If you ever find yourself at Bristol Airport, you’re only a 10-minute drive from one of the most important companies in Formula 1.
Based in the quiet countryside of Redwood Farm in North Somerset, Dynisma Motion Generators has become the industry leader in simulation technology.
Founded in 2017 by Ash Warne, a former head of simulation at McLaren and Ferrari, Dynisma count five teams on the current F1 grid as customers, including Scuderia Ferrari, BWT Alpine, and Cadillac, as well as leading F2, Formula E, and IndyCar teams.
Four-time F1 World Champion Max Verstappen has always spoken highly of the use of simulators. Indeed, a team’s success can be directly correlated with its simulator tools.
So what makes Dynisma’s products the gold standard?
“All of our competitors essentially have a lot of latency; the machine takes a long time to respond to the driver’s inputs, and that’s not what you want,” Warne tells Sector.
“An F1 driver needs to feel at one with the car that they’re driving in the simulator.”
Simulation technology and its uses have evolved significantly in the last two decades in F1, with Warne recalling how his time at McLaren saw them pioneer the first driver-in-the-loop programme in 2007.
“I was lucky enough to turn up at McLaren at a time when they had a relatively mature simulator program,” says Warne.
“They were the first to really make that leap forward to integrate a driver-in-the-loop simulator as part of their vehicle development program.”
Red Bull turned simulators into a performance differentiator, and now drivers regularly mention the team’s overnight simulator work during race weekends when quizzed about a turnaround in fortunes.
Creating a ‘digital twin’
With strict testing restrictions in F1, simulators have become a great way to replicate the real thing and correlate wind-tunnel data with car setup data.
Dynisma Commercial Director Simon Holloway, who has a rich background in motorsport, having worked for Cosworth and Le Mans LMP2 winners RML Group, highlights the problem with expensive track-testing programmes.
“The problem occurs when you’re trying to make decisions on setup changes,” says Holloway.
“If the conditions and everything have changed, then you might get a different result that’s not correct. So often, you’re working on compromise. Changing the anti-roll bar in the simulator can be done with a click of a button, so you can do that back-to-back testing really quickly.”
The trick is to get the car model as close as possible to a 1:1 replica of the in-car experience, which is no easy feat when an F1 car is bespoke to each team. This is where Dynisma creates what Holloway calls the “digital twin” of the real thing.
“There’s the car model itself – that’s all the data about the car and its behaviour, like suspension setup, ECU maps and powertrain maps,” explains Holloway.
“Then the aero map will be incorporated into the digital twin, which has been correlated with the wind tunnel and CFD results for the real car. Then you’ve got what creates the physics model of how the car behaves.”
This is paired with lidar scans of the track that Holloway says give “millimetre-perfect” measurements of the kerbs, asphalt surface, and bumps. This prevents the sensation of the car floating across the track, as most amateur DIY simulators produce.
Most recently, Alpine and Cadillac took delivery of the DMG-360XY, the top-of-the-range product that sits alongside DMG-1 and the DMG-S. The DMG-360XY offers sub-5-millisecond latency, bandwidth beyond 100Hz, and unlimited yaw.
In layman’s terms, it means drivers can react to inputs with no perceptible delay between what they see on screen and how they feel it through the steering wheel, enabling them to catch small slides, oversteer moments, and really feel how the car is behaving.
“Traditional simulators have a 30- to 40-millisecond latency, so by the time you feel a car slide and react to it, it’s already spun because the virtual model is ahead of what you’re feeling,” explains Holloway.
“With our simulators, you feel that instantaneously. You can drive a car at the limit between understeer and oversteer and react to them just like you do in a real car. The high frequency gives you much more fidelity in what you feel. We always say it’s like going from a standard definition TV to 4K.”
The motion picture
At Dynisma’s headquarters in Bristol, the DMG-1 took up pretty much half of a building unit, with the single-seater monocoque (complete with a halo) sitting atop a motion platform that stood a few feet off the ground to make it as immersive as possible.
