Does Smell Make Racing Drivers Faster?Photograph by Emiliano Granado and Illustration by Jason Holley (Photograph by Emiliano Granado and Illustration by Jason Holley)Photograph by Emiliano Granado and Illustration by Jason Holley (Photograph by Emiliano Granado and Illustration by Jason Holley)Before sliding into the racing simulator in a basement fabrication shop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IMSA GTD Pro driver Max Esterson is asked to strap on some equipment. A chest harness will measure his heart rate, a headband will track his brain activity, and a wristband will detect electrodermal activity, which reflects the activation of sweat glands, a marker for emotional and physical stress responses.This story originally appeared in Volume 35 of Road & Track.Then, the 23-year-old is handed a necklace—specifically, a black plastic torc with tiny white tubes poking out from each side. “This is how we emit all the different scents,” says Awu Chen, a research assistant in the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group. Esterson clasps it around his neck, and the tubes rest at the base of his clavicles. The neckpiece is based on the Scentac X-Scent 3.0, a noncommercial prototype intended for wellness and scented-media applications. “We kind of hacked it,” Chen says. His team’s modifications provide the capacity for advanced customization and programming. Using staggered quantities, durations, and sequences, the tubes can produce thousands of scent combinations.AdvertisementAdvertisementEsterson looks suspicious. “I hope they’re all good smells?” he says, yawning. He’d landed in Boston early that morning. “The bathroom at the JetBlue terminal—you want to talk about smell?” Esterson continues. “That place might cause serious crashes.”The fact that the ester-smelling test subject is named Esterson was purely a coincidence.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)Jokes aside, Esterson is here in Cambridge for an experiment. He is the lab rat.“Stress and driving are strongly correlated, and there’s a lot of research around that topic,” Chen says. “And there have been other studies that have measured the impact of scent on regular driving, for example, using mint to keep people awake.” The team here is measuring the physiological effects of various scents and what impact they might make on performance at the track.Esterson, who drives for RLL Team McLaren, is an ideal subject for this investigation. The New York City native started sim racing around age 11 and was ranked globally before he even had a driver’s license.Driving a sim rig is familiar territory for Esterson, who got his racing start in the virtual realm.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)Still, this simulator mimics an unfamiliar vehicle: an all-wheel-drive Formula SAE Electric car built from the ground up by the 130 or so members of the MIT Motorsports team. “It’s very fast,” says head of race engineering Vincent Xiao, a computer-science major who let our research group use his team’s workspace. “If you’ve ever driven a rental go-kart, it weighs less than that and has eight times the power.”AdvertisementAdvertisementEsterson’s olfactory immersion begins with an annotation of his scent sensitivity and fragrance preferences, or which ones arouse him most, strictly in the scientific sense. This involves releasing from his necklace whiffs redolent of cypress, bergamot, lily, and grapefruit, among other things, in sequential pairs, and asking him to rate them. His favorites will be assembled into a sequence that will “play” throughout his simulated drive whenever his biomarkers suggest he needs a shift in his emotional state, for example stimulation or relaxation. The fragrances and “smellody” were developed by Gigi Minsky, a Paris-based scent designer who researches memory and technology.Hearst Owned (Hearst Owned)“A lot of them were just soapy, like what you’d expect in a candle,” Esterson says after the calibration. “Some were almost sour.” None resemble the acrid smell of roasting brakes or burnt rubber, but a few might resemble the plank assembly beneath the Formula 2 car he campaigned last year for Trident Motorsport. “Some smelled more like wood,” he says.MIT Motorsports keeps its simulator in a basement, the traditional home for video-game nerdery.