Regarding your comments on damper settings, is it not generally just used as an artificial 'weight' control for the wheel? I've experimented with it at 100% and 0% in the Control Panel, and in most sims I seem to post quicker times with no damping.
No, that's the old misconception, I've tried to explain it many times now (so people must certainly be sick of it/me). It used to work like that, long time ago, yes, an artificial wheel weight put on top of what the game was outputting. It no longer does that. It is now a fully programmable force effect, just like constant or periodic forces. It only creates wheel weight if the game programmers choose to do it themselves, and can be used fully dynamically, otherwise it has no effect. In fact most "true" sims don't even use the damper forces in a significant way nowadays, so I'd say if you see quicker times without damper, you're very likely experiencing the wonders of placebo effect
Unless I'm mistaken, rF2 and AMS don't use the damper forces at all, so there should be absolutely no difference no matter how you set it in your wheel's control panel. AC does use it, but it only uses it to create the effect of steering weight on a static or very slow moving car - I believe that the cutoff speed is something like 5 kph or so if I remember correctly, so again, as soon as you are moving faster than that, damper setting should have zero effect. ACC doesn't use the damper at all I believe (I think they now use their own damper implementation that's independent on this). IRacing has a damper slider, so you can set the damping strength within the game to whatever you like, and if you turn the damper to 0 in your wheel CP, then the slider obviously does nothing. I actually no longer remember how and if Raceroom uses it, I should probably recheck
And I don't remember PCars settings in the slightest, but it probably has some slider for it, called "lateral driving inertia knee-jerk automatic displacement MxYZA silencer post-setting multiplier" or something clear and simple like that
Of all the sims and games in the past few years, I only recall WRC7 using damper in a significant way (and offering no sliders to adjust it initially, though those were added later in a patch), and Dirt Rally/Dirt 4, where the absence of damper forces wasn't as significantly felt as in WRC7, but setting damper to 0 definitely took parts of the FFB away that were supposed to be there, and caused some of the sliders to basically stop working (see iRacing) with quite a lot of people not even noticing.
