REAL TORQUE

Five years after the lockdown sim racing boom, direct drive's hit the mainstream

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The new normal. Remember how often we heard and repeated that phrase during 2020? Gosh, these face coverings get itchy, don’t they? Still, we'll have to get used to it, because wearing them is the new normal. It was a platitude we used when queuing outside supermarkets in two-metre intervals as the tape on the floor dictated; when observing our overgrown hair in the mirror; when walking past a baking ingredients aisle stripped bare, and when spending our Friday nights doing a ‘pub quiz’ (aka arguing with our families about the names of British rivers) over Zoom.

Never did we dare to countenance that the new normal might one day seem like merely a temporary suspension of the old normal, and that the old normal would one day return in all its boring glory. Perhaps it was old-fashioned superstition during a traumatic period that felt frighteningly out of our control, or a desire to show we were willing to adapt to the circumstances in order to keep each other safe. Five years after the fact, it's hard to tap back into that mindset and pin down its precise workings.

Among the disruption, the worry, the grief and the stress, there were positives. For the gaming and tech sectors, a boom took place that shouldn't have caught everybody off guard but did. And for sim racing, once a niche within a niche of racing game fandom, a coming of age moment took place.