It's also quite different driving the course in person than it is in a game. The pucker factor plays a big part. For those of you who've actually raced on a real road course, you know what I'm talking about.
I took my Cobra out to a road event for the first time this year. I consider myself a decent driver, and I'm certainly not unaccustomed to tossing my car around. I'm very comfortable in my car, and I feel like I have an excellent idea of how it will react and perform. All that being said, however, I found my track experience to be MUCH more conservative than I had expected. It took quite a few laps before I started taking more risks.
For example, there was a fairly sharp left hander at the end of the straight. I would get up to about 110mph before I had to jump on the binders. I kept experimenting on using less and less braking, because I knew I was losing time by slowing down too much for that left.
As I started to push my car more towards it's limits, there were several "white knuckle" moments as my car slid towards the rumble strips...onto the rumble strips...then kept going on it's way off the other side of the rumble strips as I held on and thought how much I would appreciate it if it would kindly stop, and put some distance between me and the wet grass. I never actually got a tire in the dirt, but those moments were enough to get me to back off. It makes a BIG difference when it's YOU driving in YOUR own car that you worked hard to buy.
In a game, you can slide the car the exact same way every single time, so it becomes very comfortable. When you're on the track, you have debris, pebbles, or dirt from the guy who just went off in front of you and decided to pull back on. It makes the car very twitchy and unpredictable.
I have a short video of me coming around the last left hand turn onto the straight. You can hear when I actually get on it. The surface was still drying after raining that morning, and my back end would twitch if I got on it too much around that curve. I'm the 4th car and the last car to go by (Impalla, Trans AM, Eclipse, then me). I fyou listen, you can hear me give it a bit of gas, then let off before I come into sight. Then as I round the corner (it's actually a 180* turn) you can hear my exhaust as I give it some gas, but you don't hear the blower kick in (high pitched whine) until I feel I've straightened it out for the most part. That's when I actually floor it.
Short Video
My point is, I'd like to see how well our game times would compare to OUR actual real world times if we were to drive the same cars on the same tracks. I'd be willing to guess we'd be off by a hell of a lot more than 5 sec.
Yeah that SRT was moving....pretty tight...but the supercharger on that mustang was nice!!! still prefer a turbo whistle but that whine is tight and would definatly pack some power in that 'stang!
