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INTRODUCTION BallRacing Developments Ltd (BRD) is a family business started in 1994 and based just outside Reigate, Surrey, UK. It was formed to develop and market a high quality steering wheel and pedal control system for the PC. The first product, called GP500, was invented by Timothy Ball (currently Technical Director) to replace the need to use joysticks/keyboards in driving games and simulations and was one of the very first driving control sets available. Since that time BRD has strived to push forward the development of driving simulation technology and has become increasingly involved in the real world application of simulation for training and design. BallRacing Developments was the first to take these types of controls and fit them into actual racecars to create authentic racing simulators. From these beginnings BallRacing Developments has developed contacts and partnerships with many of the leading motor sport companies and teams to provide them and their sponsors with extremely effective and popular simulators. These simulators have been primarily used for promotional and exhibition purposes but are increasingly being developed for training uses. BallRacing has developed and supplied simulators for TAG McLaren, Toyota, Jaguar Racing, BAR, Williams F1, Orange Arrows, Ford Racing, Peugeot, Vauxhall (GM) and Good Year. These have included cars for F1, WRC, BTCC and DTM. BallRacing not only converts actual racecars to simulators but also produces under licence a range of replica cars as simulators. BRD has a licence from Jaguar Racing to use their actual Formula 1 racecar moulds to create the most realistic F1 simulators available. Additionally BRD produces a 55% scale model Ford Focus WRC simulator and a truly authentic replica 1967 Lotus 49 with Cosworth DFV engine. BallRacing Developments has strong links with the motorsport community, their partnerships with the likes of Hewlett Packard and EDS enables them to create and design using the same level of technology as many of the leading F1 teams. This also enables them to take data directly from teams/manufacturers to speed up the design process and employ cutting edge rapid prototyping techniques. Nik Ball is responsible for BRDís design and development program and is a graduate in aeronautical engineering and has spent 5 years working in the automotive industry as an engine designer for one of the UKís leading automotive design consultancies before joining BallRacing. Official Homepage: https://www.interactiveracing.com/INTERVIEW PART 1 Here are the question, asked by our visitors. BHMS: Any chance of developing a wheel for the XBOX? BRD: We have outline agreement to create a version of our Speed7ô pedals that will be compatible with X-Box and PS2. The only issue at this time is to satisfy ourselves that the steering wheel support available in these consoles is going to be satisfactory. Our experience to date is that these consoles do not adequately support steering wheel and pedal devices. BHMS: Is BRD making any plans to do more product/focus on the PC sim hardware market? BRD: PC controls will remain our primary focus and all developments will be for PC first and other platforms second. BHMS: What is the progress of the speed 7 force feedback wheel. It was stated on the Interactive website that it should not be expected before the end of 2002? BRD: This is in progress. Development has been delayed because of a big F1 simulator project we were working on last year. There is a lot of work yet to be finished but the results are very promising. We will be making a separate announcement giving some specific details in the next couple of months, but we have to be realistic and say that we will be looking towards October/November 2003 before we have a product to sell. BHMS: What is BRD looking at as the target price for the speed 7 force feedback wheel? BRD: At this stage I can not be specific, we have a target price which we are aiming at but time will tell how close we can get to this as there is still quite a lot of development still to be done. BHMS: Does BRD plan on increasing its participation in the the american sim market, do you have or will BRD be setting up an american distributor? BRD: We see the US market as a very important market. We are in fairly advanced stages of discussion with a US company about setting them up as our distributors in the US. We hope that we can announce an agreement within the next couple of months. BHMS: Many other sim wheels are using 6 to 8 programable buttons on the wheel, these are useful in the games to update the driver on race information such as lap times and driver positions while maintaining car control. Do you see these controls being incorporated into the newer developed wheels crafted by BRD? BRD: Certainly. The current steering wheel products we have are built on the original game port architecture and as such are limited to 4 distinct buttons. Whilst we can now use all our steering devices through USB (via our Speed7ô or Pro USB pedals) we have not had opportunity to change the architecture to add more functions. Our new Speed7ô steering device