to be.
• Turn 9: definitely the turn that gave me the most trouble. In GT3 I just lift off the throttle, get the car turned and then full throttle down the 9-10 straight. In real life, picking up speed going downhill after the Corkscrew, I tended to turn the car in a bit tighter than necessary as I couldn’t find the nerves to let the car track out all the way to the right edge of the track.
• Front 11-1-2 straight: in the straight I found my enthusiasm for mashing the gas pedal was tempered by the knowledge that I was approaching the Andretti Hairpin at around 100 MPH. Also, GT3 fails to capture how light the car feels going over turn 1, a shallow left curve over a crest.
• FIA berms: driving over the berms in GT3 creates a gentle rumbling on the force-feedback game controller; in real life, rolling over anything more than just the edge of the berm feels—and basically is—like driving the wheels over a shallow flight of stairs and, I’m told, in the extreme can cause damage to the wheels.

Other than briefly rolling over the dirt exiting turn 2 once on my second session, the day passed without incident. I even got some pretty cool photos to show for it; here’s one of me going through the Corkscrew: