The myth of no grip...where does it come from?

[apex11]

Being a 'sim' racer, well as such I have RF2, AC, AMS, iRacing, RRE etc and wheel and pedal set up and take it relativley seriously, i find it odd what people expect from the games regards grip.....
Even more odd to me is how actually i findd that the so called arcade or simcade games seem to make the cars harder to handle via lack of grip than the true 'sims'.

Forza i find terrible for grip at default set ups, they make the GT3 LMP cars harder to drive and get grip for example than say the lower cars on road rubber, that makes no rational sense, so they are over 'gaming' it to make it seem like the transition to the higher 'levels' of the game is harder to drive...

I find any of the F1 cars in codemasters games to be harder to drive than AC / RF2 etc, because they seem to be so twitchy in codemasters games, certainly at least in 2015 and 2016 as i've not played 2017 and won't...

Why do some people call games simcade yet actually those games are less realistic with grip levels thus harder?

Another example from RF2 is the Skip barber is harder to control than the F1 cars...which i would expect in real life too, for anyone not aware about the skip barber and how its engineered to be hard to drive you need to go take a read on google.
Take the rear and front wing off an F1 car and if the drivers tried to take a corner at normal speeds with aero they would crash. What is allowing drivers to take corners at those speeds is of course the tyres as one apart but also the aero.
Anyway, many will not agree with me but where did the myth of no grip come from?
Why do i find it easier to drive the F1 car in AC or RF2 than i did in Forza (not enough grip)
How is "too much grip" arcade? when an F1 car can generate between 1500 and 1700 kg of down force, enough to travel upside down in a tunnel...
Why do we want to belive grip doesn't exist and its only driver skill that keeps a car on the grey stuff?

 

[RasmusP]

Hey man,
nice thread! I could write a whole page about it but I'm tired so it will stay short

I totally agree with your points and experiences!
I will take Project Cars 1 vs AC to tell you my experiences and thoughts about it.

The GT3 cars... My first "sim" was project cars and I loved it! It drives really nice with the outside-rear camera we know from Need for Speed etc. It feels natural with an XBOX controller and it's fun to drive.
Then I got my wheel and it was HARD to be fast! Of course I was faster (or just more consistent) than with the gamepad but it was easy to spin the car without really knowing WHY it did.
Then AC came into a steam sale and I just bought it all after what I read about it. I took the BMW Z4 GT3 to the Nordschleife and couldn't believe it. I drove quite carefully around the track and was just enjoying it. The car felt stable, settled on the Tarmac and I could feel that I could drive much faster.

After 1-3 laps I tried to actually drive faster, tried to reach the limit. I got unstable at Schwedenkreuz and the car just spun instantly. I couldn't do anything about it, I was just GONE...
But I didn't think about it was "unrealistic" because when you watch a real life GT3 race, the cars are very very stable and when they start to spin, they are just lost. Same thing with F1 and DTM.

I did a few laps, a bit more careful and after some time I felt when the rear was stepping out and could stop it from doing that.
I would describe that as "to reach the limit feels safe, if you go over it you are gone without a chance".

Then I went back to my "beloved" Project Cars, same car, same track:
I spun at the very first corner, I didn't know what was happening
But okay, maybe it's just me, so I did a few laps very slow and carefully and even at low speed the tires started to slide. It was a bit like driving on ice...

After half an hour I got used to it and it felt like skiing!
What do I mean with this?

It didn't matter if I were driving near the limit or not, it just felt slippery. But when the car actually started to slide, I could catch it

So I ended up "sliding and catching" the car around the Nordschleife, whereas in Assetto Corsa I was "driving and losing" the car.

In the end I guess both are not totally realistic. AC lacks a bit in terms of detailed simulation. In pcars you can really feel the tire simulation.

What I would like: the grip levels of AC combined with the detailed simulation of pcars.

A last sentence to end my post: A quote I read in some interview with a real GT3 driver:
"GT3 cars are very easy to drive. Yes, they are rough, stiff and loud, but if you drive with them in a casual way around a track they are the easiest cars to drive out there. If you don't go near the limit and don't go flat-out, you literally can't spin them!"

And sorry to many many games/sims out there: You don't feel like that description of a GT3 car!

Automobilista and Assetto Corsa do for me though! They have other flaws, but this important thing, the actual driving makes them my favorites at the moment

 

[apex11]

Yes every racer pretty much says how usable and 'easy' to drive racing cars are up to the limit, once over the limit that's where extra skills are involved etc, but you only need look to again GT3 and the BoP issues to see that to make a driver seem better than other driver can simply be because they have more BHP.
Now i have RF2 and now i worked out the slippy feel of ice was if the track was green and tyres were cold i realise in RF2 the cars can be driven hard and you can feel grip and when you are getting to the limits and beyond, I never can in Forza, i was just, slip then hold slip, slip and hold etc etc. But even with all of that people call Forza arcade but RF2 a sim, yet the sim is telling me that race cars have grip, Forza isn't but the general comments within the sim community is more grip = arcade....?
Its like people are scared to admit racing cars are grippy even when they are using that grip and exploiting it with set ups, just like in real life.. same with TCS, the best thing SMS did with PCars was offer a 'real life' setting for TCS so finally these people could see that in real life GT3 cars use TCS....

 

[Terry Rock]

"Ah!...my source of absolute annoyance in simracing."
I drive a car everyday on public roads.
I've also been fortunate to have driven a few race cars, as well as owned a 250cc shifter kart.
All, including the road car have had tremendous grip right up to the point of loss of adhesion...and yet, some developers insist to this day of releasing 'simulation' software with cars 'skating' all over the place to simulate cold tires.
It's insane.
It's as if the cars are tracking on oil-covered glass.
The only time tires behave that way is when you put slicks on wet pavement.
I've experienced that too on a karting slick and it was quite manageable while on the 'crawl' back to the pits.
Ask yourself this question...
"If my daily car doesn't slip around at 30, 40, heck! 50 mph on grooved tires, why would a purpose-built race car on full-contact slicks?"
"Why would anyone spend ...in some cases 1-2 million dollars for a car that drives worst than somebody's $24000 Toyota Camry?."

 

[apex11]

It is very odd, its like you watch WRC and the drivers say that driving on the snow and ice in Sweden with the tyres they use and the massive downforce (yes and even aero that helps with the car going sideways, how very arcade...) means the car is a lot more grippy than anyone could ever imagine, but people would play a rally game and say "too grippy its arcade made for pad players"
Just no. Literally get a grip, no one ever asked for a car with less grip, you actively seek grip and want grip hence F1 cars having stupid amounts of down force which as far as driver aids go that's the ultimate one...
Some training cars like Skip Barber aside, race cars are made to be driven hard to the max and beyond, you can't drive at the max in a car with no grip.
Why is grip considered arcade? Why are the 2 worst examples of this lack of grip actually simcade titles, Codies F1 and Forza 6.

The biggest reason for going off a dry track in a racing car or any car is running out of road, i.e you have grip there but you have pushed to hot into the corner and you run on, you don't simply spin around in a 180, that only happens if you have jammed on your brakes and the rear brakes have locked your wheels.

I find a lot of current 'sims' very good for grip ad they do make F1 cars grip like hell which is good and it very believable... so they are getting there but the 'community' isn't catching up with them, they still like to say "grip is arcade" despite the sim poster boy AC having mega grip with the F1 cars more grip than Codies F1 games...