Sim racing put Mullingar man on road to success in motorsport
READ ALSO: Mangan drives from victories on screen to wins on stages
Mullingar driver Oscar Mangan started competing in sim racing and last year made a successful transition to rallying, in the Dacia Sandero Challenge Cup. Here he describes the value of sim racing and the opportunities it offers to new drivers.
I think sim racing was seen as a video game for a long time, and 15 years ago it would have been rare that a real racing driver would have a simulator – they might have just for fun, but they would never have taken it that seriously. The teams and car manufacturers had simulators in their factories – but the pandemic is what blew it up, where a lot of the real racing championships had to find some sort of marketing or media to stay relevant, so they pushed a lot of the real drivers to go and do these virtual competitions.
“I took part in a championship and I was lucky to be selected as one of the top 50 sim racers on the iRacing platform at the time, and 50 real world racing drivers were paired up with us. I was with two drivers over the over the year; for the first half of the year I was paired with Fred Vervisch, an ex Audi GT factory driver, and now a Ford GT programme factory driver; and then Seb Priaulx, a son of Andy Priaulx, a famous touring car driver from the 1990s. Seb is now part of the Ford hypercar programme who are trying to win Le Mans outright for the first time since 1966.
“I was going into these sessions, meeting these guys for the first time, thinking – not starstruck – but thinking these guys are well known, successful racing drivers, and I get the chance to race with them. It was hilarious, because the roles were reversed – if I was on a real racing track, I’d be asking them for advice or coaching, and when it came to the simulator, it was the opposite way around they were asking me for advice or wanting to look at telemetry and see what I was doing, how I was driving the car, because other than maybe a handful of them, the sim racers were battering the real world racing drivers.
“Verstappen is an anomaly because he’s equally good on both, but there were about 40 drivers who couldn’t get within a second a lap of the sim racers, they couldn’t get it at all, and I think they were a bit humbled by it.
“But also I think, the success about it was that they really saw what sim racers do and how it transfers. Verstappen has said to David Coulthard that if you look at the telemetry, what sim racers do and real racing drivers do is almost identical – they’re doing the same things, braking the same way, using the same racing lines, carrying the same speed – but one is virtual. That’s why Verstappen is a big advocate for sim racers getting chances to do competitions, and he’s brought up a couple of sim racers a bit younger than me into racing in real life now.
“He did an interview recently, on a Brazilian podcast, where he said that if his daughter or any future children want to go into real racing, he would rather they practice on the simulator than on the go-kart, which is kind of crazy because the go-kart has been the feeder tool, or the starting platform for any racing driver since the 1960s. And he thinks it’s more worthwhile to be a racing driver on a simulator.
“He thinks there are more transferable skills. He thinks go-karts are great for racing, for race craft, but in terms of actually learning how a car works, the simulator, he thinks, is far better.
“The Heineken event where I met him was a competition for sim racers – if they won in their country, they went to a grand final. I won the Irish one… I entered it on a whim, because my girlfriend said I should try it, and I ended up winning it. I had no knowledge of it before. We got Heineken hospitality, free tickets and flights to the Dutch Grand Prix a year and a half ago, and later in the year, all these people from around the world were invited to a final in Spain.
"It was more a marketing demonstration, and part of that was meeting Verstappen. It was only a 30-second meet-and-greet, but I know a few of the drivers from the sim team he runs, Team Redline – a guy from Germany and one from the Isle of Man – and I mentioned them, and said it was nice to meet their teammate, and we had a bit of a chuckle about it.
“There’s definitely a camaraderie there from the likes of Verstappen and the younger drivers. Lando Norris (2025 F1 world champion) is a big advocate of sim racing. It’s rare anyone would get a chance to meet Verstappen one-to-one in a setting like that, and I got to do it through sim racing, at a competition he supported.
“As I mentioned, when I was at the track in Bedford (see main article), the coaches couldn’t believe how transferable the skills are, when I said to them I’ve never driven a racing car, like, the fastest car I’d ever driven was my Volvo diesel. They couldn’t believe it, and when I said it’s the simulator, they were amazed. The younger racing driver coaches were a bit more aware of it, but the older guys, in their 30s and 40s, couldn’t fathom this at all, that someone on a simulator who’s never driven a car can just hop in a race car, and it’s almost one-to-one similarities.
“Then it was the same with the rallying, though rallying is not as big on simulators because it’s quite hard to replicate, so it’s not as popular as racing, like F1, but it’s getting there, and there’s the likes of Jon Armstrong from Fermanagh who’s now racing for M Sport in the World Rally Championship – he’s an ex-winner of a sim rally championship, he was a big in e-sports and sim rallying during Covid, and now he’s a World Rally Championship driver.
“I think it’s definitely showing how, parents these days, if they want their kid to be a good driver, a racing driver, start with a simulator, as well as a go-kart, and the simulator might pay off first instead of the go-karting.”