I was practicing some road rally stuff a couple of days ago, and I noticed something that LFS seems to be lacking.

Under hard acceleration, when the front wheels are just breaking away from maximum traction, the car/engine/transmission all lug/judder.

For those who are not sure what I'm trying to articulate, it is the process by which when the front tyres apply sufficient torque between the chassis and the road to shift the weight to the rear of the car, concequently there is less grip, and less acceleration, so the weight transfers forwards again onto the front tyres, the process repeats at mb a rate of 8 times a second? This causes a juddering of loss/gain in traction.

Something like that anyway. I find the FWD LFS cars lacking in this respect, it is especially apparent in the overly smooth wheelspin off the line start. I would expect as the speed increased and the tyres regain traction, some form of lugging to occur.

I am not sure as to what aspect in the physics simulation would require tweaking to model this correctly, but I would take a guess at tyre traction regain calculations.

I would also like to note, that if you were thinking of adding any kind of TCS system into the front wheel drive cars, that causes the car to judder on acceleration, as the ABS stabs at the front brakes trying to keep the wheelspin managable. (I only say this because I would imagine all "stability" control and "brake help" will eventually be replaced by traction control, and ABS similar to real world counterparts.)

Have you tried playing around with lower gear ratios?

AFAIK the phenomenon you're describing has much more to do with driveline play and engine mounts, which of course are not simulated. Wheelhop can be interesting alright

This will happen in LFS, but as previously mentioned, this happens in real life due to other factors. Weight transfer is instant so this less/more grip situation can only happen in a sim, and not reality. In a sim it will happen at the rate of the physics engine, so far too fast to actually notice when driving (which is the idea).

Surely there's moment of inertia related calculations taking place in LFS?

... or did I misinterpret what you're saying?

This is modelled in Richard Burns Rally, and very noticeable on the tarmac tracks in FWD cars - but funnily enough it's one aspect of the sim the devs were unhappy about! Not sure why, I think it's rad

Yeah my engine mounts are made out of jelly... same with the exhaust mounts, I swear they make em slack to make it wiggle a lot when revving so it looks powerful... I mean, there is only so much slack you need right?

Thanks for the insight, that was exactly what I was lookin' for when I posted about it.

Right, it's basically the same thing as "rubberbanding", but in the opposite mechanical direction. Most high performance FWD vehicles have harder mounts installed to help alleviate it. I've always wanted to try a launch with no hood and observe how violently the engine rocks back & forth