A couple of the members of Defector’s Philadelphia bureau received an invitation, approximately one year ago, to attend the official launch of the city's F1 Arcade (pretty much what it sounds like), with DJ Jazzy Jeff. None of us were able to attend. Ever since then, until this very week, we have been talking about visiting, and failing to visit, the F1 arcade. Here, in our own words, is the story of our visit.
Kathryn Xu: I suppose the most important piece of information here is that we have been meaning to go to the Formula 1 Arcade in Philly from the day it opened, and after some punting and faffing about, we finally managed to do so approximately one year later, which is a huge occasion unto itself—if just for the fact that I was so sure the F1 arcade would fail and close before we would ever get the opportunity! Surely F1 simulator racing was not so popular in Philly that it could be a sustainable enterprise. Yet, month after month passed, and the arcade lived on, and each time I happened to pass by, I would take a photo and text my beloved coworkers, "We should finally go!" And we finally did.
Kelsey McKinney: We ate dinner before at the delicious Nan Zhou Hand-Drawn Noodle House, and I ate so much beef noodle soup that my tummy felt warm. And suddenly, while I was eating I was hit with a wave of panic. Was the F1 Arcade even open still? Was it open on Tuesdays? I hadn't checked! Had anyone checked? Because we've been talking about going for so long, I took it as an inevitability that it would be ready for us whenever we wanted it. Luckily, that was in fact true.
Luis Paez-Pumar: I also had that panic as we were walking to the F1 Arcade but it was swiftly replaced by a different panic: What if the racing is too complicated for a random Tuesday night? Sim racing is a big subculture, and an expensive one to boot, so I was worried that the F1 Arcade would lean in this direction. I'm sure it's a blast for the people who get good at sim racing, but I do not want to have to deal with, like, brake differentials and rear wing angles while having an overpriced cocktail with my pals. Luckily, it was pretty idiot-proof for even a group of dumpling-filled dummies like us.
Kathryn: Well, first of all, it has to be mentioned that Luis and his partner got Tsingtaos at the restaurant, so if he was concerned about the seriousness of the event, he was having that realization way too late. But we'll get back to the drunk-driving portion of the night a bit later.
Kelsey: Wow drag him! It is true that the people at the F1 Arcade were unbelievably happy to see us there. There is a man who just seems to open and close the door. He did not check our IDs or search our bags or anything. He just welcomed us into the F1 Arcade very merrily, and then we were inside this strange giant space that is FULL of screens. Every car simulator (of which there are dozens) has two screens, but then there were also giant televisions playing the terrible Phillies game. The rest of the room, though, was designed kind of how I imagine someone from Berlin would design a bowling lane: very dark, with some neon strips and a fancy hotel-like bar.
Luis: The vibes were pretty bad in there, but I can't decide if that was because it was empty or because it was like stepping inside of TRON. All of the red neon, flashing lights, and TVs combined to make a real disorienting visual landscape. Also, the bar had way too many bright lights emanating from it, which gave everything a weird shadowy look in its periphery.
Kathryn: It was very surreal and kind of evil in a corporate-party–core sort of way, and I don't know if I should have been surprised about that. In retrospect, a weirdly dark and serious-looking F1 Arcade in Center City would cater to that type. We were also, by certain interpretations, on a work trip and having a corporate party of our own. I do think that the next work retreat should be at the F1 Arcade in Philly; they even had a private situation room with tables and, like, a dozen simulators! Imagine having Jasper and Sean delivering powerpoints, and then everyone hopping on to race each other.
OK, let's get into the actual racing. Did it feel realistic and fast? Was it everything you dreamed of?
Kelsey: We only got two racing simulators, which turned out to be the right decision because I genuinely cannot imagine doing the racing without any breaks because my heart rate was so high. The cars themselves surprised me because they MOVED a lot. They bounced up and down when you went off the tracks and swayed a little from side-to-side. I was also forced to go first, which did not seem fair. The arcade let you pick how difficult you wanted the racing to be, and so I started on an easier level and treated it like Mario Kart for my first race and this was thrilling and so fun. I loved running Max Verstappen's idiot ass into the wall! Eat shit, Max!
