It would likely be less equal if there was a standard set.
People have different driving styles, to be really fast the setup must be fit to the driver.
With only one setup it would only be fit to one style of driver, disadvantaging those with equal skill but different technique.
Saying 5% is setups and the rest is skill is utter bullshit, if someone has a better setup they will have an advantage, if that setup is a lot better than yours then they could be gaining a few seconds a lap on you. Skill will allow you to drive setups to their limit, but it doesn't give you the ability to lap faster than the WR set while using a drift setup.
You can't have a setup to be at the same time well-balanced for every drivers and extremely performant as an absolute criteria.
For instance, a friend of mine has been racing for quite a while on WR setus, and he feels comfortable with the understeer it has (for stability). I can't drive those, because I don't like to be struggling to turn in.
My setups have a broader range of outputs with the exact same inputs, but it is quite harder to stay on the edge when going fast. While I don't have any problems to do so, he, on the other hands, find them unstable, and I find his really far from my driving technique.
But we have similar times... As I say again, a setup is a tool to victory. The better the tool is, the better the result will be. But give a good tool to a bad worker will always be worse than giving a bad tool to a skillfull worker.
When we are talking about road cars in lfs (either fictional or simulated) setups should be balanced like real cars generally are. WR sets generally do not reflect the way any road car handles (or should handle). In my opinion there is no virtue in being able to race a setup that does not reflect realistic handling.
For race cars I am all for having setup options (within realistic parameters).
But it's hard to judge whether it is realistic or not. Have you tried, driving an XFG in real life, going at exactly the same speed, using exactly the same brake/throttle, exactly the same steering input with the same track/corner in the same conditions? No? Well who's to say if it's realistic or not then?
Well it’s not that hard to judge. I haven’t sheen not even one situation where you can get oversteer just by accelerating out of a corner on an FWD in real life. No matter the setup and no matter the diff. You may just get some nasty torque steer if you have silly high locking and/or outdated front suspension with unbalanced front corner weights but there is no way you will get that silly overseer while accelerating.
But again as I keep saying thread after thread.. Setup restrictions will not solve the physics flaws.
Fair enough mate, but that wasn't really what I was getting at. I was just saying that if you haven't tried the setup you have on LFS, in real life in the exact same conditions etc etc, then how do we know if they are realistic or not? Who knows, you might get some oversteer on a FWD at the exit of a corner with a LFS setup in your Suzuki Swift or whatever
Err this actually not so random or unknown. I can’t really imagine that if this kind of behavior was possible in real life physics, no one would have taken advantage of that.
A close friend of mine has a 93 suzuki swift GTI that is realy close engine-chassis whise to the XFG. But I still thing that I don't need to lock it's differential and remove its rear arb in order to see what happens according to LFS analogy :P not that he or any sane man would let me do such thing to his car...
I did a couple of track days in a Suzuki Swift GTI aswell, and I admit it understeers like hell. It had an open diff, with positive camber in the front though. Rollcage, stiff(ish) susp and Formula Ford grooved tyres on it. I think a locked diff and more camber in the front would have got rid of most of the understeer on exit. It turned in quite decent with the open though
