Some Genius Put Your Hellish Commute In A Racing Simulator So You Can Road Rage Responsibly

I started to do the calculation of how many hours of my life I’ve spent driving on Houston’s I-610 loop road, but quit when the math was showing the number would have to be measured in months and not weeks. This massive amount of time isn’t due to its size, but its terrible design and constant, ceaseless, insanity-inducing traffic. I’m pretty sure Houston traffic broke my father, who essentially rage-quit his job on the opposite side of “the loop” by telling off a client after one particularly bad commute.

A Houston-hater I am not, for Houston is truly one of the best places in the world if you can ignore the heat, the weather, the traffic, the poor urban design, and the fact that everyone has a gun. Basically, you don’t use your horn in Houston unless you’re ready to reach into the glovebox and pull out something that’s going to produce a response that’s at least nine millimeters in diameter.

There is no shortage of terrible Houston roads, but The Loop is a good place to focus your ire if you commute in the city. Because Houston is nothing if not a land of entrepreneurs, this brilliant guy decided his new sim racing center needed a full, true-to-life simulator of that road you can drive however you want without fear of getting shot (but there’s a bar, so you can also do it after enjoying some shots).

Inside Satan’s Sphinchter

For reasons having to do with history, geography, and a grab-the-epipen allergy to urban planning, a huge percentage of the Houston area population works in one of three separate office cores (Original Downtown, The Downtown With A Mall, And The Downtown That’s All Hospitals), but few people live there. According to the Downtown Redevelopment Agency, about 12,000 people live in Original Downtown Houston. In a city of 2.3 million people! That’s insane. About five times as many people live in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, and that’s less than a square mile in size.

To the city’s credit, they’re trying to encourage people to move there, and there’s even a decent light rail system that exists mostly to serve this small population of people. I had a friend whose apartment was on the light rail line, and it was incredible to be able to quickly get to enjoy Houston’s world-class museums, world-beating food, and world champion (not at the time) baseball organizations. For most other people, it’s kind of useless.

So there are three downtowns and, statistically, no one lives near the downtown where they work. When I was in Houston, I resided in various parts of town, and wherever I needed to go was inevitably on the other side of town. This meant that I would get on an interstate to go to Central Market for bananas, which is a bananas thing to do. It’s essentially a local road packed with a trillion cars.

Everyone is miserable. There are flyovers that rise high into the air, so you might get stuck 80 or so feet up, watching no one move. It’s usually 900 degrees outside, and no one appreciates the irony of a city built by oil suffering from a warming climate. It’s no coincidence that the road itself resembles Beelzebub’s butthole.

If only there were a way to exercise all of my angst at this specific piece of freeway…

Enter The 610 Loop Challenge

I’ve been to a couple of these “sim racing lounges” before, and it’s a fun thing to do for a corporate party or if you don’t have the money or space for a full simulator in your bedroom. Houston’s version is Velocity Racing Lounge, run by former motorcycle racer Viet Tran, who fell back in love with sim-racing after a bad crash sidelined him.

What do Houstonians do when they get knocked down? They get back up and open a business, and usually that business serves food in some capacity. I credit much of the city’s amazing food (both Anthony Bourdain and David Chang have publicly called it one of the best in the world) to the huge immigrant population. The rest of the credit goes to the fact that the near-constant heat and humidity mean that indoor businesses have a natural incentive to thrive.

Tran created a place that seems to fit the mold of most places, with a bar, restaurant, events built around racing, and a chance for up to 16 people to race in modern sims against their friends in a variety of racing disciplines (F1, sports cars, Indy, et cetera). Not content to rest on the fact that Houstonians will go anywhere with air-conditioning and beer, Tran worked with a simulation company to build a realistic, mile-by-mile representation of The Loop.

In the video above from Houston Life, you can see reporter Lauren Kelly nervously tackle the “610 Challenge,” which allows people to race across the city while also viewing famous sites like the crumbling Astrodome, the extraordinarily polluted Ship Channel, or the place where Astroworld used to be! Also, the Galleria.

It looks so true to life, I’m starting to get a PTSD flashback of sitting at the unholy merger of the Southwest Freeway with the West Loop south of Richmond. I used to work over there in the era before podcasts. I think I had a Blackberry Storm that could play 20 MP3s. It was misery.

The reporter here doesn’t even know how to drive fast in a simulation. If you go out at 4 am, there are definitely times you can quickly get around The Loop, but for most normies, it’s a road experienced in rush hour. She eventually gets up to speed but runs into traffic and, because they put her in a McLaren race car, she gets to learn the joys of lift-off oversteer.

“The best bit is you didn’t hurt anyone,” exclaims Tran, who also pointed out that you can listen to a Houston playlist (presumably Paul Wall, Lightnin’ Hopkins, MTS, Travis Scott, UGK) while driving.

In theory, the goal here is that people can set up a race with their friends and have a “virtual” race around town. The appeal seems to be that you can drive in a way you couldn’t in real life, which, for some, would be going as fast as possible. I would swap out the McLaren for some form of 18-Wheeler and just plow through traffic, knocking over anyone who gets in my way, which was always my secret wish.

The poor reporter here makes another go at it, but almost immediately makes the same mistake, causing one host to cover her eyes and the other to coldly remark that “Okay, Lauren, next time we’re going somewhere together, I’m driving. Terrifying.”

If you’d like to see a better version of racing, YouTube channel A Casual Racer has a better video:

This is still a brilliant idea, and something I could see on other hated roads from the various places I’ve lived and visited:

• The Santa Monica Freeway Grand Prix
• The 24 Hours of the Major Deegan Expressway
• The Dan Ryan TT

Is there a road you’d love to see on one of these simulators?

Photo: Houston Life, Velocity Racing Lounge