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Old 17 Jun 2011, 12:38 (Ref:2900888)   #1
MarkG
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real racers - which driving sim for you?

If you race for real or do track days, which driving sim gets your vote and offers a more realistic driving experience? No disrespect to "normal" road drivers, but I suspect racers will have a more informed answer.

I enjoy GTR2 and GT Legends, the latter maybe giving a more realistic feel it seems, as the cars seem more "connected" with the track than with GTR2, but I don't race historic cars so the cars are not really that relevant, although I'm sure the "seat-time" with them is helpful whatever one drives(?).

Also, are the online sims any good? ones like iracing, rfactor, LFS & NetKar Pro?? My main focus is for realistic feel of the cars, and mainly doing practice driving, but having said that, the iracing online racing structure might be fun. Is it?

Key thing for me though, is what product offers the most realistic drive??

thanks guys
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 13:59 (Ref:2900925)   #2
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IMO the vast majority of real racers don't use sims; personally I use in-car footage to learn a circuit, that's all
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 14:10 (Ref:2900933)   #3
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I don't want to use the sim for learning circuits specifically, although that would be an added benefit it it did.
I want some fun at home that costs virtually nothing relatively, but is also useful as an aid for driving improvement.
A lot of real professional racers use sims, but admittedly those sims are in a different league to the home user setup.
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 14:35 (Ref:2900946)   #4
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The real racers I've heard/read about who really swear by a sim offering a realistic experience do mostly talk about iRacing - that seems the "sim of realism" at the moment.

Personally like you I love GTR2, the Simbin games and rFactor, although right now I'm preferring the Simbin titles especially considering the growing amount of stuff for them. The only type of racing rFactor now has which the Simbin titles don't are stock car racing and oval racing. Other than that you're pretty much fixed with the Simbin titles.
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 19:02 (Ref:2901086)   #5
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I have iRacing, rFactor and Live For Speed (LFS) at home, pretty much the 3 big well known sim racing games these days if one ignores netKar.

My personal preference and I believe the most realistic is iRacing but all of them have their strengths and weaknesses.

iRacing is expensive, isn't modifiable and has a limited number of tracks and cars. It is also somewhat US centric.

LFS is cheap, the cars handling qualities are fun but the cars and tracks aren't real.

rFactor is IMHO the weakest of the 3 in terms of driving realism, it has an infamous unrecoverable oversteer or understeer tendency in its handling and all the cars seem to handle the same regardless of layout. It is however cheap and very easy to mod such as creating a car like your own out of a base model. You also get pretty much every track in the world for free.

I use rFactor to drive a model of my real car and iRacing for fun or to explore different cars or the limited tracks they have. Brands Hatch and Spa for example are superb but we are still waiting to get Oulton Park.

Once you get in to them all the sims have their quirks which can be really annoying. The braking in iRacing for example is a complete PITA, I find it far easier to repeatedly meter out my braking in real life than I do in that thing and yet I have a proper load cell brake peddle setup adjusted to suit.

The vast majority of club racers that I know of don't do sims but that doesn't mean anything at all.
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 21:05 (Ref:2901129)   #6
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Originally Posted by NJH View Post
I have iRacing, rFactor and Live For Speed (LFS) at home, pretty much the 3 big well known sim racing games these days if one ignores netKar.

My personal preference and I believe the most realistic is iRacing but all of them have their strengths and weaknesses.

iRacing is expensive, isn't modifiable and has a limited number of tracks and cars. It is also somewhat US centric.

LFS is cheap, the cars handling qualities are fun but the cars and tracks aren't real.

rFactor is IMHO the weakest of the 3 in terms of driving realism, it has an infamous unrecoverable oversteer or understeer tendency in its handling and all the cars seem to handle the same regardless of layout. It is however cheap and very easy to mod such as creating a car like your own out of a base model. You also get pretty much every track in the world for free.

I use rFactor to drive a model of my real car and iRacing for fun or to explore different cars or the limited tracks they have. Brands Hatch and Spa for example are superb but we are still waiting to get Oulton Park.

