PRO GT DRIVER REVEALS THE BEST SEATING POSITION FOR SIM RACING

hey guys Daniel Morad here professional GT driver and today I'm going to give you three steps to perfectly set up your seating position steering position and pedal position to directly impact your lap time and comfort behind the simulator [Music] the starting point for getting the perfect ergonomics on your sim rig is always with the base the seat itself that's where you're going to be sitting for me personally I race the Mercedes AMG GT3 and GT4 in real life and I actually I measured my seat in my race car just because I was very curious to know what the angles were and I actually found out that it's a 38 degree angle on the base and a 50 52 degree angle on the back portion and I've actually I've set the seat up in a way where it's matching within a degree of my exact race car seating position and for me that's so important because I want to be comfortable while I'm racing on the Sim and I wanted to emulate my real car as closely as possible so it's always about getting the Sim rig as close as possible to what's comfortable for you at the end of the day because that varies on personal preference you can opt to use more of a prototype seating position where it will be a bit more tilted backwards or more of a GT style seating position uh like a road car GT seating position where it's tilted forward for GT3 or GT4 cars typically the range is anywhere from 32 degrees on the base to around 40 and then on the back it's around I would say a 45 degrees to around 55 degrees in that range so definitely whatever feels more comfortable to you you can go ahead and set your seat up like that one of the most frequent areas where you may experience some pain would be in your lower back in your lumbar section and that's so important because when you're braking which we'll touch on in a little bit there's a lot of pressure that's caused in your lower back because of you pressing against the pedal and it's squeezing your back against the seat if there is an air pocket or any space between your lower back and the back of the seat usually that will cause a lot of extra strain and you don't want that so typically what you would do is you can see in my seat I actually have a little pad that I've added to to reduce that gap on my lower back and that just tends to support my lower back and Lumbar a little bit more when I'm pushing the brake pedal hard [Music] once you get your seat position dialed in and you have the perfect angle for your personal preference because remember there's no right or wrong when it comes to seat angle it's only a personal preference in terms of what you're looking for and what you want to achieve out of it for me I'm always looking to replicate my real race cars so I have my seat set up exactly like my car next up once you have your seat make sure that your your shoulders are pressed to the back of the seat and inside the the shoulder rest because this is so important if you start removing your your back off the chair then you tend to lose balance on the car so when when you're turning you tend to wobble back and forth especially if you have a direct drive wheel it will uh it will move you around so you want to make sure you're secure this way you have the the most balance and the most secure grip on the Wheel second thing is I would say uh wheel position wheel distance to you and uh the angle of the wheel itself so for me uh the height and the angle go uh hand in hand I've had I have my wheel set up at around 14 degrees on the steering shaft and that's emulating my real AMG GT cars perfectly within a degree that's personally what I like and I set up the height accordingly where when I'm gripping the wheel I'm not putting any additional strain on the top or bottom of my wrist it's actually more or less going straight from my forearm through a straight wrist onto the grip of the wheel if if you have the wheels height too high and it's too angled you'll put additional stress on the top of your wrist and on the other side if you're too low and you're driving down down low you'll actually put a lot of stress on the bottom of your wrist so you want to make sure ergonomically you're very straight and all your joints are lining up with the steering wheel in terms of distance to the wheel you don't want it so far away where you're coming off the seat but you also don't want it so close where you feel like you're you're jammed up and you can't really make the steering inputs and your elbows hitting the side bolster in the seat so finding that perfect distance to where you're not jammed up or you're not reaching as important a great way for that to figure that out is to put your arms out while your shoulders are in the back of the seat wrists on top of the wheel and your wrist should be sitting right on the top of the wheel Rim that's more or less a really good guideline to getting the proper distance for the wheel the final step to get the perfect ergonomics in your sim racing rig would be to get the pedals set up in the right spot and this one can be quite tricky because you need step one and step two to be correct for step three to to fall into place and um starting right away from your knees and we'll work down you want to make sure that the pedals are close enough where your knees are more or less you don't want