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)After establishing a physiological baseline on the sensors and familiarizing himself with the car and course, Esterson runs the track on the simulator in two 10-lap sets. Following each set, he answers questions about how he felt. Research team members Nomy Jianing Yu and Xixi Li, grad students at Harvard, monitor the data in real time.A consummate professional, Esterson appears serene while driving and even refrains from scrunching up his nose. “It was less distracting than I thought it would be,” he says when he finishes, “though I smelled a lot more on the second set of laps.” This tracks, Chen notes. No scent was released during round one.AdvertisementAdvertisementSo, what was discovered when the numbers were crunched? Not surprisingly, given Esterson’s expertise behind the wheel, the vapors didn’t cue any performance benefits. “Max’s lap time, or the variability in his control of the car, isn’t that different between sessions,” Yu says, projecting the stats onto a monitor. This aligns with findings from other experienced sim racers.Eagle-eyed readers will recognize the images on the computer screens as the Daytona Milton Keynes go-kart track.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)However, there were measurable differences in his physiological markers. The scent intervention’s impact on his electrodermal activity during the driving sessions indicates more stability and less stress, according to the researchers. Such shifts could reflect enhanced internal processing, relaxation, or emotional regulation. “We don’t know if that makes you focused, or if it makes you too relaxed,” Yu says. “It’s not possible to tell within such a short period.” What is clear is that the scents surreptitiously affected Esterson’s emotional state. “I guess the point is to see what your body does in the background,” Esterson says.In the bigger picture, the research explores the expansion of in-car information delivery systems and what might be possible beyond visual, auditory, or haptic-based interventions via “more ambient modalities,” as Chen says. “We thought about this liminal space between when something is noticeable versus when it’s unnoticeable but physiologically noticeable,” he explains. In this realm, scents could offer a new method of alerting drivers whose thoughts drift into background tasks such as to-do lists or lunch, without adding the stress or cognitive load that can come with beeping warnings and flashing messages.This work could help create new frameworks for scent-based inputs and the release of stimuli people can more readily sense and respond to. There’s typically a delay of one to two seconds between when Chen’s team activates a scent and when people smell it. Plus, the brain can become accustomed to a scent and tune it out. Intelligent timing and variation in the release of scents could keep the mind from becoming inured to them.A laptop controls the scents while Esterson’s vitals are measured during the test sessions.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)Datasets from this research are also contributing to the development of AI olfaction, or helping computers learn to detect and create fragrances and build a kind of olfactory vocabulary—a large language-type prediction model but for smell. This team’s long-term vision is an “adaptive scent system” where physiological signals feed into AI models that learn a person’s profile and generate customized scent sequences in real time to help them optimize their emotions and performance.AdvertisementAdvertisementLooking ahead long-term, the lab could explore recruiting more pro drivers. “We’d want to do a more longitudinal study, where someone like Max could run this for a week or a month, and hopefully we could see more notable results,” Yu says.Esterson, calm and relaxed behind the wheel. Or just thankful he’s not smelling an airport bathroom.Emiliano Granado (Emiliano Granado)I ask Esterson for his overall assessment. Does he feel nasally hypnotized? Duped? “Obviously, I like racing,” he says, so when he smells things such as tires, fuel, and hot brakes, “I’m doing something enjoyable. When I smell a two-stroke go-kart exhaust, that’s a superstrong emotion.”Does he believe scent can affect his mental state? He nods. “When I’m in my car in a 24-hour race, I’d rather it smell nice than smell bad—for sure that would be a benefit,” Esterson says. “If my choice was: Would it smell like cake or a toilet? I guess I’d perform better if it smelled like cake.” A car-lover’s community for ultimate access &amp; unrivaled experiences.<a class="body-btn-link" href="https://shop.roadandtrack.com/road-track-premium-all-access-membership.html?utm_source=PAA_Daily_Edit_Newsletter&amp;utm_medium=PAA_Daily_Edit_Newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=PAA_Daily_Edit_Newsletter" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">JOIN NOW</a> Hearst Owned (Hearst Owned)You Might Also LikeIf You Can Only Own One Car, Make It One of TheseThese Are the Most Popular Cars by State