will incorporate more buttons and functions than you will find uses for! In the meantime however, we are looking at ways to offer more buttons for the existing steering devices. BHMS: Will BRD be doing more updating of the website to keep the potential customers better informed on their products? Currently the site says to go to the teamBRD website for tech support, yet the link provided does not go to such a place. This may lead one think that there is no way to obtain tech support. BRD: It is our intention to provide more information to existing and potential customers via our website. It has been difficult to make the time to actually do this in practice. The teamBRD website is now in build and this should provide a very great amount of detail on products and lots of practical information on how to get the best out of the products. We are also planning a number of technical papers on various aspects of sim racing hardware, from discussions on potentiometers and encoders to force feedback. It will also be a forum for customers to swap this kind of info and to feed information back to us. BHMS: I'm a professional race driver and a SIM racer as well. I'm using SIM Racing as a traning tool. It helps in a lot of areas. The problem is that hardwear doesn't give the right fealing. Softwear is not perfect as well. My question is, would BRD's new (upcoming) FF wheel sistem future a shifter (H pattern)? Will it have Force Feedback to simulate the forces felt in real car? BRD: We are developing a sequential and H shifter which will be available for Speed7ô pedals and also as a stand alone device. Release date will be around June/July 2003. They will be all metal constructions and designed to give an authentic feel. The force feedback steering system will be very radical and is being designed with training applications in mind. We can not go into more details yet. BHMS: Will your speed7 FF wheel have something in common with the Reaction prototype? BRD: We have had discussions with them and have tested some of their equipment. All we can say at this time is that the Reaction system is only a motor drive unit and not a complete steering system, and so it would only be something that could be incorporated into our new product, it is not a product in its own right, which ours will be. We will be making more details available in the not too distant future. BHMS: I'm very pleased with my BRD Pro wheel and Pedal set having had it now for coming up 5 years with no problems. Firstly I would like to upgrade to the clutch addon package. Im using it extensively for GTR2002 from Simbin which is equally excellent. Will this improve my lap times? Also during race starts and spin recovery the auto clutch in GTR takes for ever to get in to gear. I guess the other issue will be going back to right foot braking. One last thing, is there an upgrade for the steering sensor as its never smooth post calibration? BRD: Sometimes ghosting or jumping. This problem is caused by the Game Port on your PC. If you take the Poll with interrupts off in the game port config screen this will solve this problem, otherwise if you upgrade to USB this will solve any problems you have. The clutch add on will give some benefit, such as improve starts, but we could not say whether you will actually go faster throughout the rest of the race, thatíll really depend on your method of driving. BHMS: I own a Pro v wheel and Speed Seven pedals. They are absolutely the best race controls I've ever owned and were well worth the money, especially the really fine throttle and brake controls. They have a lot of "feel" to them. My question is regarding the upgrades and diagnostic programs you talked about for the Speed Seven. When are these coming out? BRD: The software development is well advanced now. We have been testing the program for the last couple of months, making revisions and adding features. We still have a few bugs to iron out so it really will not be too much longer. The program will be far more radical than anything currently available. We hope that this will be ready in the month. BHMS: In the future are you going to develope a Winston Cup style wheel with the stick shift off to the side like the Thrustmaster or Thomas Enterprises wheel? If so, how far off in the future is it? Or what else would be cool if you could incorparate the stick shift inside the Race Frame Pro. Anyways I think the Speed 7 pedals rocks, the Race frame pro is awesome but I just wanted to see the steering wheel with a shift knob on it before I purchase the whole set. BRD: Thank you for your positive comments. As mentioned above, we will have a stick shifter for use with our controls by the summer. The design will allow it to be mounted on the Race Frame Pro. We have just introduced a Winston Cup style wheel which we call our Stock V2, so all you need to wait for now is the gear shifter. BHMS: BRD produce some of the best steering wheel and pedal sets around, but considering the price of rival steering wheels such as the MOMO, do you think your products are priced too steeply, and as a result loosing a big section of the market? Is there to be a compromise between your best steering