What came first?

[tannat]

Your love of racing or your love of racing sims?

[Brown, Jon Brow]

Good question!

I've always been interested in cars for as long as I can remember, and I used to like watching them race. But it wasn't until I got Toca Touring Car Championship that I really got into motor racing. 1998 was the first year I tried to follow all the races in the BTCC and F1.

[jso1985]

both I think, my dad follows F1 so I watched some races there since I can remember(sadly my first memory of an specific race is the 94 San Marino GP). but I only started to follow other sports lately.
While for racing sims, I remember when the family bought our first computer in 1992, it came with that F1 game from Accolade, and I was instantly hooked up!

[ChrisS]

I definitely was into racing before getting into racing sims. I got into racing in the early 90s and the first racing game I got was GP2 back in 1996 and I was just a casual player. I started playing much more when I got internet access in 1998 and I found all the addons available for GP2 that kept the game up to date.

As I got into racing sims more I did play some games for series I didnt follow

[cosmicpanda]

racing sims for me - I started playing colin mcrae on the playstation, got into WRC and then from there into F1.

[MrJan]

I was a motor racing toddler. I think my Dad was taking me to events when I was still in a push chair, I certainly remember being at rallies when I was only about 3 (1988). Fairly regular visitor to Castle Combe and Thruxton throughout my life. First racing sim would have been playing CMR in a shop, can't remember the year. Didn't actually get a playstation until a few years later (probably '97/8). TOCA 2, CMR and Gran Turismo became regular stalwarts.

I can't imagine doing it the other way around and I don't think that any game has influenced me into watching different motorsports

[Marc W]

Racing for me, I've been watching racing for as long as I can remember and there were no sims back then. (Late 70's-early 80's)

[Zico]

My love of rallying and racing came 1st.. then only when racing/rallying sims became fun and realistic enough did I develop an interest.

[JTLarsen]

Rallying came first for me!

I got introduced to Rallying when my older brother took me to a local rally in '87, I got hooked instantly, but didn't get into gaming untill some 13 years later when my boss introduced me to CMR1 while I was working at a community center..

I can still remember his exact words: "I work untill noon or two o clock, then I'm too burned out to do anything but play the rest of the day.." then he pulled down the CMR1 game from a shelf, popped it into a PC, and we spent the rest of the day rallying away.. ahh the memories!

[johnny shell]

I like watching races first - indy cars mostly, along with some sports cars & F1 when we could get it here. Even nascar... hey, you can't really avoid it.

Then when I got old enough, I started racing a little ameature racing myself.

Eventually I traded my race cars for kids & a wife, but a few years later I discovered sim racing which is much more affordable than real cars, and requires considerably less time to maintain the cars.

Luckily by the time I ran out of money I had discovered that I wasn't going to exactly be the next Danny Sullivan anyway.

That doesn't mean I don't still love it just as much though!