Hi there, my name is David Perel. The founder of Coach Dave Academy, Coach Dave Delta and SimGrid.

Throughout my life I have been crazy about video games, in particular racing games. It started with Gran Turismo 1 and slowly expanded to more hardcore simulators like rFactor and netKar Pro, before being immersed in ACC, iRacing and now LMU.

While my passion for sim racing blossomed, I fought tooth and nail for over 15 years to become a real life racing driver. These days I am lucky enough to call myself a Professional Racing Driver, competing for Ferrari customer GT teams around the world at events such as Le Mans, GT World Challenge, Spa 24 and more. It’s incredible to say I’m now a three time Spa 24 Hour winner.

When I started karting I didn’t have the money to go testing at the race track. But, from the moment I picked up my Playstation 1 remote and turned on Gran Turismo, The Real Driving Simulator, I came to the realisation that video games could improve my real world driving skills.

Around the time of Gran Turismo 4 I started to take this idea more seriously, spending hundreds of hours doing laps and refining my craft in the hope that I could improve in the real world.

To this day I continue to rely on my simulator to help improve my speed, race craft and mental approach. It’s safe to say racing simulators are now 90% of the real thing. They are just missing G-force and a few small nuances only a real cockpit can give you.

It has always been a dream of mine to blend the world of real racing and sim racing together. Proving that they compliment each other. Now there is endless proof of this being true, with many sim racing drivers now getting real world opportunities.

My journey to becoming a professional race driver was not an easy one, so to earn a living I started a YouTube channel about sim/real racing and quietly began coaching sim drivers in my spare time. As I signed up more and more clients I had ambitions to turn my coaching into something bigger.

Then Covid hit and I found myself without a drive, as all forms of motorsport came to a sudden halt. There was a silver lining in this, however, because almost out of nowhere Sim Racing started to become more acceptable to mainstream drivers and media. They were using it, they needed it.

Then Coach Dave Academy was born.

Now, over the years I have managed to gather a group of incredibly talented drivers, engineers and devs across all walks of sim racing life to steer our efforts through a wide range of sim racing titles to bring you the best quality coaching, setups, features and apps so you can improve as a driver.

These days Coach Dave Academy has evolved from a simple coaching website to a fully blown tech company that develops our app ‘Coach Dave Delta’. It is used by tens of thousands of sim drivers, helping provide lap time tracking, driving telemetry, professional setups, AI coaching, video analysis, setup IQ and more for a plethora of racing games.

It’s my pleasure to have created a home for sim racers of all levels to improve their skills and speed in their favourite racing games.