In front stood an 180-degree projection screen of the track, although the DMG-360XY uses a full 360-degree LED or projection array. The whole system is powered by six computers. Yes, six.
“That’s just for doing the graphics,” Warne remarks.
“Separate from that, you have another PC running the vehicle model and physics, and then an embedded PC is doing all the calculations to control the motion system.”
When the simulator was active, you wouldn’t think it was replicating the animal V6 turbo electric hybrid. Instead, you hear the steady whir of fans cooling the computers and a few rumbles from the motion system itself, as the sound is primarily delivered to the driver through headphones.
Dynisma kindly gave me a go on the newly announced DMG-S, the model marketed as an entry-level product for drivers in lower categories of motorsport looking to hone their skills.
The setup was a Ferrari F2004 at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, a circuit I’ve been to before and driven countless laps on the officially licensed F1 game on the PlayStation. But this was next level.
The physical aspect stood out most. Turning the wheel, you could feel the car’s weight through the sweeping Turn 9, while I was hanging onto the wheel through the flat right-hander of Turn 14 as the motion platform replicated the g-forces.
Admittedly, I’m not the fittest person in the world, so my arms lasted five laps before they began to feel the burn. Now imagine that in a cockpit that is close to 40°C on race day, having to think about strategy, with Lewis Hamilton hunting you down in your mirrors. If anything, you appreciate how this world takes peak human performance to its limits.
But it isn’t just the drivers being pushed to the brink; the cars themselves are becoming mind-bogglingly complex.
It’s why simulators have become indispensable with F1’s 2026 regulations, helping teams optimise power unit battery deployment and optimise narrow setup windows.
Building one in-house can cost tens of millions to maintain and upgrade over time. Although Dynisma’s DMG-360XY offering is just shy of eight million pounds, it is a high-performance product that F1 engineering demands in a commercially viable form.
“Rather than employing a team of 15 people to build a sim and look after it as parts go obsolete and the software changes, they can now buy a product from us where we’ve got 185 people keeping that sim running, improving it, etc,” says Holloway.
“It means F1 teams can now use what would’ve been 15 salaries to develop a new front wing or hire more engineers focused on car performance.”
Warne adds: “I’m pretty sure that you won’t see an F1 team develop a simulator in-house ever again.”
Breaking out of Motorsport Valley
To completely disrupt F1’s R&D habits is impressive enough. To do it from outside of motorsport’s traditional heartland is another feat entirely.
Dynisma is a true British business success story. It recently earned plaudits from NatWest for its use of intellectual property to scale, with turnover reaching £33 million in 2025, an increase of 68% year-on-year, according to data from Companies House.
It was also recognised in the Sunday Times 1000 Fastest-Growing Businesses, Sunday Times Tech 100, and the Financial Times 1,000 Fastest-Growing Businesses in Europe.
It’s a mark of how healthy the business has become after nearly a decade of operation, especially as one of the few companies to do so based outside Motorsport Valley near Silverstone.
“It does bring quite a lot of advantages,” explains Holloway.
“Firstly, our staff are not being poached every five minutes by another supplier or another racing team. We have strong links with the universities here, including Bristol and Bath, for internships and graduate roles.
“We also have many highly skilled industries based nearby in mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, with companies like BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, and Dyson, plus the airport links to Europe.”
Wellness is also taken pretty seriously, with regular fitness classes, orienteering, and other team-bonding activities. Headcount is now at over 180 employees, with plans to expand units across the Redwood Farm site and to build another to increase capacity.
All of the products are assembled at Dynisma’s Technology Campus in the UK, with a few currently being manufactured as a result of their newly announced partnership with Italian chassis maker Dallara, which will see them shipped to European and US markets.
“In the US, we’ve been growing business there already, but over the last couple of years, we’ve been looking at how we grow globally.
“We now have resellers established in China, India, Japan, and our own sales team working much more globally to address the market, especially in automotive.”
Warne’s prediction that F1 teams will never build their own simulators again may sound bold, but the momentum is entirely on his side. In the high-stakes world of modern engineering, why waste millions trying to build the future in-house when you can simply buy it from a farm in Bristol?
