I read the RacingNews365 headline twice. Lambiase warns Verstappen about a “monstrous invasion” in Singapore. The monster is a monitor lizard. They turn up regularly at Marina Bay, and drivers only just manage to avoid them. Verstappen and his race engineer know they will have to reckon with “Godzilla” again next weekend.
So I loaded Marina Bay. Full lap, base setup, bedroom lights off for the atmosphere. Not one lizard. I did ten laps. Nothing. I went through the options: rain, yes; time of day, yes; wildlife, no. Nobody has modelled the monitor lizard. Nobody has modelled the wind either, but I knew that.
So I simulated it myself. My sister put a toy dinosaur on my desk, right next to the screen, and she was supposed to push it at random. Human reflex, basically. Result: I lose four tenths a lap, purely because I’m looking at the dinosaur instead of the apex. She never even moved it.
That’s the variable. Not the animal, the expectation of the animal. A driver who knows Godzilla might come out of the trackside has one more piece of data in his head. In the sim, I hit reset and the dinosaur is still there. In real life, you don’t reset a monitor lizard.
The team confirms that Florian already avoids wasps under the gazebo. The pathway is ready.
I wrote to the developers to ask for a monitor lizard as an option. No reply. Server bug, surely. The sim driver job exists, I checked, and one day someone will have to test Godzilla. In theory.
It’s true, we checked: RacingNews365.
