The Cure for Racing Hearts

Playtime in America is growing up, with “rides for the kids” being rapidly replaced by Thrills R Us.

Us . . . we adult wannabes who are cramming outdoor toy lands in Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta--and indoor playgrounds at a Minnesota mall and a Las Vegas casino--for the eye-widening, gloves-on, tummy-tightening sensory perception of motor sports.

Which translates to most of the sweats, threats and omigawds of high-speed stock-car, Indianapolis and drag racing, with none of the blood, broken bones or insurance premiums. Kind of a fantasy football camp without splints.

* In Bloomington, Minn., there’s the NASCAR Silicon Motor Speedway, a lineup of 12 stock-car mock-ups mated by computers to each other and to a 3-D visual presentation of the Charlotte Motor Speedway. They rock, they roll, they snarl, they bump and vibrate as you race on a 1.5-mile oval that, at simulated speeds of 200 mph, starts to look like a Froot Loop.

“It really resembles the real thing,” says another real thing, Indy 500 winner Arie Luyendyk, consultant to LBE Technologies of Cupertino, Calif., which created the attraction and has it poised for introduction in other cities to be named.

* The Sahara Hotel & Casino, a Las Vegas dowager, circa 1952, is countering upstart New York-New York with something that could become Indianapolis-Indiana. It’s Speedworld, a $15-million bank of Indianapolis Racing League cars and cockpits also based on virtual reality technology, and also networked to race against each other.

“This is not an arcade game,” says Robert Jacobs, president of Illusion Inc. of Westlake Village, creator and developer of Speedworld. “It’s a system that can calculate, with very high precision, the way a race car responds to its driver’s commands . . . communicating all sensory experiences that a driver perceives when operating a high-performance vehicle.”

And, adds Jacobs, the basic system can be programmed to duplicate other arcane activities beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Flying a space shuttle. Piloting a submarine. Upside down with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds.

* For fans of raw, straight-line pace, there is the Top Eliminator at SpeedZone, a 12-acre park in the city of Industry. Nothing simulated here. Not the Formula One cars on one track, not the scaled-down sprint and Indy racers on two other circuits, and certainly not the drag racers.

Although held and braked safely on rails, these are full-size cars shoved by 350-cubic-inch, small block Chevrolet engines. Powered by propane, they put out 300 horsepower and thunder from dead stop to a lively 70 mph in a shudder over three seconds--or quicker than any production street car.

“It’s as close to actual drag racing as most people will get, or can afford to be,” says Robert Stolfus, general manager of SpeedZone, which has sister parks in Dallas and Atlanta. “This is wheel-to-wheel, clock-to-clock, hands-on competition where a tenth of a second means the difference between nothing and a cash prize . . . because if there wasn’t the competition, it wouldn’t be fun.”

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Now back to the original premise: Back off, kids. Stick with your bumper cars, midway rides and Nintendo. Only people with valid driver’s licenses get to ride at SpeedZone. Further, at $15 for two sprints--or just over seven seconds of track time--this is no pastime for those who must mow lawns to fatten their weekly allowance.

These speed games are adult entertainment as redefined by Silicon Valley’s virtual realists, who for decades were rooted in the seriousness of building military, civilian and NASA flight simulators.

Then came the Cold War meltdown and, with it, smaller military budgets and a reduced demand for simulators to train tank and helicopter drivers and to stage bloodless combat rehearsals on virtual battlefields. Fortunately for aerospace subcontractors, that global downsizing coincided with a rising public awareness of how a certain minority was getting its jollies.

Blame it on ESPN. Or television cameras climbing Everest, robot cameras allowing us to waltz in the underwater ballroom of the “Titanic”--and minicams showing us exactly what Michael Andretti was seeing when sniffing the gearbox of Paul Tracy’s car in Turn 2 at the Indianapolis 500.

“We are living in an age of experiences, with everyone wanting to climb mountains, race speedboats and drive fast cars,” explains Peter Beale, chairman of Illusion Inc. and a movie producer/director specializing in projection, sound and special camera effects. “What we have set out to do is create the sense of driving competitively at fast speeds.

“It suspends belief until you become Emerson Fittipaldi . . . but if you crash, you don’t get hurt. In the future, we hope to adapt track telemetry so you can enter Indianapolis or Le Mans, and drive against the experts in real time. And the real winning driver might never know he has been beaten by a virtual reality driver.”

The Sahara’s cockpit mock-ups--complete with yoke steering wheel, instrumentation, sequential shifting, and rear-view mirrors to prove it’s not your paranoia, that there really is somebody stalking you--feature 160 parameter dynamics simulating every aspect of real Indy car performance. Racers can be tuned to 700 horsepower. Gear ratios, tire pressures, wing angles and suspension travel are adjustable.

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Gentlemen and ladies, start your engines.

Eyes take in the track and other cars on a 20-foot wraparound screen with 133 degrees of arc. Ears--thanks to a phased-array sound system--catch the whoosh of passing and being passed, the screech of tortured and blistering tires and, inevitably, the horrible clash of impact. Even the seat of your pants picks up cues from a six-axle motion system.

Most of it works. Hard driving does produce sweaty palms and maximum pucker factors when the car is sucked up the banking toward the wall. But there is no wind in the face, no gasoline smells and definitely no forces of gravity, which are, after all, the supreme exhilaration of acceleration, braking and cornering at the limits of car and driver.

But it does, in the words of Speedworld consultant Danny Sullivan, “give everybody as much of the feel as you can, without involving the huge costs of racing these days.”

At SpeedZone, however, the sounds and smells and G-forces are no simulated environment. To prevent a driver from continuing across the park and into West Covina, race car and steering are gripped by a rail. The engine starts and stops by a computer; braking is hydraulic and automatic at the end of a 140-yard drag strip.

But you stage the car, you wait for amber lights to go green, and you mash the gas pedal. Jump the light and the run is defaulted. Forget to shift--from first to second by a button on the steering wheel--and your time will be measured by a calendar instead of an electronic timer.

And you’ll need to run a whisker above three seconds to beat local hot shoes, qualify for weekly and monthly runoffs and maybe earn a $1,000 winner’s purse.

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At Illusion Inc., they say this is only the tip of the simulation iceberg and synthetic environment. Sequels to Speedworld, says Beale, could be “a trip into Chesapeake Bay to collect specimens . . . docking with a space station . . . going through the Black Hole in space and to Mars. . . . “

Identical technology, he adds, eventually may allow us to sample high professions, like arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, or knowing the delicacy of neurosurgery.

And so “Westworld” will come alive.

* SpeedZone is at 17909 Castleton St., Industry. For prices and hours, call (888) 6-MALIBU.