Sim Racing Cheating problem

This has not been a good year for simracing thus far. First LeMans 24 hours has lots of problems, then Daytona 24 had a team exploiting the system. Now the latest news are chaters. I covered this topic almost 3 years ago. Now it seems that some of my fears have come true.

F1 2022 has been a title underfire in 2022 and this year about out of control cheating in leagues. A few videos of cheaters in leagues have appeared where the drivers follow extremely strange and unoptmised lines, going way too deep into corners. For example in this video, you can see first and foremost the shifting is very dramatic, then the lines taken are extremely strange. Going way to deep sacrificing exit speed in theory, but then still having a fantastic grip in and out of the corners. At corner 9 of Yas you can see the driver down and up shift mid corner. This type of mid corner correction should be only done when the corner is totally missed, at low speeds, and carefully. Here an example with Jarno Opmeer, the same corner is done with finesse, maintaining throttle control not upset the balance of the car. A downshift with a minimum speed like that would upset the car possibly making it spin. 

This and many other examples show that the cheats are not about power, they are about grip. A point that Ive posed in the other video about this topic is that cheaters just use the cheats to find a tenth or so, it would become extremely difficult to detect them. This is where the video will become spicy, as spicy as subbing to the channel. 

In F12022 league racing there has been this suspicion that a certain esports driver has been cheating. Accusations have been circling around regarding Thomas Ronhaar, but that ends up being somewhat irrelevant because while on stream, a driver Alvaro Carreton had a slip. He has shown a folder with grips opened and the hack executable selected. This has automatically peaked my interest, because why wouldnt it. Probably one of the most interesting stories of the year has someone that has in past criticised the accused hacker, having hacks themselves downloaded. Ive went around trying to figure out what was going on, got a message from a few people saying nothing is as it seems, a few days later Alvaro sends a tweet saying he had downloaded it as an investigation where himself and others have downloaded the hacks and shared the finding with EA and Codemasters. Jarno Opmeer comments on this below. So maybe there is an investigation.

SO I reached out to Alvaro, tried find someone, anyone at EA or Codemasters and even reached out to Jarno to confirm this. Only Alvaro came back to me saying what he said was true, but when I asked about someone to contact to verify the story, no answers back. I just needed verification, not an indepth explanation, after all anti cheating is super secret squirrel sauce.

It may very well be true, all of this may very well be similar to what g0at did in Escape from Tarkov, but from my point of view only one person was found with hacks and is not Thomas Ronhaar, that is essentially the driver that has been with the suspicion over its head this last season. A few drivers have analysed Thomas laps stating they are suspicious at best, but not totally out there like the example before. This is because Thomas is at the very least a good driver. But without any sort of anti cheat or at the very least telemetry from F1 2022 to confirm anything, its just an allegation. Much more so than in the case of Alvaro where we could see with our eyes a downloaded cheat pack. So if Codemasters or EA wants to reach out to confirm it, send me a message on twitter or discord. 

Telemetry will lead to the next point which is the discovery of Kirill Sadyrov an esports driver in Assetto Corsa Competizione. In a thread, Williams esports driver Daire McCormack shows a side by side comparison between himself and Kirill. He makes it obvious that you shouldnt be that fast if you are not using the track all the way. He has even shared a set of telemetry from Kirill. A few discord messages seems to suggest that Kirill is gloating or teasing about this topic, to the point he accuses most of the field of using the cheats, and that he has created “something” that its not a cheat. These translations could be all wrong, because they were from Deepl and I dont know any russian, so take it with a pinch of salt. I really didnt want to do this video without these images.

The telemetry is interesting as the goat Niels Naujoks has created an amazing in depth post showing where it is a redflag, pointing towards the lack of usage of the track, corrections at exits, traction control kicking in and especially compromises without downsides, for example at T1 where Kiril takes a deep line that should have compromised the exit speed, but in this case, the loss of top speed isnt there. Niels thread is really good, Id recommend for you to check, it shows how knowledgeable he is, but also how difficult it is to detect a well calibrated cheat unless someone leaves some sort of breadcrumbs.

The Logitech G challenge championship Kiril was on, after the investigation has dumped him from participating.

In this case, unlike in F1 2022 this was only possible because the discord messages and the telemetry was there. For F12022 unless there is something egregious showing like missing everything completely and still not losing time (or showing cheats on screen, but that is still to be confirmed that the story is true or not) everyone would be none the wiser. Thats why if multiplayer is a center feature of a racing game, has esports or even multiplayer official series, anti cheat needs to be part of it, and I dont care how many excuses are thrown around saying that the titles dont need them. A developer for a simracing title reached out, saying it is possible to have anti cheats in simracing by inserting a few strategies running at the same time. 

So, at this point cheating in simracing is far detached from what masterlooser has done a few years back. It has basically created a situation where it is really not possible to know who is cheating, because good drivers use these hacks to get an edge, an extra tenth or two, so everything goes below radar. It basically created a situation that is impossible to know who really is cheating. At the very most you can suspect, but thats it. In the past probably we have situations like that “how did he gain so much grip, he messed up the entry so much” or something like that”. Its really not possible to know without devs developing the necessary tools to know whats going on.