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It is, in purely technical terms, a bit of a shit. The left-hander of Surtees climbs slowly uphill, propelling you into the wilderness of Brands Hatch's Grand Prix loop where the delightfully named Pilgrim's Drop and Dingle Dell await. I've never really got the hang of it in any video game, its late apex and rapidly tightening exit proving next to impossible to read, where you're resigned to blindly chopping away at a target that's constantly just out of sight. In most video games, Surtees is a corner that simply doesn't work.That's until I got to try it in VR. Then, quite suddenly, something that's escaped even the very best simulators clicks. Driving at its purest, and its most efficient, is about simply fixing your gaze somewhere and letting your instincts and reactions figure out the quickest way to get there, and that's so much easier when you can actually turn to look where you're heading. With VR, tackling Surtees is no longer an act of blind faith. Instead, it's a total pleasure.
I've been toying around with VR for a short while now, and I haven't been wholly convinced just yet. There are too many barriers in place at present, from the expense to the space required and through to the fact that so much of it still feels like shallow novelty that can be too easily tossed aside as a faddish distraction. The biggest challenge right now, though, is that VR's still not convincingly figured out the controller problem. PlayStation VR's appropriation of Move and the imminent (and expensive) release of Oculus Touch will help, while Vive's full-body immersion works well enough if you've the space, but there's still an abstraction present in both.
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