haha, so true. Funny you should say that though as we had one come hammering down the road leading to the track today, trying to show off. God only knows why as pulling the handbrake on briefly isn't what I call great driving ... but anyway He couldn't get his car into reverse for a while and eventually got it in with a very loud crunching noise to his embarrassment
I think the basics of how cars behave at high cornering speed can definately be learned in sims.
An average guy, who may even be a racing fan but has no sim expierience will usually simply not have an understanding of basic concepts such as under and oversteer. If he goes into a corner too hot (in real life) and the back end steps out he will not even begin to start applying opposite lock until it's way too late because he simply wasn't expecting anything of the sort to happen. I've seen it happen. Anybody with some sim experience will have been expecting the oversteer and will have had an idea what to do about it.
Also I don't understand why fear always gets mentioned so much in these types of threads. Do people really believe that the reason one driver is a few tenths faster than another driver in qualifying is because he had less fear then the other driver?
Of course this may sometimes be the case, depending mainly on the track, but I don't believe this is very often, especially considering the safety levels of most forms of racing today. Drivers think about handling, lines and braking points while driving (like in sims), not about how fast they "dare" themselves to go.
j.b.: I don't think fear comes in to play at high levels (well, maybe in overtaking) - just about anyone good enough to be a professional driver must be in the 'crazy no fear bastard' group anyway . It's more at the low levels, and is the most obvious reason why 'normal' people are usually several seconds (not tenths) better in sims than real life in all the 'real / sim' comparisons I've seen - fear of dying and fear of wrecking someone else's extremely expensive car...
I totally agree with your statement. When an average road driver tries a "realistic" sim racing game like LFS, they always call it very unrealistic. The problem is that in real life, the sensation of speed is very high. This means that if you put an average road user in LFS they will drive at 100 mph around a corner, which to them will feel like 40 mph. The problem that this causes is that they expect the car to behave uniformally, and stay stuck to the road. However inevitably they find themselves with loads of 100 mph oversteer, lose control, and claim that the game is "nothing like real life". In reality the real car would probably have the same handlings characteristics at 100 mph in real life, as the game did.
I therefore believe that although games cannot simulate speed, or fear, and sometimes feedback, they can teach you "car control" (correction of oversteer for example), even with the limited feedback. This area of LFS (car physics and handling), is very true to life.
I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but that is a great feature from NKPro. You actually need to care (when racing in PRO mode), because if you crash, you'll spend A LOT of time until you get to the pits and until your car is repaired.
So that makes you care about crashing and being a "jerk".