wheels (eg speed7) and price in the future? BRD: Our aim has always been to produce items that are going to maximise performance and be realistic. To develop such products requires a high level of investment. Taking Speed7 as an example, we had to invest many tens of thousands of pounds designing and building the tooling for the dies etc for the Speed7 pedal components. We were using extruded aluminium and such complex shapes had not been done before, so there was a lot of work that had to be done with the aluminium producer. Also the electronics design in the pedals is far more complex than any other steering and pedal system. The development of the USB program took nearly a year to complete and we are using USB 1.1 rather than the standard USB 1.0 protocol as this is necessary for the plans we have for our new steering device. So not only do we have high development costs, but the complexity of some components means that the material costs are higher. Now it is true that prices could be reduced if volume was higher, just like any product, but even if we were producing a product in the same volumes as say a Logitech system, our product would still be considerably more expensive, simply because the parts are more expensive to make. We have priced our systems as low as we can possibly make them because we want to make the system available to the most people possible and still make it viable for us to build the units and develop new products. In the end, winning performance costs money, whether it is your sim racing controls or your racing car or your washing machine! We intend doing a technical paper which better sets out the cost/benefit relationships between different control build techniques and the technology behind them, which we hope you will find informative and useful.INTERVIEW PART 2 This second part of the interview is a transcript from the live chat session from Team Redline and BallRacing Developments Ltd. TR: Ok thank you for joining us Ball Racing Developments TR: my first question is an easy one! TR: What made you decide to start the company? BRD: I thought you said easy, let me think a second TR: hehe BRD: It started with Tim deciding he needed a steeing wheel to play his Amiga games and he came up with a couple of bent bits of metal and it went from there TR: Many people think you are a large company but how many people actually work for you? BRD: Well there are 6 full time plus a couple of people part time on contract. TR: What makes you stand out from your competitors? BRD: I think the main thing is that our interest was first in motorsport and that our approach to design comes from that angle. We have quite strong connections in the motorsport industry and they are getting stronger all the time. BRD: We have invested extensively in state of the art technology through our partnerships with EDS and HP so that we operate CAD systems that are the same as used in F1. Additionally our electronics experts have decades of experience in the simulation industry both in automotive and aerospace. TR: Would you see yourselves as a stepping stone between sim and real racing? BRD:We have always seen that we are a link between the real and the virtual and the technologies are converging. We are uniquely positioned to be able to understand the needs of both the sim racer and the professional race driver as we produce equipment for both markets. TR: How can you you bring real racing and sim racing closer together? BRD: There are two areas. Firstly educating the motorsport industry of the benefits associated with simulation in the sense of driver training, since simulation in this industry as been associated with car design and development only. The second area is really to do with the cross fertilisation of technology. Bringing design and manufacturing techniques etc used in motorsport into the sim racing hardware development. TR: Do you think its only a matter of time before real drivers get more involved with sim racing? BRD: Yes. Already they are to some degree, but they need to understand that this goes beyond just gaming and initial familiarisation with tracks. There needs to be more work behind the scene to show them the other benefits available. TR: Now a big question, where can you as a leading player between real and sim racing see sim racing in 5 years time? BRD: We see sim racing becoming a recognised sport, with a proliferation of race centres, increased numbers of sim racers through much easier online access and the creation of established professional racing leagues. We would see a much more significant place for sim races being broadcast to a viewing audience. Lots really, but we need to think more about this. TR: The Sim racing community seems vast yet there doesnt seem to be that much direction, what would you like to see change? BRD: We see that Sim racing is going to have to undergo some big changes to allow it to be able to expand and attract new people. There has to be some standardisation introduced, for example in server hardware, positioning, bandwidth etc. This may be best achieved through a virtual governing organsation or a recognised group which will come up with a standardised