PRC: Is there one car in any sim that stands out as being the best sim car for you? What makes it so?
SA: I haven’t driven every racing sim out there,
but for me the best sim car is Assetto Corsa’s Formula Abarth, which is basically a re-branded Formula Renault 2.0 car. It handles shockingly close to what the car drives like in real life, and a close second is the BMW M235i Racing which was found in Assetto Corsa’s Dream Pack DLC. The body roll is a bit excessive in Assetto Corsa, but the tire model really helps these cars shine. Assetto Corsa, as a whole really, is probably the best consumer simulation on the market. It’s got a very good tire model, amazing re-creation of tracks, and practically every car in the sim could win the best sim car award. My only complaint, however, is the weird temperature behavior of some of the tires. They seem to cool down super fast on the straights, and then gain all the temperature back in one corner. It’s as if the sim only calculates surface temperature and not core temperature. Maybe I’m wrong though.
Another game worth mentioning is Stock Car Extreme.
The Brazilian Stock Cars aren’t very nimble, but the game undermines the point that if you have a good tire model, which they developed together with Pirelli, then the cars will feel very realistic to drive. I’ve done some racing in rFactor and some racing with Stock Car Extreme, and I’m average at best in rFactor, whereas in GSCX I’m near the front of the pack in online leagues. That’s how important tire models are and why so many developers are obsessing over them now.
Reiza Studios and Niels did an incredible job with an ancient engine.
PRC: A common debate between almost all sim racers is whether race cars are easy to drive out of the box, like in Game Stock Car or Assetto Corsa (which some call “simcade”
, or that they are extremely difficult and unforgiving as seen in iRacing. Settle this one for us – is it easy to jump in a race car and make laps, or does it try to kill you? Give us some examples if necessary.
SA: This is a really difficult question to answer for me, since I got to try my hand at real race cars before driving pretend race cars.
I can, however, say that games like Assetto Corsa feel leaps and bounds ahead of other certain sims on the market, and Assetto Corsa on its own is very close to what a real race car feels like. To me, the actual physics of the car aren’t that important. Yes, they decide how the car handles overall, but every car in real life handles differently anyways – so it’s always going to be something you must deal with. The tires, however, are the only thing that connects the car to the road, so if the tire model isn’t right, the car won’t feel right.
There is a common misconception that race cars are incredibly hard to drive and that it’s almost impossible to catch a slide, which is probably the biggest lie ever told on the internet. In real life you have so many more inputs that your body can process: Not just the wheel in your hand, you have a whole car under your ass – you feel it moving, twitching, vibrating… All those little things help you understand what the car is doing. If you possess the ability to understand what the car is telling you, then this of course helps you catch the car when you get sideways, or when there’s a little bit of oversteer. I would say, however, that very good sim racers would probably possess these skills in real life as well – they’ve learned all of this from simulations after all, so I don’t see any reasons to inflate the difficulty to compensate.
Sure, it may make for a nice challenge, like in Grand Prix Legends or iRacing, but there’s no need for it.
