That picture looks nothing like LFS except the tyre temperature HUD. I'm pretty sure that it's just a really obvious way of presenting that data.
Also, bump stop 0.0 in? Is that car hitting the bump stops on all 4 wheels??
fixed for you. :P It would be interesting if EA has bought the LFS engine tho....Could be the devs had to sign a NDS that meant they couldn't talk about it....hmmmmm kinda interesting. I'm more inclined to think EA just "borrowed" the basic LFS model for their game tho.
realistic sim - My guess it will only be slightly more "realistic" than Shift. The SMS developers seem to be looking for a "realisitic driving experience" rather than duliplicating the real world behavior of the cars, so some stuff is going to be exagerated, such as the excessive amount of oversteer that was such a big part of Shift, where it looks like your drifting through turns, somewhat reminding me of Grand Prix Legends, but with dumbed down physics via hidden assists so driving isn't as difficult as GPL. Maybe not realistic, but you get a sense of what the rear end is doing, and it looks cool. They're targeting a much larger audience that isn't as hard core as the old GPL and current iRacing players.
Personally, after playing racing games since 1997, realism has lost some of it's appeal, and I find a balance such as Shift to be enjoyable. I still play some of the better rFactor mods, like PCC 2007, or go back and play one of the GTR games, but for an overall game, Shift is close enough for me. I also enjoy the arcade games (but I'm skipping Hot Pursuit 3).
One of the nicest features in NFS Shift is the replays, but you can't save them, so I made a video of a collection of replays. In this video you can see the exaggerated oversteer that's part of the Shift experience:
Yeah, it makes no sense. I mean, your eyes do that theirself, you can't look at the road or motec at the same time that good, but now you can't even look at the motec even if you wanted this way...