We had family over for boxing day and naturally everyone wanted to have a go on my race simulator.

Here's a video of my simulator with the lights switched on in the room, so you can see the seat motion in more detail.

Here are a few more pics taken from within Forza 3, you can see some of the cars I have in my garage.

Over the last week or so I have been spending more time competing in races on Forza 3 for the Xbox 360. I easily feel it's currently the best racing sim for a console.

Here are a few shots taken from within the game.

It's been a while since I have been on my simulator recently as I have had a cold and have felt crap. This evening I met up with a mate and had some fun races online.

This evening I decided to have a go at throwing Nelson Piquet's 2008 Renault F1 car around Singapore. I was interested in comparing the telemetry with the leaked information from the crashgate scandal, as you can see I didn't crash this lap.

Today I collected my new car!

These are a few photos of my 2007 2.0 litre BMW Z4 which I part exchanged today for a 2009 Z4.

I decided to stream my session on the simulator tonight via Qik using my Iphone 3GS.

This is another clip from the weekend, here a mate from work is driving an 09 Indy Car.

This evening I spent some time on my rFactor simulator, after Massa's accident last weekend the recent news regarding Michael Schumacher coming back is awsome. I decided to do some Laps of Mugello in the 2007 F1 Ferrari just like Michael did this weekend as he prepares for Valencia.



Here's the onboard version.

I had a few online races with a mate this evening and decided to race some ovals with a few GT cars for a laugh.

This is Phil one of my work mates competing in a Clio Cup race at Donnington.



External footage.

I had some mates over on Saturday and we spent the afternoon driving varoius race machinery on my simulator. This was Jason's lap of São Paulo in 2006 Renault F1 Car.

I haven't posted any new videos in a while as I haven't really been on my simulator while the weather has been warm. This evening the weather wasn't so fantastic and the temperature in the loft wasn't too bad so I decided to meet up with a mate and go for a few races.

Lewis Driving a McLaren Mercedes SLR, originally uploaded by paulwoolrich.

The passenger was a competition winner.

Timo Glock, originally uploaded by paulwoolrich.

This was taken a few second after he got out of his Toyota from 2008.

Lewis Hamilton, originally uploaded by paulwoolrich.

Lewis heading up the hill in last years World Championship winning car.

Nascar Burnout, originally uploaded by paulwoolrich.

I don't know much about Nascar but this was one cool burnout!

Nissan Primera Touring Car, originally uploaded by paulwoolrich.

It's been a while since I posted anything on my blog lately. This mainly due to the warmer weather, i'd rather spend my time outdoors while I can. A few weekends ago I was at Goodwood for the Festival of Speed, I haven't processed hardly any of the photo's yet but I will post a selection here.

Today is my 30th Birthday, so to celebrate yesterday we went to an outdoor Karting track in Tamworth. The Karts there are quite quick, they are 270cc and with the sweeping corners you can take almost every corner flatout. I finished 2nd in both races, I just couldn't get past my brother even after trying all through the first race. We both did rather well as the 2nd race had a reversed grid so we started at the very back.

Today I have bruises all over and ache, I guess I am not used to being thrown around quite as much.

This evening my brother popped over to have a blast on my simulator, I decided to take some video footage as usually it's me driving. I don't really have anything new in my setup other than my PC now has 8gig of DDR3 ram to make it run even faster.

Here's a second clip of my new MMG SimRDisp7X unit, I am filming this while sat in my simulator so the camera gets shaken around a bit as I race around the circuit.

Today I finally received my MMG SimRDisp7X for my steering wheel, it was the last component from my original order that I was waiting for. I guess I can now call my simulator complete for the time being. The display is really great because I can tell when to change gear without looking at the dash as the blue led's are really bright.

My brother filmed me while I was driving a BMW M3 GT car around Toban. I think having my simulator my driving and car control has improved no end so I wanted to show my steering input around several laps of the Toban circuit. This is with no driver aids of course, it's the proper way to drive a car.

I competed in several online races with a mate this evening, we both connected to my rFactor dedicated server. I was hoping a few others would join us online to race however there was no such luck. I instead added a few AI drivers which my mate and I could race against.

This was an awsome race with me starting at the back of the grid and slowly coming through to just take first place.

If you fancy taking part in a race or two meet us online now, just get the password from my forum and make sure you have the SRM ETCS Mod.

Join me and a friend for a race around Toban Long using SRM ETC's edurance mod. My server will be available from mid afternoon with practice starting around 6:30pm GMT. For more details join my forum and follow the links to download the car mod and view my server info.

I decided to setup a dedicated rFactor server on my home network which will be connected to the world wide web so others can race online with me. I presently have only been hosting non dedicated races with a close friend, so to date there has only ever been two cars lining up on the grid.

