I can just say that LFS was the thing that got me interested in racing. Not just simulation but watching and following some racing sports.(saw the F1 GP in Australia this year)

I once got stopped by the police and almost lost my license because i took a corner in a intersection as fast as possible.
I was on my way home from my girlfriend in the middle of the night and there wasn´t a car as long as i could see. I closed up to the intersection outside the area where i live and decided to make the left turn as fast and tight as possible. By the way i was driving my familys Toyota Previa witch takes 8 persons. I barely slowed down and steered the car inside to the left of all the refuge islands cutting the corner in true racing spirit.

I felt really good coming out off the corner but to my surprise and horror i saw in the back mirror a policecar closing in really fast. It followed me really close a while and then stopped me. They did an alcotest, checked my background and asked me what the hell i was doing. I just said i was really sorry for driving like an idiot -i felt that explaining to them that i was pretending to be in a race and there for cutting the corner wouldn´t have been to smart- and apologised. The cops were pretty young and let me go with a warning. I guess they saw the fear and regret in my eyes.

After this ive been sort of careful about doing stupid things like this and has been driving like a saint. It´s lucky ive got this game to live out my speedgreed with.

lfs changed my driving style a lot in rl. i usually brake a lot later, shift down faster/earlier, and take the turns on the 'ideal racing line'. sometimes it scares me i usually dont grab the wheel with both hands, cuz it makes me feel like im racing online. strange, but trueillepall

It probably has yes. I'm smoother because of LFS, and I am better at judging lines through new corners quickly, but the changes aren't vast on the road. You're always driving well under the limit, and having to be wary of other cars/people/horses/shrews/lampposts/shrubberies etc.

Has it helped me on the race track - I believe it has. At Brands last weekend in the Reynard I was within 3 seconds of people in almost identical cars (his car is better set up and has about 25hp more) after 2 laps, and I was able to predict and judge under/over steer, lines, speeds, braking points much more quickly than I think I would have without LFS experience.

I'd also used rFactor to learn Brands, and that 'sim' is just a joke. The cars handle COMPLETELY wrong, the track is only about 10% accurate (all versions of Brands in computer games are this incorrect), and it's a waste of time.

In other ways, I now always hold the wheel the correct way (very little one handed driving anymore, as it's quite simply dangerous), and I'm able to give more of my mental processes over to predicting and reacting to potential accidents, and LFS has meant that my cadence braking is much much better (and it's cheaper/safer to practice cadence braking on a PC).

at first i can see i drive much more precise, iits not even taking proper lines but taking one correct from in to out of turn. i feel having more road awareness and prediction so i probably drive little faster, maybe bit too much. And driving even cars i learnt to drive smoothly which helps a lot outside city areas with underpowered city car.

triss, no game is anywhere near the actual track that they try and reproduce. the only way to learn a track is to go round it. ive only ever used a game to try and learn a track for the ring, and that was to get an idea of the direction of corners, or sections, so i dont get caught out.

Hasn't for me. I played LFS a bit, offline, before getting my DL. Straight after getting it I went back to the UK and haven't driven since I sucked in my final test too, I think I was quite lucky to get away with the license. It's quite funny, on the last real pre-final (mock) test by my tutor I did about 30 mph in a 15 mph zone, was several times close to scratching the wheels against the sidewalks, slammed the brakes on a green light, didn't see a motorcyclist etc etc, lol. Awareness certainly hadn't been improved in LFS..

Ja se pää kääntyy!

Quote from BlackEye :

LFS or any other sim didn't change my RL driving.
What I'm little afraid of threads like this is that some kid will read this and think "hell, I can drive pretty good that FZR so I can drive at least some 300 hp beast in RL" and end up dead around some tree beside the road.
Maybe it's just my crazy way of thinking

Its true that for less experanced drives simulations like LFS can and often do provide them with a false sence of security in thinking they know more then they really do. I do feel that LFS is not as bad as the more commonly played racing games by new drives which have drasticly less realistic physics.

Even LFS is now replacement for real seat time. I can use LFS as a tool for improving my driving only because I have nearly 20 years of real driving experance. So for me, yes it did change the way I drive. It helped me learn to react to situations in am approate way which I had never encountered in real life previously. Like others have also said, my time in LFS allows me to pickup things faster in real life as wel that are new but similar to things I have done in LFS.

