Hi there,
first of all, even though e.g. polepositiondriver (or any driver, really) hasn't yet memorized each and every corner completely (with every suitable strategic line that these have on offer) does not indicate they might have no reasons to think and/or feel in a specific way about what they have in their hands (i.e. that shiny lfs license).
Statistics are indeed, afaik, quite useless. There have been multiple resets of personal stats throughout the life of lfs. I've been driving/racing lfs since the dawn of the first available S2-demo.
And I am today still not within the magical 2 second reach of the world's quickest WR-drivers. On some track-combos where I feel I'm not that slow I still catch myself thinking: where do these guys "see" and gain those extra 3..4 seconds from? Constantly over-driving their cars, using the guard-rails to help them making a corner? Total advantage of that extra bit of luck called draft throughout more than half a lap?
Or maybe there is a certain component buried inside the still very well-behaving physics engine that makes the kind of driving that one *thinks* should be the most realistic, elegant and fast - horribly inferior to another driving-style that simply takes advantage of some minor shortcomings in the physics and turns out to be indeed the faster way around a track in lfs?
Maybe it is just my bad luck that - in most racing situations - the environment won't clear up enough to allow for a few very clean laps. On the other hand, I just might not want to admit that I'm getting old an were never that fast to begin with.
However there are some shortcomings I've come across in LFS:
... no dirt 'on the road'.
... no weather
... no different tyre dimensions to chose from (I'd certainly like to play around with that stuff, like wider-narrower tires, bigger or smaller rims (with corresponding change of tire profile, ...)
... afair there is only a limited amount of suspension set-ups present in today's car-models inside lfs. Like no multi-link rear suspension, etc... I would like that little bit more of variety so there is different tech inside the same class to race against. This certainly is another bit of the puzzle to be included in the "tire-model" stuff, if that is to be implemented
... as mentioned before: no day and night low-beam/high-beam, stuff like that. When this arrives, we might actually get to use those cool and old-school pupup-headlamps of the xrg/xrt and other cars.
But the number-1 missing feature there is today is indeed: lack of tracks.
The open-config patch last year really stirred my enthusiasm again, since now there were a good bunch of "new" corners to explore inside the game. I think that feeling might not be uncommon among 'veteran' lfs-players. And it really illustrates that the odd high-speed lap in Aston or Westhill will not have to power to draw affection for all eternity.
We need more tracks. And by that I don't necessarily mean real-world tracks. I'm actually fine with fictional creations. Classic real-world road courses would be a cool "plus", however: take a good look at i-racing and to what insane measures their obsession with real tracks lead them and their business model! Fictional tracks really have a lot going for them:
No fuss about "is it accurately reproduced?" "How would it compare to sim "y" ?" Fictional tracks may be harder to create from scratch but will never be "wrong", so long the designer puts in the effort to get his/her vision right.
I know I really like the tracks that are in lfs today - it is just: they are getting old and sometimes tend to bore me quite hard, even when in pickup-racing the combo high-speed track plus slow roadcar comes up (i.e. quite often on cargame.nl) and everyone is lured in by the wiiiiiide track to go into T1{,T2,T3,...} much too aggressively due to the lack of perceived speed (Sometimes, more than 2/3 of the pack usually only know *one* quick line and won't miss to trade some paint in order to claim the right to stay on that very line)
I'd sure love some more, narrower road courses that have a little more flow and a bunch of extra-versatile corners thrown into them, a few more undulations in the surface, much lower over-all speed (to reward good handling & race-craft above all else). Fern Bay is just not enough. That said, the lfs-devs always gave us the advise to try out other games/sims before we bore ourselves to death.
Other than that: Still the user interface is one of the best in the business, netcode is good and stable (once again, after those crackers were coded out of their amok-appearances), even physics were once so far ahead of nearly everyone else, they still feel "very near to the real thing", today.
So far for now:
And please, let's not abuse statistics to the extreme when we discuss our share our points of view!
Cheers!
I see a lot of nonsense here in this thread 
I'm getting quicker though 
