For mostly all cars is the draft not right, this means way to high.
When you look for ex. at any GTR car or the BF1. When you are right behind a car, you get such a huge speed increase. Now watch the Formula 1, did you ever see something like this? Yeah, 10-15 years ago but not today. It would be nice to have it back but right now it isn't. The same for the GTR cars. Watch for example the DTM races they are racing damn close over couple of laps car on car. In LfS not possible cause you crash right away in to the car in front of you.

I think this really needs some improvement to make LfS more relistic and it would make the racing more interesting cause we would get tighter fights.

As, you may guess, I have no experience of slipsreaming a DTM car, but I'm not buying your claim right away. I'm quite sure that watching couple of laps of incar footage, we would notice that the driver in slipstream has to lift the throttle quite a bit to avoid getting too close to the car infront. And what comes to F1, I believe (tell me if I'm wrong) that the aerodynamics have been designed also to distract the airflow behind the car, making slipstreaming harder. Dunno if that works in LFS at all.

Waiting for Tristan..

F1: yes you are right but in LfS you can't see this. the draft there is like in the old days but not like 2day

pls check the DTM link and go to 50% of the video there you can watch the race action. the cars sometime so close together that I say it is not possible to make this by lifting a bit the throttle especialy not when you brake in to a corner

I can't speak for DTM as I'm not a fan of watching heavy repmobiles tootling round tracks, but as for F1 simply watch some onboards from the last 3 or 4 races when people get good long drafts - Schumi at Brazil is a good one because most of the people aren't fighting back as much. You'll see that the speed gain is MASSIVE.

Whilst LFS is not 100% in this area, it's still not too bad. I sometimes think the slipstream starts a touch early behind other cars, but in strength and effect on downforce it's now about right I think.

Just to note, the slipstream effect of older cars was way less than now, for a number of reasons. Older cars had a smaller frontal area, they had a lower coefficient of drag (which combined mean a much higher drag force for a given speed nowadays), less power, less downforce (which meant less turbulence, which is part of the low pressure effect that causes the slipstream)... So saying older cars had more slipstream just rips your argument to pieces.

Edit: In that DTM video they are racing on a tight, bumpy course, will higher downforce and softer suspension, all of which will tend to increase the natural drag of the car, nullifying any draft effect. The average and peak speeds will be lower.

Also, bear in mind the main thing LFS's slipstream physics doesn't do is the effect of the draft on the lead car - it will also 'see' substantially less drag than when it's on it's own, so the difference between leading car and following car (which is what you see in car, so probably what you base it on) will be slightly less in real life.

The problem with the current physics is not the slipstream you gain on the straight, but the air disturbance on corners is now not strong enough. It used to be in patch S that if you followed a car through a corner you'd struggle for grip, the effect was too strong, but now it is barely noticeable at all.

Quote from frokki :

As, you may guess, I have no experience of slipsreaming a DTM car, but I'm not buying your claim right away. I'm quite sure that watching couple of laps of incar footage, we would notice that the driver in slipstream has to lift the throttle quite a bit to avoid getting too close to the car infront. And what comes to F1, I believe (tell me if I'm wrong) that the aerodynamics have been designed also to distract the airflow behind the car, making slipstreaming harder.

No, no one really tries to mess the airflow behind the car. It's just a result of the immense region of turbelance generated from the lower surfaces of the rear wing, coupled with the low pressure region generated by the body's own drag. In essence, F-1 cars are like barn doors from the drag coefficent point of view. Don't be surprised if a behind car suddenly gains a lot of straight line speed. The drag of downforce cars is so large that even a small % drop in the air pressure ahead translates to significantly greater net forward proplusion force in absolute terms.

The reason they don't keep too close, especially for downforce reliant cars such as F-1, is the fact that the loss of downforce is a much greater concern than the lack of drag. Turbelant airflow doesn't stay attached to the front wing. For the car behind, this is felt as massive loss of downforce both front and rear. It's felt mostly as increased understeer and worsened braking.

The heavy relaince on downforce is why bumper to bumper racing is impossible in current F-1. The downforce loss makes it impossible for the car too close behind to brake and corner as well as the car ahead. Ultimate realism would require both CFD(computational fluid dynamics) integrated with structural deformation modelling (wing flex) in real time, but this is obviously too computautionally intensive for anything short of a supercomputer.

All this is of course better understood with wind tunnel data and CFD studies. And LFS's aero is still rather simplistic, so we'll just wait and see what happens on the next physics update.

Quote from Becky Rose :

It used to be in patch S that if you followed a car through a corner you'd struggle for grip, the effect was too strong, but now it is barely noticeable at all.

If I'm not mistaken, that struggling for grip mainly came from the wrong distribution of downforce-loss. Back in patch S the front and back wing suffered equally (instead of the front losing alot more than the rear), resulting in spins rather than understeer. Besides that, the effects of slipstream were quite exaggerated, sometimes resulting in multiple passes and re-passes on a straight.

I guess we need something in the middle of that. Atleast for some cars the slipstream effect should be a little bit higher, but at the same time we also need the drag reduction for the front car implemented. Though I think all that should be done on a per-car basis. Depending on the chassis some cars should suffer more from "rear-drag" than others, but at the same time that would mean they gain more of a push if someone is behind them.

Oh well, there are so many things that need to be implemented still, so, like Jamexing said, lets just wait for the next physics update.

I know for a fact quite afew drivers setup the car infront so they can pass at the END of the straight. And also, if the car infront gets a better exit, slipping will be more harder..

Thats how it is for me in LFS. In GT4, i can slipstream the car infront when im going 1kph lol thats how shit it is.

Quote from AndroidXP :

Oh well, there are so many things that need to be implemented still, so, like Jamexing said, lets just wait for the next physics update.

Like the introduction of ground effect for the racecars - that should change the whole aspect of setups alot. Although there appear to be alot of regulations on limitting the use of such IRL.

Quote from xaotik :

Like the introduction of ground effect for the racecars - that should change the whole aspect of setups alot. Although there appear to be alot of regulations on limitting the use of such IRL.

Right

Imho the introduction of the ground effect and of the effects caused by the variations on wing's angle of attack (braking, accelerating, bumps, sliding, on both horizontal and vertical direction, so that a slide in high velocity corner will cause a loss of downforce on rear wing too ) will add a lot of realism on lfs setups and will increase the "feel" of the track on the car, because u will need to learn the correct use of track surface for a better aerodinamic efficiency

Pieter Bervoets showed me in car vids of him running at Spa in his Donkervoort (similar to an LX6, but twice as powerful). The slip streaming was quite strong, I'd say quite a bit more than what we have now in LFS. He was running lap after lap with another guy and they swapped the lead on the big straight after Eau Rouge easily every lap. In fact, they'd wave each other by each time. Just made the both of them faster so they could pull away from the pack.

I'd personally like to see a bit stronger effect in LFS. Not as strong as it used to be, but maybe 1/4 or 1/3 of the way between what we have now and what it was.

I don't really like having much downforce loss, but if a little bit is realistic, then go for it. Just please don't make me spin out like used to happen in the F08 at the oval

This might be horribly incorrect, but does an F1 car's engine suffer from drafting as it doesn't get enough cool air intake? Any F1 experts want to share comments about that?

Quote from spankmeyer :

This might be horribly incorrect, but does an F1 car's engine suffer from drafting as it doesn't get enough cool air intake? Any F1 experts want to share comments about that?

Yes it does. It gets too hot.