Once you get in to them all the sims have their quirks which can be really annoying. The braking in iRacing for example is a complete PITA, I find it far easier to repeatedly meter out my braking in real life than I do in that thing and yet I have a proper load cell brake peddle setup adjusted to suit.

The vast majority of club racers that I know of don't do sims but that doesn't mean anything at all.
Ah that's very interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm glad its not just me that thinks rFactor's handling at times is a bit weird (I never knew as I've never raced real-life before so thanks for making me feel better! )
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 21:20 (Ref:2901138)   #7
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It will do odd things sometimes such as chuck a car hard into a corner, it will start to come round and right at the point when the car should swap ends you get a massive understeer skid. On other occasions you get things such as massive unrecoverable oversteer getting to the throttle early in slow corners. Croft for example is a PITA like that in rFactor, I don't think the car has ever spun up the inside wheel in a slow corner, I doubt its modelled that way. The steering wheel force feedback in iRacing is also way better and with the latest changes they made to the way the tyres interact with the track it really came alive even though it seemed pretty to good to my inexperienced hands anyway.

Oh that's another thing, the clutch and transmission isn't modelled that great. ISTR Live For Speed does the best job out of the 3 in that area, in iRacing with the clutch you don't actually have to use it. All of them also suffer from a lack of force feed back for the brakes to give them a feel like real brakes.
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Old 17 Jun 2011, 22:58 (Ref:2901177)   #8
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NFH, thanks for your detailed answers. Interesting your comment about braking. I have bought the 3months-for-1 offer of iracing and it definitely intrigues me, but like you, I find the braking of the cars not quite right, but then, all racing sims I've tried are a bit unrealistic with regards to braking. Having said that, there are some corners real life where my own braking is not optimum, so who am I to judge

By the way, I have just started playing Richard Burns Rally... REALLY impressed so far. I don't rally, but the skills required just in the game surely must help real life.
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 09:23 (Ref:2901309)   #9
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I have only 1 proper sim and it is rFactor. I chose it because it was cheap and has MASSIVE amounts of contant because of modding.

If iracing was cheaper though, I'd probably buy it in a heartbeat.
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 09:31 (Ref:2901311)   #10
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Never raced a car on a circuit, but I did karting in my youth. Does that count?

I'm itching to have a go with iRacing, but the fact you have to have a subscription AND buy the cars/tracks to progress puts me off. If it was just a monthly subscription fee on its own then I would have no problem with that.

I don't doubt that it is pretty much the best out there, everywhere I have read about it says so. I may cave in at some point to try the 3 months for 1, but for the moment I remain strong!
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 11:38 (Ref:2901365)   #11
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I've never tried iRacing, netkar or LFS. I haven't tried any of the Simbin titles either. I bought rFactor after two friends recommended it;they are both former Queensland Sports Sedan Champions, who now race in the Australian Sports Sedan Championship. (Sports Sedans are like Thundersports in UK or Transam in USA).

My real life race car is in rFactor (TCL Bathurst '86 Car #62) and I regularly race it at tracks i have driven in real life. I am blown away by how much similarity there is between real life and sim. That said, there are a number of glaring inconsistancies as well, though i don't know if these are attributable to the base programme, the track mod or the car mod.
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 11:51 (Ref:2901370)   #12
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What ****es me off about iRacing is the fact that I did the Radical promo which was easily the worst of any promo they ever did, and I've completely wasted that. If I had known there was going to be an IndyCar promo, I'd have held my money. Now they don't have a single promo
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 20:18 (Ref:2901600)   #13
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Like PorscheCurves and Spudgun, the pricing of iRacing is a big detracting factor, otherwise I'd probably go for it.

NetKar Pro and LFS are made-up cars and circuits which sort of puts me off, so I may go for rFactor.
DAVID PATERSON, the glaring inconsistencies you mention, are they related to car feel? or more to do with other aspects of the game, which may not be a major concern as long as realism was there.
I did try the demo of rFactor but wasn't impressed by the available car and circuit although I didn't give it much time, but the gear changes didn't sound right. Maybe that was a setting I hadn't done but they sounded like slipping clutches each time.
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Old 18 Jun 2011, 21:44 (Ref:2901617)   #14
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I'm not a real racing driver and I'll stay away from the debate over the pluses and minuses of each sim in the market, however I'll just point out the following regarding iRacing.



iRacing misses a bit the plot regarding its pricing policy (though I understand why they don't market it like that). Please consider the following:

1st rule:
For the base package, which IMHO should include around 15 tracks and 4/5 cars (see below), you'll have to spend around $220. This, for me, is the absolute minimum if you plan to stay for the long run in iRacing.