to be quite at like a 90 degree angle but you want to make sure that when you're going to press the brake pedal especially this is very important you don't want to have a straight leg you want to make sure you're maximizing your big muscles so you're using your quad to press with the big pressure and you can reserve the rest of your strength in your leg from your calf and your ankle for the Finesse pressure on the brake that's going to give you really good trail breaking and that finesse the last stage of breaking when you're coming off and balancing the car in the corner so again no straight leg avoid that but you also don't want to have your knees up into the steering wheel or like too bent because um then it will start to generate some knee pain as you start to press the brake so finding an angle I would say um you want to keep it around like 130 degree angle or so um you know you're not 180 degrees straight legging it but just allowing yourself to have a little bit of a Bend so you can get that string from your quad when you're pressing the brake second thing is your ankle position if you feel like you're too closed off in terms of uh where your your ankle and your foot is positioned pushing against the pedal face it's going to cause some Shin pain so you're going to get a lot of pain in the front part of your your shin um just think about it when you pull your your toes back and your feet back just statically it hurts right it hurts in your shins and on the other side if you're reaching and you're trying to Tippy Toe it and and push with your the the front of your toes you're going to get a lot of calf pain so try to find that position where when you're squeezing you're balancing that muscle front and back on your on your lower leg so you're Distributing the load across you know all the muscles in your leg you don't want to just use one muscle group or one muscle area so that's that's um probably the best tip I can give you in terms of getting your your ergonomics for your legs the throttle is just positioning the throttle in a way where you're not reaching all the time I know in the real race cars sometimes I've driven cars where I'm reaching a lot and especially if you have to blip the throttle in a manual car or sequential gearbox it can create some massive shin splints which you know you really want to avoid and also calf spasms so uh that's typically frowned upon but yeah always start with with the knee Bend work down towards your ankle and make sure you get the pedal position you can adjust the tilt of your pedals either towards you or away from you and um make sure that you're using big muscle groups for big pressure situations and reserve your smaller muscles and those quicker twitch fibers for finesse on the brake pedal so you can hit the track improve your lap times and have full control of your car another Point that's super important is alignment of your hips and your knees going down towards the pedal you can adjust the spacing between your pedals to basically align yourself straight towards the pedal if you feel like your your pedals are off towards an angle which sometimes it happens in real race cars if you have especially with a three pedal setup typically the brake will be in the middle and if you left foot break like myself you're more or less off to one side but with my setup and especially in the real car I more or less align myself where I'm trying to hit those brakes straight on even if I have to shimmy my whole body over so I'm hitting the brakes straight rather than being you know straightened and angling my knees across because I can generally generate uh knee pain especially if you have a misalignment so you always want to align your jaw going straight onto your controls whether it's your steering wheel or your legs you always want to try to find the path of least resistance and line yourself up straight with your controls foreign hopefully those three steps help you guys set up your ergonomics for your sim rig I know this is a hugely talked about topic and hopefully that shed a little bit more light in terms of the correct seating position versus uh just everything you hear I think coming from a professional GT driver and being able to relay my real life experience you know fitting in multiple different cars having seat fits every single year I know exactly what it takes to get that perfect ergonomic position to be comfortable and also to feel the car and be balanced within the car as best as possible so not only will it make you more comfortable it's going to make you faster because you're not focused on the aches and pains you'll be focused on hitting your marks and uh and dropping your lap times on track [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: Daniel Morad

Views: 134,983

Keywords: Driving Next Level Racing, Senna, Simlab, best sim rig, fanatec, motion simulator, motion simulator racing, racing rig, racing sim, racing simulator, racing simulator setup, sim racing, sim racing cockpit, sim racing setup, simracing, simucube 2, asr6, racing wheel, pedals, iracing, assetto corsa, forza horizon, forza motorsport, logitech g920, best sim pedals, simucube ActivePedal, seating position, sim racing ergonomics, Wheel setup, pedal placement, perfect seating

Id: LOsftrJuhvw

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023