All eyes on Julien Apothéloz

Julien from Gockhausen (ZH) completed his Higher School Certificate this summer and generally describes himself as a very active person. When he is not driving on real or virtual race tracks, he spends his time in the gym, doing athletics or skiing in winter. At the moment he is taking an gap year in which he wants to fully focus on motor sports and is doing various internships on the side. In the autumn of 2021 he plans to start studying part-time, so that there will still be time to realise his dream: he wants to be at the top in GT racing as a professional racing driver. At the moment, the 19-year-old drives in the ADAC GT4 Germany in a Mercedes AMG of the Mann-Filter HTP Winward Motorsport team. In order to take another step towards his the profession racing driver, Julien is hoping for an promotion to the GT3 group in the near future.

Apothéloz uses the Racing Unleashed Simulators as well as the Competiton mainly for training and preparation purposes for the real races. He trains a few times before the monthly challenges on the corresponding track . What he particularly likes about the simulators is that they are not static simulators, but those that are equipped with a motion system and therefore simulate more forces and the ground conditions better. He is also impressed by the real cockpit.

For the future, Julien hopes that the screens of Racing Unleashed will run more smoothly, as in rare cases "micro-jerking" can occur which can disturb driving. Furthermore, the differences between the individual simulators, which are sometimes noticeable, should be avoided. As far as real motorsport, the 19-year-old recognises the strong change in which the sport is currently undergoing. The trend is clearly towards hybrid and electric cars, as he says. For this reason, he can well imagine that in the future other drive systems, such as hydrogen, will play a role.