This is why I don't trust people's opinions of racing sims. It's why shite like rfactor, iRacing and dirt are allowed to exist. People believe such rubbish about sims - good handling is a sign of good physics, it's too easy to be to be realistic, it's too hard to be realistic, the colours are wrong so it must have bad physics...
And racing drivers (that aren't or haven't been sim maniacs) are even worse. Never EVER trust a racing game with a positive soundbite from a famous driver. Particularly if they're American.
rFactor alone is horrible, but the physics aren't complete shite. With the right mod it can feel half decent. It's almost like ISI made it for modding, and just made the shittest series possible.
Such as GameStockCar or Fórmula Truck, runs on the gmotor engine, aside from the UI and other things, you wouldn't notice it was the gmotor engine at all.
I don't think Dirt deserves to be lumped in with iRacing. Dirt at least has a somewhat realistic damage model (rather than iRacing's "Oh, you hit a branch.. your suspension has been destroyed now").
but he said he uses Forza to practice, it must be realistic!
I don't know what is worse, the pro driver that is paid to say something good, the 12 year old who has never driven a car trying to tell you what is realistic or the people who quote the pro driver lol
Imo while speaking of LFS the tyre modell should be lower priority to get the game further in development. 4 years after the news about new tyre physics we are still at the same ground. Meanwhile things like the susbension and a lot of other physic based areas could get a polishing.
Totally off topic I know, but saw parrallels to LFS development.
If anyone here has experience modeling rF/GTR/Race/whatever, and understand the dynamics simulation framework in ISI's system, I would love to see some technical explanation instead of "this does not feel right, it must be bad". (I do trust your driving experience, tristancliffe. But as you've pointed out a "feels good to me" from some race driver does not suffice.)
I've some experience tweaking rF/GTR mods and understand that there are certain problems, but I'm in no way an expert when it comes to evaluating the whole framework.
I think only Niels truly understand the engine in rFactor 1. Close cooperation with the ISI team and racing teams to correlate real testing data means he have a unique and deep understanding of the engine and what it can do. He's not touching the rFactor 2 engine, as it is far more complex. Having said that, Niels is getting aero numbers that match wind tunnel numbers VERy closely, I think within 1% for the largest errors, and much closer for most of the aero map.
Also, his Corvette drives VERY convincingly for a road car.
I think rFactor is not that bad, while not every single car have physics top notch, I still have enough mods I like, beside, is there better sim where you can race merc 1928 or indy cars 1960 or touring cars 1980-2000 on the multitude of tracks available to rFactor?
The amount of stuff available is insane and there are enough mods that feel right or at least more-or-less-right.
For me racing more about smooth racing likes, grip and mass transfer trough corners and rFactor does that good enough for me.
Matching a aero map from a wind tunnel is much easier than matching real dynamic behavior on the track. A car is not a plane and wind tunnel results alone won't tell the whole story because the ground in a tunnel doesn't move. Stuff like weight transfer can add some complication, and don't get us started on track-side structures or car-to-car interaction.
Showing a 2D/3D tunnel map matched is like showing a whole-lap speed curve matched. It's good, but not good enough, especially if data for that particular car/track combo is used.