When I finaly bought a car worth taking to a track, I took my new to me miata to an autocross school. This was the first sporty car I have owned and the first time I have been on a track other then a gokart track. My first run was sedate, the second run the instructor showed me what the car could do, the thrid run I was hanging the ass out around the cormers, and by the 6th run I felt in complete control of the car.

Without the time I have spent in LFS I very much dought I would have become so comfortable in so short a time with that car. So LFS has changed the way I drive, but not in a negitive way, I am not a lead foot, I know when its approate and not approate to drive in a more aggressive mannor, and I only take away from LFS what is applicable to the real world.

i gotta admit that my habit of going fast round slipways has been getting worse each day ... cant say if its because i play lfs or because i go round the same ones each and every day though

OT @Tristain, I don't see why Brands is so hard to reproduce, but nobody has ever got it right. I had a version for an old game that was flat out pretty much all the way round, even Druids. Were you on the Indy or GP track?

Indy.

One of the main, major differences, was where the indy circuit rejoins the full circuit. In every game I can remember playing, there is a large 'ramp' as the two angles meet each other, but in real life it's a very smooth, unfeelable gradient.

Paddock Hill is reasonably closely reproduced in most games as far as I can remember, Druids in sims never seems to have the crest in the right place (basically just on turn in), and Surtees/McLaren (the fast left-right) are much shallower in real life than in sims.

LFS definitely taught me a lot about driving, and I think helped a lot when I bought my first rwd car in the middle of winter when it came to keeping it on the road. I wouldn't say it's going to teach you how to go and do hotlaps the first time out in a race car, but the things it teaches you about handling the balance of a car definitely apply irl. Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 taught me how to fly r/c aircraft, LFS taught me how to drive.

/Edit - I did notice a version of the tendency that other people are noticing though. If someone's about to cut me off on the road in a way that's even close to racing aggression I'll have to quickly fight the urge to return racing style aggression. It doesn't help that I've done as many recorded miles in LFS as I've done in my current car.

No not at all. Ok, since I play lfs I call people who drive slow on the left side "blocker" instead of "a***ole". Erm.. sometimes I´m searching the draft behind other cars....and sometimes I´m looking for the shift+h...or shift+r...but..no..didn´t changed my way of driving.

If it has changed the way I drive IRL, then I'm not aware that it has. I don't really associate LFS with driving IRL or vice-versa, but that probably has something to do with the environment in which I play the game.
If I had a cockpit which was identical to the interior of my car, screens covering all of the windows and photo-realistic graphics, then it might be harder to make the distinction between game and reality, and I expect it could possibly affect the way I do things in both the game and the real world.

I repeatedly find me doing Throttle Blip while downshifting even from low speeds/revs - it has become so much of a natural thing i keep doing it without thinking

Quote from MikeB :

I repeatedly find me doing Throttle Blip while downshifting even from low speeds/revs - it has become so much of a natural thing i keep doing it without thinking

ah right forgot about that in my post ... i practice heel and toe all the time now ... i like driving a car smoothly and heel and toe helps heaps with that

I notice how terribly my family drives. When my mom is driving on a straight, flat road at a constant speed, it is like this:
gas-brake-gas-brake-gas-brake-gas-brake. It is so annoying.

In the real world, I'm constantly sorry there are no buttons to bind to text messages. "BLUE FLAG" and "@#$!#$%NOOB" opportunities present themselves daily.

@Flycantbird:
I'd much rather like to see a kick-vote-button.

Vain

I have been driving for 20+ years now averaging 40,000+ km per year (much higher than that in my early 20s), so my relative time driving LFS is quite minimal in comparison (probably not far off hitting 1 million km in real life lol) so no hasn't affected my driving much.

If anything it has helped me be a more responsible and calm driver on public roads, as I have an outlet for "racing" for a few hours on the weekends in LFS

As i was active it didnt change my driving style. In some way I found a way to get rid of love towards speed. I drive in a day +80km and thats only to work and back and since I can find very little time for LFS in the past months i have started to notice that 180 km/h is starting to be very normal for me. LFS was like some place to get rid off my need for racing, and it aint same without it.

