http://www.teslamotors.com/

It would be easy, since you could take the raceabout, tweak the body, beef up the engine, and take out the engine sounds.

The GTR cars feel like they have too much downforce for their power levels, like a slot car almost.

I'd like to see something that is more on the edge, like a vintage GT40 or a modern stock car. Something with 800+ hp and almost no downforce. Bring back the concept of throttle control.

Quote from DaveWS :

I*Edit. (on KY GP) At the slow speed double apex hairpin however, the car is very twitchy and unstable.

But it is easily corrected, right? That's my worst corner on that track, so I'm not really sure. Part of the instability might be the bumps there.

I just thought of another factor. F1 cars have more area in sideview in the back than in the front. If you are sliding, this would put more sideways aero force on the rear, tending to stabilize the car. I think this would be very important in real life. At low speeds, you have a car with little downforce and a rear weight bias, so it could be very twitchy.

You can say that loss of downforce due to side slip will make it unstable, but that depends on which end loses more downforce. If both ends lose downforce equally, it should just slide more, but not necessarily spin out. If the airflow is directed slightly to the side, the rear seems to lose more air because of the large side elements, but it is also getting cleaner air, because less of it is coming from the driver/airbox area. So I don't think it is obvious what will happen.

Maybe the fact that I'm getting dirt on the outside tire when I lose it is causing a dramatic loss in traction, and I'm confusing that with aero effects. So I guess I don't really know which part of the handling is aero and which is other stuff. But I do lose it plenty when I hit a bump wrong while totally on the asphault. One bad place is the fast, downhill right-hander (T6?) after the 3rd hairpin at the beginning of Aston North.

As for the tire comments, F1 tire data is in the Ferrari Formula 1 book (p. 190), if anyone has it. It looks pretty forgiving to me, especially at low loads (not much falloff in lateral accel for high slip angles). The measurements here don't go past the peak slip angle for high loads, so I don't really know how much it falls off, but the peak slip angle for high loads is very high, much higher than at low loads (10 vs 5 deg). So you should feel like you are sliding more at high speeds and probably should try to keep the car straighter at low speeds. Who knows if LFS's tire model looks anything like this.

I think I can tell a difference between fast and slow corners. When I lose it in the BF1 in fast corners, it snaps so fast I'm in the wall before I can rotate the wheel. This usually happens when I hit a bump wrong or get the slightest amount of rear tire on the grass. This may be due to loss of downforce, but it certainly is unforgiving.

In slow corners, the slides are gentler, and I can let the rear step out a bit for turn-in. I have plenty of time to correct, and nothing weird happens. I don't see how anything is wrong.

Maybe you guys are running too much understeer or too soft of a tire compound. I usually end up running the hardest compound to keep from overheating, and they end up being hard to get up to temp and very unforgiving.

I know that some form of downforce is modelled, both from the wings and the undertray, but what else is there? If I take damage to my body, does my coefficient of drag increase? Does my downforce decrease? What about the rake and frontal area effects on the drag? I'm curious, and there is no mention of this in the manual.

I know GTR includes some of this, and the effects are obvious. But I can't really see any effect on my top speed or grip from damage in LFS. Also, I can't see that varying the front/rear ride heights affect my top speed or downforce.

Thanks!

Quote from theboyrob :

thanks for the very quick reply!


and anyway to add deadzones to my axis?

Dead zones are usually a good idea for the pedal axes, but bad for the steering wheel. They keep the pedals from being slightly on all the time, since the controller can register a small amount of pedal fluctuation even when you aren't pressing them down. This is especially bad if the brake does it (thus slowing you down slightly). The steering wheel is continuous in the center, not like an on/off effect, so doesn't need a dead zone. But I don't think you have the option to set individual dead zones in S2a, so just turn them all on, and you should be better off, IMO.

Quote from XCNuse :

... what a waste of a post petrichor

For the dense, that was a 'no' vote there.

And then we could have sharks with frickin' laser beams, right on their heads, driving the cars, with police sirens and missile launchers behind the license plates ...

I also come from a sim background and hate having to unlock cars. :smash3d:

I would like to make the point, however, that it is easy to pass the driving tests by driving cautiously, and that the tests does not predict anything about someone's online racing behavior. Even if you can drive the figure-8 without spinning out in an FO8, you still have a long way to go before you can run a race under pressure and still maintain throttle and brake control when racing for position. If the tests (which I still object to) are meant to weed out the inexperienced, then the only sensible requirement would be finishing X number of online races with <Y% of damage.

Maybe if more people start out with the 'in order to finish first, first you must finish' mentality, the attitudes will change ever so slightly for the better. And maybe I won't get taken out by as many people under full brake lockup in T1, L1.