2nd rule:
The subscription for a year doesn't cost $99. If you are savy, you can take the regular promotions that lower the price to around $70.
After that, please bear in mind that you can gain as much as $10 credits for each season (4 season for each year), thus the subscription tends to get cheaper than that.
But, for that, you need to participate in different championships, that's why the base package should be as extensive as referred above.

3rd rule:
Stay away from "emotional" shopping (like when "this" car or "that" track are released). You should plan your shopping in order to get the 20% discount on items (when you buy 6 items at a time), even if it means that you'll not get right away the car or the track of your dreams.


4th rule:
You don't need to spend $600 for the whole contents. I mean, do you really have the time to race in road courses and in ovals? IMHO, participating in two different championships for each season is more than enough (a lot of people miss this, thus they tend to be very slow and have lot's of accidents just because they want to drive in every race with every car).


If anyone has more questions about iRacing, I'll happily answer them after reading them
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Old 19 Jun 2011, 11:43 (Ref:2901808)   #15
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I have used the ZR car extensively in rFactor and used it is as mod basis, its probably one of the better ones. I would say that the results you can get from it are very accurate compared to real life its just the way it drives can feel a bit contrived, I guess its just a bit basic in some areas.
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Old 21 Jun 2011, 20:29 (Ref:2903105)   #16
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Further to above something I have seen in the past few days is that my real car has far more grip in low speed corners (as in 1 gear higher in a couple of places on the Silverstone Arena GP). Something that I had already seen before is that the sim model cars in rFactor are also a bit to stable under braking meaning that I can brake later and harder than in real life as in real life I have to ease off a touch back from the corner to make sure the car is stable before turning in or if its a short stop just not brake full hard. My real car also has much better grip under power out of corners, I guess ultimately the instabilities in a real car are balanced back out by better grip such that the overall result is similar.

In terms of liveliness and feel of the track the closest thing I have sim driven to my 944 race car is the Skip Barber in iRacing but its a mid engined single seater so different handing. The closest handling car oddly enough is the late model NASCAR thing but with a circuit racing setup.
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Old 21 Jun 2011, 21:07 (Ref:2903130)   #17
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LFS
For.me.
it is good or better dynamically and on the net than any other I have raced.
rfactor has content and tracks. Love it. SimBin WTCC is quite good but I have limited play on it. Very pc intense.
Nr2k3 was my fave oval sim and not bad around a road course.

Lfs weak spots may be sound, and lack of tracks from the real world. But it is stellar.
I am just a club racer though..
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Old 20 Feb 2012, 13:04 (Ref:3028359)   #18
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Hi, Best in my opinion, (haven't tried iRacing) are Netkar pro and LFS. LFS has very good 'feel' and the force feedback is very communicative, Netkar pro has realistic cars and some real circuits - I'm using Netkar pro on Oulton Park currently, preparing for the new season. I found RFactor to be completely unrealistic - you have to drive it like a game, not like a car.

Another which I have found to be great training is Grand Prix Legends. becasue the cars are fast, powerful and lacking grip, you have to brake for along way before each corner, feeeeeeel your way into the corner, eeeeeeease it through and gradually power it out. You have time to really feel the turn-in understeer, neutral, power-on understeer turning to oversteer on the way out. Great for practising in the wet.Unlike a wham-bam modern formula car which is brake-in-out so fast you need lots of experience of that car to feel the phases. I'm sure rally sims would also help develop feel. I've even used one thing I learned in GPL, in real life - when a slide gets too bad in GPL, stop steering into it and straighten the steering, (even turn hard into the bend), to cause the front to slide as well, which allows the whole car to slide sideways without rotating much further - and I've done that in the wet in real life and it can work.
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Old 25 Feb 2012, 16:13 (Ref:3030911)   #19
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