A very true fact is that not a lot of our better half (women) drive in LFS which makes life much much easier

Quote from wheel4hummer :

I notice how terribly my family drives. When my mom is driving on a straight, flat road at a constant speed, it is like this:
gas-brake-gas-brake-gas-brake-gas-brake. It is so annoying.

Lol. I make a tedious drive on a long boring highway a couple times a month, and see your mom, or possibly some distant relatives, every time.

I started to write about something similar that drives me crazy, but realized this isn't the "Things that make you go @#$!@#$" thread, after all.

As George Carlin says, there are two kinds of drivers. Anyone going slower than you is AN IDIOT, and anyone racing past you is A LUNATIC.

hell yeah.

LFS is indeed a game, however, it is a game that tries to duplicate the real behaviour of a car.

This is what i did... i selected the XFG, and drove around trying to see how it behaved, when it oversteered, understeered, that sort of thing. Then, i learned how to correct it. Generaly, i tried to learn the car's behaviour and how to control it. I did not pay any attention to shifting and stuff.

Then, i went with my (real) car to a (real) empty car park and did the same. Since i was alone, i could thrash my car around without risking anything but my tyres. So i did what i did in LFS and tried to see if the simulator was accurate. Not surprisingly, it was accurate.In the beginning i managed to find the limits of cornering (big big car park) then i tried to make slight oversteer and correct it.

In short, lfs helped me learn my car, by showing me how it will behave, so i would not be surprised.

True, i could learn all this without lfs, but the process was much much easier and relaxed. Of course, i did not think that "oh lfs car does this, so my car will behave the same"! I did not make any assumptions that the real car and the simulation are close to each other. However, before i started letting lfs 'teach' me car behaviour i hadn't seen in my real car, i had seen that lfs imitates the behaviour i HAD seen, nearly perfectly. In other words, lfs was very accurate when i drove the xfg like i normaly drive my car and slowly i would try something in my car and then see if the same could be done in lfs and the opposite. So before i tried something in my car i would try it in lfs.

i learned my car, driving it, but using lfs as a guide too.

I can safely say LFS has helped me with my real world driving. For me its taken the edge off doing risky things (if and when i can) and given me more confidence in my ability todo what i want the car todo. I've always believed since i can remember that id be a fast driver, and with every car game I've played I've always been pretty quick. Now that I'm driving on the road and track for real, i can see the same sort of patterns that i had once been through in the virtual world.

Although most of the games were very aracde like the same applies, pushing yourself a little harder but still holding back enough to keep you alive and on the road. I had also never drifted a real car and when i got LFS i started todo some drifting. I then attempted the same in my car and it worked, the force feed back isn't the same its twice as brutal and requires twice the effort! But the behaviour of the cars are almost identical!

Im young and i drive like a nut, is death near? Probably... Am i wreckless or careless? No... Do i drive fast with others in the car? Not a chance! I leave that for the LFS passengers!!

Quote from Rooble :

Im young and i drive like a nut, is death near? Probably... Am i wreckless or careless? No... Do i drive fast with others in the car? Not a chance! I leave that for the LFS passengers!!

Hm no passengers in your car when you drive like a nut is good, but what about the passengers in the vehical coming the other way

Sry to be negative but with about 1 million km of real road driving under my belt I've seen more than my fair share of nuts and to many accidents (many fatal) to count

LFS has definately improved my real life driving skills. Here's something I wrote in another thread about muscle memory.

Muscle memory saved my life I swear. I was driving down a narrow road with hedges close to the road either side. This means all the corners are blind. I was travelling quickly - too quickly in fact and breaking the golden rule of 'always make sure you can stop in the distance you can see'.

I came through this corner, only a slight right hander, at about 60 mph, nowhere near the limit in normal circumstances. As the corner opened up to my horror I saw two lorries blocking the entire road. They were too wide for the road and were just squeezing past each other.

I had to hit the brakes pretty hard before I was out of the bend. The inevitable happened and the back started to step out. Not good when you still need to knock off speed.

Without even thinking and in a split second I had lifted off the brakes slightly and put a quick jab of opposite lock in then re-applied more brake. I pulled up to the lorries nice and smooth and caught the back perfectly without the horrible snatching you sometimes get.

Then I realised that the only reason I did this was because of the muscle memory that I have built up through playing LFS.

LFS MAY WELL HAVE SAVED MY LIFE! THANKYOU SCAVIER i OWE YOU ONE.