Luis: I have some experience with racing video games, having acquired a wheel controller during quarantine and gotten, briefly, really into the F1 video games. I'd say these sims fell short of even that experience. The cars felt very sluggish on turns, the brakes were way too strong, and the assists on the car made it so that the whole thing felt on rails. I know I said I was worried about the sims being too complex, but I would have liked to have a bit more control in the car.
That being said, it was fun! The swaying Kelsey mentioned took me by delightful surprise the first time, as did the bumping when Kathryn ruthlessly T-boned me into the first corner of our first race against each other in Bahrain. If I had complaints about the responsiveness of the cars, they all went away when overtaking each other and hooting while trying, and failing, to navigate chicanes.
Kathryn: I would encourage Luis to have a more generous interpretation of the events that took place in the opening corner of Bahrain. Racing incident!
My only experience before going to the arcade was briefly playing the video game on a friend's PS5 over Thanksgiving, on the easiest difficulty, when I thought, "I'm da king of da highway." While at the F1 Arcade, I picked the second-easiest difficulty, and thought, "I'm da king of da highway."
Kelsey: Yeah, we really were da king of da highway on the easier level! It was so fun. Kathryn and I made the same mistake and we attempted the middle difficulty level on our race against each other and immediately both spun out into the wall! Whoops! This was also kind of fun. Something that felt immediately clear to me was that I had almost no rear steering in the car. So a few times I would just end up facing the wall with no ability to get myself out of there. Later, I realized this was because I was not braking hard enough into curves, but it was still fun.
Luis: I also got overconfident as well and went for the "Pro" level of difficulty in Suzuka (fourth out of five levels), and got my ass handed to me when I spun out multiple times. I think Semi-Pro is the sweet spot where you are actually in control of the car without turning into a sweaty mess of frustration and cursing. (There are children about!)
Kathryn: Yeah, I was really caught off-guard by the difficulty spike just going up one notch. In most of the difficulties they give you a racing line to follow, which makes it much easier, but I just could not figure out tight turns. They were not joking about giving less assistance on issues like "braking" and "traction." Also it's probably my fault that I approached a turn at Monza and decided that I just needed to cut the chicane because it's not like stewards exist in the sims here, and then the game duly punished me by spinning me off the track… but by the time we reached Vegas, the closing race of the season, I thought I was getting a hang of it. Perhaps I was buoyed by extensive straights. Perhaps that's just evidence that Vegas is a shitty F1 track.
Kelsey: The Vegas track made me feel insane! I think it was on the Vegas track that Ocon hit me into the corner on the first turn and my car BARRELL ROLLED!!! I was just flipping around for what felt like hours! Luckily, because it is a video game, my car (which was upside down) could be righted by simply… hitting the gas, and then I was ready to drive again.
Luis: The digital halo saved Kelsey's driver's life. That barrel roll actually made a lot of what felt off about the sim click for me. The weight of the cars just… didn't exist in correlation to the actual images projected on the screen. Everything was simultaneously too heavy and too light, and it disoriented me after hundreds of hours of playing the F1 video games that tried to be more realistic. This might just be a personal problem, though.
Kelsey: I did not feel this at all. I felt WEEEEEE VROOM VROOM BEEP BEEP BITCH!!!!
Kathryn: If we're talking about a lack of realism, how about the fact that at the end of the season, I won the Vegas Grand Prix in an Alpine over the Kick Sauber of Gabriel Bortoleto and the Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton. (While I was pretty uncaring about collision physics throughout most of the race, I was very respectful when passing Lewis, my GOAT.) The sims randomly assigned you a team, which meant that Luis and Kelsey were repping VCARB and Luis's partner and I were in Alpines. The indignity!
Luis: Our VCARB was a real piece of shit on the straights, let me tell you. Kelsey and I still won, though!
