We’ve seen the overly simulated car games that are fitted inside cars to give them a feel of reality and we’ve seen simulators that are used for pilots so they don’t have to get off the ground and now the ultimate in simulation has come from the furiously fast, stupendously sexy company with the Prancing Horse, none other than Ferrari. This humongous new simulator weighs two hundred tons, uses over ten kilometers of cabling and needs its own building that’s around 180 square meters, on two floors, which includes the control room. Andrea Bertolini has been helping design the machine at the FIAT Research Centre for the last few years and was also the first to test it.

The driver is seated in front of five displays, which provided a total viewing angle in excess of 180 degrees. The system also features a Dolby Surround 7.1 sound system, putting out 3500 W and is controlled by ten multiprocessor calculators with a total memory of over 60 GB of RAM: the amount of data that can be produced is around 5GB per day. The whole rig consists of an aluminum and composite structure in which are fitted the cockpit and the equipment which produces the images and sound. That’s a serious mouthful of specs and although it’s a seriously hardcore simulator unlike anything out there in this segment, it seems like an awful lot just to help train drivers and in some way is quite like a rather over-sized video game. Nevertheless, I want to give it a shot.

[Ferrari]