La vision de Aris según los que nos quejamos que la GT2 hace Eau Rouge a fondo:
First of all, let me change the thread from critical which is not obviously. I love to hear you people discussing physics and driving, but labeling critical a thread like this is not a good idea.
Let me also let out AC for a moment so that I can simply give facts on real life races and eliminate my subjectivity on the AC part of the story. ok?
Let's go, Spa 6 hours 2014, Qualifying session. Let's start with the weather at Spa 6 Hours: [url=http://fiawec.alkamelsystems.com/Results/04_2014/02_SPA FRANCORCHAMPS/41_FIA WEC/201405021920_Qualifying Practice/26_Meteo_Qualifying Practice.PDF]
[Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver este vínculo] Practice/26_Meteo_Qualifying Practice.PDF[/url]
Ambient temperature was around 7-8°C
Track Temperature was around 10-9°C
Humidity was 91-87%, track status was declared WET.
Wind speed was 10-15kmh
2:30.556 laptime under those conditions, so comparisson with any sim that doesn't have rain is out of question.
So let's go on to
Practice session 2 which had the fastests laps for the whole weekend.
[url=http://fiawec.alkamelsystems.com/Results/04_2014/02_SPA FRANCORCHAMPS/41_FIA WEC/201405021415_Free Practice 2/26_Meteo_Free Practice 2.PDF]
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Ambient temperature was 11-9°C
Asphalt temp was 12-11.5°C
Humidity was 85 to 89%
Wind was 8 to 20kmh from north
Track conditions DRY
Now, DRY conditions with such humidity and knowing Spa, probably means that the track had tons of humidity and was also in green state. Spa is also notorious for low grip asphalt.
Now let's analyze how a car is setup for such races.
GT2 cars have 4 sets of tyres + 2 tyres (not a set, just 2 tyres!) MAXIMUM for the whole free practice sessions and a warmup if one is scheduled.
This means that during practice, qualifying and warmup the teams have 4 sets of tyres of just one compound,
usually the harder one, to try. With those 4 sets, they have to setup the car for two different drivers and most importantly find acceptable performance for the least fuel and tyre consume possible.
Very important: The is no use of gaining 1 second per lap more if you have to stop one extra time than you competitors. The setup must be satisfactory enough for both drivers and deliver the best compromise in terms of laptimes and pitstops. This is not a "let's see how fast we can go flat out" setup.
Top speed. Cars are very restricted and race very close to each other. There's no use if you have half a second faster setup when everybody else overtakes you on the straights because too slow. Often the setup is made to give some more top speed to the cars, compromising absolute laptime.
BOP: Balance of Performance. All GTE cars have ballast and rear wing height modifications imposed by the Federation in order to balance their performance. No car is in perfect form during races they are all limited in one way or another, especially the ones at the front.
Let's analyze how drivers react and drive those cars.
The fear factor is almost bull****... no real driver thinks about dying... their main focus is being faster. BUT... there are many but's...
Test limiting is very harsh on drivers in the last years. They visit a track and have a total of 20-30 laps before racing.... that's on par with the laps an enthusiast manages to do on a track day... ridiculously low amount of time.
They can't setup their car 100% to suit the track, their style, their necessities. It's a "good enough" setup that has to satisfy both drivers...
Their driving style can't be flat out either. We talk with GT3/GT2 drivers to name a few, , Alex Balzan, Nick Catsburg, Stefano Colombo... great guys. I'd also like to remind you that Kunos doesn't have the budget to put such names on a payroll, but they are very polite and happy to talk to us about their experience.
On Spa they told us, "yes you could go flat out on eaurouge and blanchimont, but you don't want too. Your race engineer doesn't wants too. It's an unnecessary risk for 6 hours and puts great stress to the tyres and you want them to last as much as possible, so you lift a bit and go safer and the lost time on track you gain back from 1 less pitstop. On fresh tyres, low fuel you can go flat out anytime if you want, but unnecessary risk."
Traffic. There's tons of traffic during a GT race. LMP1, LMP2, LMGTE pro, LMGTE Am cars... all in the same track at the same time... F1 traffic is a joke in comparison.
There are many other reasons, like mechanical parts preservation and setup choices for the race weather...
As you can see, all of those reasons are completely different from the conditions we found when we drive on our simulators... any simulator. I'm not talking or defending AC here, I'm talking generally.
In AC you should set the track in green conditions, lower the temperature (and you'll still be 2-3°C higher temp than reality, we go down to 10 only), use only hard tyres and try 20 laps. You still won't be equal to the real conditions. Then you should try to not cause graining, blistering, flatspotting in the tyres everytime you go out for a fast lap.
But let's forget about all of this and focus only on the lap difference. Which if I'm right is about 3.5 seconds AC vs Reality. That's on soft tyres, proper setup, on the limit driving etc etc.
Spa is a big place, it has 15 turns. If you gain just 0.25 seconds (a quarter of a second) on every turn, then by the end of the lap you have 3.5 seconds difference. That's just gaining 2 tenths of a second on every turn, not calculating braking distances or acceleration and speed on the straights and "alien" drivers dedication to details and infinite experience.
Add all of the above... I think some interesting conclusions can come out. I'm not saying AC is perfect, but when comparing real life laptimes to a sim, ANY sim out there, you must be less superficial. You need to analyze all variables and go deep in the details. Screaming "sim X is 2-4 secs faster than a laptime in real life that I saw on a website" is simply misleading.