Kelsey: I have never really understood how bad it must feel to be an F1 driver in a shitty car until I had my pedal all the way to the floor in my stupid VCARB and I was for some reason not in seventh gear, which the car did not seem to have even though the Alpine had it, and was getting absolutely destroyed on the straights. I hated that! But I imagine if I had been randomly assigned a car that was good on the straights I would have really loved that.
Luis: I'm hyper-competitive about... everything, but after seeing how bad our car was on the back straight in Bahrain in that first race, I decided to chill out a lot more, and that helped. So did the tequila cocktail I got.
Kathryn: Perhaps my true success at Vegas can be ascribed to the fact that, despite my initial resolution not to get a drink, I ultimately did. I will never get (or seize) the opportunity to drink and drive in my life, and I may as well take the opportunity to simulate it. The F1 Arcade has a bar attached, so clearly they want to encourage this sort of behavior!
Kelsey: Yeah, I was also not going to get a drink mainly because the cocktails seemed overly fancy for the space that we were in. The menu was covered in leather! The cocktails all had a little drawing of the kind of glass they came in next to them! What I wanted was a shitty tequila soda to drink-and-drive on, but this felt like the wrong choice, so Kathryn and I got some kind of spicy margaritas with a fancy name I forgot.
Kathryn: I grabbed a photo of all the cocktail drinks on the menu, and I believe we had a "Spicy Apex." Luis got a "Welcome to Miami." Some other options included "VIP Pass," "Hairpin Hero," "Pitlane Perk," "Flame & Glory," "Smokin' Lap," "She's in the Lead" (very progressive!), and "Slipstreamer." All these cocktails were created by the winner of Netflix's Drink Masters and F1 Arcade's Global Creative Director of Bars, which I initially read as F1's Global Creative Director of Bars, which would be a really insane position to exist and hold. Nevertheless, I'd love to know LP O'Brien's process.
Luis: It's surprising to me that F1 would allow drinking and driving from just a legal standpoint, but also, what's more rich-person than a simulated DUI? Maybe the sim does filter out drunkenness, though; I can't imagine getting hammered and trying to navigate driving around Spa without wanting to barf. But it does feel jarring to encourage this behavior, even in virtual reality!
Kathryn: Seriously. It's not even just that it's encouraged, but it seems like part of the expected experience.
Kelsey: I was about to say that they should offer beer goggles to do the F1 simulator but then I realized they simply want you to create your own IRL beer goggles by drinking eight Spicy Apexes and barrel-rolling your terrible car into a corner in Monza.
Luis: They even had a handy cubby in between the consoles to rest your drinks on and also, I guess, store your shoes? I don't know what the purpose of it was, but yeah, I'd say they probably make most of their money from the $20 cocktails and the sim racing is just a nice bonus.
Kathryn: We decided to leave the simulators when our hour was up and explore the other areas of the F1 Arcade, which were mostly more simulators, more tables, a reaction-time test (again, great to do while not sober), and also a beautiful quotes wall. I think my favorite quote from the wall was, "YOU ARE THE WORLD CHAMPION!" as that could have applied to any of the world champions.
Kelsey: I liked "I'm young. I'm fit. No problem." What's no problem???
Luis: I liked "Clean air is king!" because it's so… boring. Fittingly, I think that was a quote from Oscar Piastri, my milquetoast king.
Kathryn: Luis's partner was wearing a Carlos Sainz Jr. shirt and naturally got a photo next to, "Vamos!" We really missed out on the opportunity to have everyone repping Ferrari drivers: Luis has a Charles Leclerc shirt, and I have a Sebastian Vettel shirt, but neither of us thought to wear it.
Kelsey: I also have a Carlos Sainz Jr. shirt! We could have all been locked in! At one point when I was yelling "There are no stewards here!" and "No track limits!!!" as I drove directly through the chicane, I realized that perhaps the funniest thing about the F1 arcade is that it is marketed to F1 sickos but it is actually just Mario Kart in a fun simulator. You do not need to have any knowledge of F1 or how to drive really.
Kathryn: Which is also the level of knowledge where watching F1 can be at its best, so that's apt!
