This isn’t your uncle’s old Test Drive simulator from the 1980’s and it’s certainly isn’t Gran Turismo 5. What it is, though, is the future of racing simulators, one that involves driving your very own sports car in front of a huge screen at the fastest possible speed your vehicle is capable of.

This is about as real as a car simulator can get. It’s the work of an Australian-based company, TAG Systems, who spent the better part of the past eight years developing, honing, and testing out their system to look and work the way it does now. Just how cool is it? Cool enough, apparently, to get even Jay Leno to leave his beloved garage in favor of an old factory warehouse. In the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage->ke3731, the comedian was invited by TAG Systems’ general manager, Anthony Walsh, to give the simulator a baptismal of fire of sorts.

Leno took his Chevrolet Corvette Z06, which has been perched atop a dynamometer and clamped down using aluminum clamps over the suspension arms, on a panoramic virtual joyride around a number of tracks - a test track, a night track, a basement parking lot, and a drag strip, among others - while going pedal to the metal, and doing all of it inside the warehouse.

Understandably so, we're pretty impressed with how this simulator works, although it does have one pretty glaring drawback that, in fairness to it, no simulator in the world can replicate: the sheer thrill of racing sports cars to the limit with the wind blowing in your face to the sound of Don McLean's "American Pie".

Take that whole real life experience out of the picture and Tag Systems' amazing simulator is definitely one for the books.

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