It makes a lot of sense. iRacing cars behave very accurately. The Skippy is downright spooky to drive because it is crazily realistic in it's behavior.
But putting a cardboard box on some casters and rolling down a hill in it would feel more like a car than iRacing.
iRacing cars just do a terrible job of communicating what the car is doing. The audio is fine. But the force feedback and visual feedback (head bob) is terrible. The head "physics" only communicates bumps, but it needs to communicate G forces as well. The force feedback just goes slack when the car starts to really work, and doesn't warn of impending slides at all. It's like there is no self aligning torque to transmit and all the force in the wheel is coming from the caster.
That combined with dodgy slide behavior makes it too unforgiving and a chore to drive. I haven't raced for two weeks - I just don't feel engaged by the sim any more.
LFS, Net Kar Pro, and surprisingly GT5 all give very convincing feeling from the cars and actually feel like driving, even if there are problems with all 3.
I put a lot of stickers on my Miata and got up to 267 MPH. Peanuts compared to some here. I figure the stickers were good for an extra 600 or 700 BHP. Mazda makes good stickers.
I've been at the speed of light but the vehicle was more like a brownie and some cookies that had been tampered with.
No it isn't. No existing computer could ever simulate a tire molecule by molecule in real time. Sometimes that lack of perfection doesn't matter. Sometimes it makes all the difference. That's the art, which clearly iRacing isn't adept at, or has got wrong in some way.
Do you think I'm defending the new model? Because I'm not. It's not what I hoped it would be, in fact I may stop playing if it doesn't start engaging me (didn't race this week). The Skippy now behaves like the real thing (which I've driven quite a bit). Things are still wrong. It still doesn't feel like a real car at all. The HPD and GT feel dead. More like hovecrafts with car-like behavior.
I still prefer LFS's and NetKar Pro's physics, and especially their feel.
But trying to dig into a simulation none of us understands is quite useless. We can observe various effects but, as you must know, in the computer world sometimes the issue is at first glance completely unrelated.
All simulation is approximation. Classic physics has unlimited resolution. Computers don't.
So a computer can only ever simulate to a certain decimal point of accuracy percentage ("fudge factor"). Depending on what is being simulated, a couple of decimal points in accuracy and simulation detail can have extreme impacts on the results, and the computing requirements.
At least one of the base content cars should be updated well before your sub runs out. They have mentioned that they intend to release the rest of the cars over the next 3 months.
I had one of those in T1 at Phillip Island yesterday in the Corvette. Could have driven a Vespa through the gap between our bumpers, but my race was still over.
iRacing does a lot right, and they're working quickly on fixing the things that are wrong.
Unfortunately it was pretty DOA. It was no stealthier than other choppers (sound, radar and IR signature), and it was more lightly armored. The original didn't even have weapons - it was designed to spot targets for Apache Longbows. The armaments were added later when the project was in dire straits.
It looks utterly badass, but the SuperCobra and Apache do the job much better.