My very brief stint as a race car driver at the F1 Arcade

Confidence was my first mistake. As I plopped down in one of the 83 racing simulators in the new F1 Arcade location in Washington, DC, I told the company's CEO, Adam Breeden, that I'd raced plenty of times before. I picked Semi-Pro difficulty, even as Breeden told me he recommends most first-time arcade visitors pick something simpler. I adjusted the Vesaro simulator, started the race, and caused a six-car pileup on the race's very first corner.

Luckily for me, the F1 Arcade is designed more for fun than fidelity, so my race wasn't over. It ended four minutes later, in dead-last place, as the onscreen timer mercifully ticked to zero. On a normal day at the arcade, this would signal it's time for someone else to race. For me, sitting at the wheel a few days before the arcade opened to the public, it just meant my shameful drive was finally over.

The DC outpost of the F1 Arcade is the company's second location in the US - the first opened in Boston earlier this year, after two locations in the UK have been huge hits. (Breeden says one location did twice its projected revenue in its first year.) The project started a few years ago, when Formula 1 reached out to Breeden about building a more experiential product for racing fans. Breeden has been doing this kind of thing for a while - he calls it "competitive socializing" - and has built brands for Ping-Pong, minigolf, bowling, and darts - and says he landed on the idea of racing simulators right away. Millions of people have sat in arcade chairs and driven onscreen cars in games like Cruis'n World, and lots of people are willing to fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a wheel and pedals into their own home. A fun, social, competitive racing experience seemed like a winner.

All 83 simulators inside this huge DC space are the same: an all-in-one machine built by a company called Vesaro. (The company sells a modified version of the setup, which it calls the V-Zero Mark II, for a hair under £40,000.) It has a steering wheel and two pedals and a seat that rumbles and moves as your car does in the game. "If you're playing this thing with full manual settings," Breeden says, "it is functionally a professional-level racing simulator." He says his team is already working on new versions of the rig, but he's happy with the state of things, too. And he's trying to make sure he thinks of everything - even the F1 Arcade's food menus were designed in part to make sure you don't bring messy fingers into the cockpit.

Racing simulators are not, by nature, fun to watch or even particularly social. Sims are complicated and require full attention, races last for hours, and watching someone's heads-up view isn't fun for very long. For Breeden and his team, the most important thing about the F1 Arcade was making it a group activity.

That process started with building an entirely new game to play. Booting up 83 copies of F1 24 just wasn't an option. "Ultimately, the console game is not really fit for a concept like this. It's very complicated," Breeden says. What the arcade needed, he thought, was a way for racers to just sit down and start racing without having to make lots of choices and wait through loading screens. It also needed to be connected so people could race against the person next to them or even everyone else in the bar. 

The F1 Arcade's game is based on rFactor 2, a well-known simulator and rendering engine that is often used and modified for various kinds of professional simulating. (It's also the game that real-life F1 champion Max Verstappen rage-uninstalled last year, after it crashed and cost him a virtual race.) Everything other than the core racing experience has been modified for the arcade, Breeden says. "And it's not just the software," he says. "It's the booking system, the points, how it leads into the leaderboards, how that fuels the virtual currency we have." The F1 Arcade team has designed a whole online system for gameplay, too: you play the reflex game by scanning a QR code rather than dropping in a quarter, and you win that virtual currency instead of tickets. It all took years and a team of engineers. Breeden says he's much more of a tech company CEO than he ever expected to be.