set of rules. We would not want to see some thing restrictive introduced, but we would want something TR: Can you describe some of the features on the new speed7 FF wheel? What sort of new technology does it feature, are there more buttons on it than previous BRD wheels, and any idea of a price? BRD: We can't go into too much detail yet. Should be able to tell you more soon. In the meantime there will be more buttons and functions available on the wheel than you will be able to shake a large stick at! With regards to price, we are trying to work to a price some where between £1 and £100000. TR: haha TR: ok, I'll put the noble on hold :O) BRD: Seriously, we are looking for around £300 TR: At the speed 7 launch, Andy Wilke was using a gated-shifter made by BRD but it was a prototype then.... Are there any plans to bring this into production? BRD: We are producing a new shifter, which will be a combined H pattern and sequential shifter. We are aiming at the summer for this to be launched. It will be a predominantly metal affair and will have a very positive and realistic action. Doug E: With the launch of the S7 Pedals - you mentioned (as on the website) that they would be flash updateable and so forth - do you have plans for something like that - or an application to manage setting on a profile basis much like MS and Logi use for their hardware? BRD: Yes. We have a driver the 'BRD Analyser', in final development now. We will be releasing this to Redline shortly for testing. This is a very radical driver and will allow you to manipulate every aspect of the steering and pedal outputs and combination of most manufacturers controllers. The flash updateable aspects was in place at the outset. It has only so far been used by those customers who had the earliest versions of the pedals. Doug E: Any plans to attend / organise any LAN type events - or similar events such as Goodwood '02 Doug E: (and any idea how much was raised at Goodwood?) Doug E: I'll REALLY stir things up and tack on the end - any plans for a S7 Wheel Launch party? BRD: We are planning a launch event for the new steering when it is ready. We are not sure we will have time to do much in the way of other events this year. We are holding a post stock take sale on 15th February at our office. We will have lots of our older controls at very low prices as well as some F1 wheels etc. We will post a news article shortly. BRD: I do have a record of what was raised at Goodwood , I will look out the details, but Whizz Kids were overjoyed with the amount they raised. TR: How will the Force be different from other wheels and will you have to run seperate software? BRD: The forces will be realistic but this goes to the heart of the what is radical and so we can not disclose anything about this yet. You will not need separate software but I can't say more than that. I am sorry but come back to us in a couple of months. Doug E: Will you offer a trade in scheme for wheels to upgrade to the S7 Wheel as was offered for the S7 Pedals. BRD: We have not discussed this yet. I am sure there will be some arrangement for previous BRD customers but don't know what yet! TR: Could in your eyes the speed7 pedals be improved in any way? BRD: One area we have identified was to produce a range of varying strength pedal springs. Also we have been looking at some pressure sensors for the brake as opposed to potentiometers. As with everything it costs and takes time to do, if enough people say they want these things it makes things viable. We rely on people telling us what other things they think might want improving. TR: One thing I would like to see and that is to see the brake feeling spongy when you start to get brake fade, is this possible? BRD: That is something we had discussed, we did explore the use of some electro-mechanical variable dampers. These would be great and we did allow for these to be fitted in future. It does require software interface and forms part of our ideas for 'force feedback' effects in the pedals. TR: So in effect a poll to see what people want would be a good idea? BRD: This is something we should explore (questionnaire that is). TR: Did you have any involvement with Papyrus and their latest NASCAR sim? BRD: No comment TR: Hehe, Well I would like to thank you for your time! |
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Comments : |
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| Author: Al Schwimmer | 09-02-2003 |
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Thanks, you've answered a lot of my questions. |
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| Author: Steve Claeys | 12-02-2003 |
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Thx BRD., This brought a couple of new things in the open, things i really wanted to know. Really looking forward to the speed7 wheel launch. Still have a couple of months to persway the wife to buy me the whole nine yards, :-) |
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| Author: JIM Shanks | 09-11-2004 |
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used the kit at a show, great , best of luck in '05. jim |
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