THE REAL DEALS; With CXC, you might never need a real racetrack again.

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

This is not an arcade game, it's not a video game, and it's not Grand Theft Auto IV.

"These were designed as driver-training tools,'' Chris Considine explained about the CXC driving simulator. "I was looking to train cheaper.''

Considine was a racer himself, and he followed the karting tour for a while. But it didn't take long for him to realize that getting enough practice time on a real racetrack in a real car, even a kart, can get pretty expensive-counting not just the track rental itself but also the cost of getting there with your race car and your engineers and putting everybody up in a motel during the test. So he made this.

Simulation's Motion Pro II Racing Simulator may not be cheap-$26,000 to start-but it's as close to the real deal as you're likely to get without going there. The base model gets you a steel-frame chassis with a composite race seat, Formula One-style steering wheel, pedals that feel like real pedals, paddle shifter and a 46-inch high-def LCD screen. The kicker is the "full- motion feedback system'' that moves your seat around, simulating bumps, engine vibrations and all the g-forces you're likely to feel in a race.

The amount of software driving your drive is staggering. The simulator can run with eight or nine pieces of software, allowing you to change suspension setup, fuel strategy, tire compounds, gearing, aerodynamics, brake-duct size and radiator size-it's as helpful to race engineers as it is to drivers. For the tires alone, you can change 16 variables, including temperature, slip value and pressure. And that's just setting up your car. The available tracks are almost unlimited.

There is a plethora of software available that will run on this machine. You can have virtually (no pun intended) any race car for which someone has written a software program lapping any track that is in a computer database somewhere. The limit is the quality of the program you choose to run.