There are many good leagues out there which you can join but they require commitment timewise, so I am setting up my only server for some casual racing for now. I might look to host a league of some sort in the future. If your interesting in meeting up online with a few of my mates just join the forum for further details. I have included the connection details below along with the mods I plan to use.

Server: paulwoolrich.blogspot
Password: Join the forum for this

Car mods: (Click the mod itself to be taken to the download site)
Touring Car Legends *requires soundpack
Edurance Touring Car Series *requires update as well
VLN 2005
Formula Nippon 2008 *requires 1.02 patch

This evening I joined a F1 2009 league for rFactor, the first race is this weekend and will be Australia. I will be racing for Toyota, however here you can see me getting some practice in Robert Kubica's 2009 BMW.

As it's the Australian Grand Prix this weekend and the first two practices have finished I decided to have a crack myself. So far my best lap was 1:29.644 which you see here.

Here's a clip of the real thing.

This clip shows one of my mates taking a Ferrari Enzo around Nuerburg Ring.

This is the new Touring Car Legends mod that was released yesterday. I was surprised to see the Royal Mail Datapost Escort. I remember this as my Dad used to work for Royal Mail and attended the races at Silverstone and he gave me a photo of this car.

I had some friends from work over on Sunday, they wanted to see my simulator in the flesh and give it a go. This clip shows Jason driving Indy Cars around the Indy 500 motor speedway, it was his first go and he soon got the hang of things.

Yesterday I downloaded the first 2009 F1 mod released by f1ligue.com. In this clip you can see me driving Lewis Hamilton 2009 championship contending car. This clip also shows the full movement of my motion simulator which I recently converted to run X-Sim.

This clip fully shows the X-Sim software in motion along with some of the other new features on my simulator including my two laptops displaying realtime telemetry.

I managed to take some video of my simulator in action since converting it over to X-Sim 2.0 software. I had some friends over so a shot some video of my simulator so you can see my latest setup which includes a Mimo 7" touch display.

I finally got my simulator up and running this weekend after being without it for a few weeks due to the Frex Simconbase controller unit blowing. The controller unit itself still hasn't arrived back from Japan yet, however I switched the simulator to run X-Sim software so it's using a different interface now.

Below are two clips taken from this evening.

While my simulator is out of action due to my simconbase controller unit breaking I have been playing around with some software to add to my simulator setup. This video shows Rfactorlive pitwall telemetry software working along with X-Sim virtual gauge display.

I came across this the other day while looking on VirtualR, it's a full dashboard for your cockpit complete with dials & switches. The cockpit dash is manufactured by a company called Shark Productions, you can take a look at their website here.

I might not have mentioned up here but my Simconmotion simulator is currently out of action, my simconbase unit packed up and has been sent away for repair. I think the issue is that Frex doesn't include any instructions about earthing the cockpit and the simconbase unit is very fragile. I can't say I was too happy about it only lasting four days, however I am going to earth my cockpit so that should be the last of it fingers crossed.

In the meantime I have been working to make my simulator even better and last week ordered a Mimo 7" touch display with built in webcam. I am now making a touchbuddy display for rFactor, the two pic's below show my progress.

We are now less than 30 days away from the start of the 2009 Formula World Championship. I had allot of reservations about what this season would bring after the radical rule changes. I have to say with the news of USF1 and a management buyout for Honda it's looking very positive and things could be quite exciting.

I eagerly await the release of a 2009 F1 rfactor mod, hopefully a few should start to see the day of light in the next 30days.

The clip below is taken from the recent Jerez group test session.

I came across this clip while surfing Youtube for race simulators, Williams are widely known to have one of the best race simulators around. With a few extra laptops and mods such as the Pitwall Project & rfactorlive I think I can get something quite close for a very small budget.

I completed the lap in 1:24.720 with no driver aids vs Alonso's 1:20.253, I did forgot to select minimal fuel so I think I could have gone a little quicker.

Last night I decided to do some practice laps around Silverstone in an F1 car of some sort. I was very keen to only use the driver aids available at the time so I went with a Renault R26 from the 2006 season. This was Renaults World Championship winning chassis and had traction control as the only driver aid. I will post the lap time tonight once I boot up rFactor again and plan to release a split screen vid against Alonso actual qualifying lap.

This was a video I put together for my boss, he's attended Champ Car races at Mid Ohio and has been a Paul Tracy fan in the past so I created this clip to show the simulator working.

This is the second clip of my newly finished Frex Simconmotion Simulator. I have to say it's worth every penny it truly transforms the experience of driving.

I finished my simulator around mid-day today and have spent the last few hours trying it out.

This clip was taken shortly after we had mounted the projector to the ceiling, we ran some rFactor footage just to check the angle and screen size. I am currently using something fabric to project onto as my motorized screen hasn't arrived yet.

This shows how far I got with the construction at the end of Saturday night, tomorrow I just need to complete the wiring and mount the pedals.