This is by far the best explanation.It's not really, though it doesn't necessarily translate into "feel" either. in pCARS and Forza, the physics refersh rate means the rate at which the tire and suspension physics update. For example if the car is travelling at high speed over a bump in the road and the physics refresh rate is not fast enough, that bump simply won't be calculated. Sawtooth kerbs for example are something that can't be calculated properly unless you have a really high refresh rate, and the effect has to be canned ("faked" into the physics when the car is within a kerb collision are for example). But as I said, it doesn't necessarily translate into a better feel as you also have less time for calculation during each tick, though the ticks themselves don't have to differ in feel compared to slower refresh rate.
Input polling is another thing, but that was never the argument and most of these games poll the controller at a high refresh rate.
This is not entirely true. The physics can be less precise and less accurate at a higher rate. There are PC racing games out there with more accurate and more precise physics that run at frequencies 3-6 times lower. This is why I say it often means very little when one specific aspects rate is used to determine its merit . It's used mostly for PR because everybody loves a Hz race even though it is not the whole picture but not entirely meaningless either. To make matters worse people often give their highest rate and that gets advertised around for physics as a whole even though some aspects may run at a lower frequency (collision detection with PhysX in PCars runs at 50hz for example), but the precision or accuracy of its physics is not determined by that frequency alone.Precision and accuracy? Especially needed for a car game, since the pretty much all of the variables change as when the vehicle changes position. It just acts like a refresh rate, more frames = better picture, but in this case the physics are more precise.
much like the 600hz rates they advertise for some TVs some racing game fans used the frequency of some aspect of their physics calculation to bolster the merit of their physics as a whole as if this frequency determines the complexity (precision or accuracy) of their calculations. It's not the whole picture and it often means very little in how a game feels in terms of accuracy even though it is not entirely meaningless.