Yes. Many many times. But that's not even the point. Sims don't help much with individual situations as much as they do just with improving your driving skills as a whole.
What car have you had to correct oversteer at 30mph in the dry on a public road in and what was the situation?
Personal experience. Experiences of siblings, close friends, people I've talked to.
That's anecdotal evidence not a
citation, one has no way of being independently verified the other does.
Here's an example of a statemnet with a citation (or in more simple terms a source).
Thinking you can learn to drive and transfers skills and experience from a sim to the real world is not only wrong but potentially very dangerous.
Sources -
http://bridgetogantry.com/2/index.php/home/amusingamazing/320-playstation-heroes and
http://bridgetogantry.com/2/index.p...art-2&catid=55:touristenfahrten&Itemid=300088
Really? You must not have been a very great teacher.
Really? You resort to personal attacks rather than a reasoned discussion, you should re-read the AUP and do so rather quickly. I was good enough to work both as a freelancer and for major European brands and maintain a perfect safety record for all the launch events I managed (both on and off track).
Observation
Knowing exactly where the car is on the road
Knowing where other cars are around you
Recovering from a skid
Adapting driving for rain/snow etc.
Being smooth with the steering
Being smooth under braking
Not upsetting the car
Having control of the car
The list goes on... and on... and on, of good habits and techniques that apply to both street driving and track driving.
Lets just take one of those track skills and try and apply it to the road and see just how useful it is. Braking.
The purpose of braking on the track is to slow your car down as quickly as possible to the required entry speed of a given corner (a speed that is often still in excess of road legal speeds), in doing so you use every last drop of grip available from the tyres. Its a violent action and one that bears almost no relationship to the level of application (force and speed) that you would need to apply on the road, which would only apply to emergency situations, which unless you are an idiot you should not be in often at all.
Applying the brakes on the road is about efficiency and smoothness well below the limit of the tyres, at much lower speeds and often involves coming to a complete halt. They may be the same action, but very little of the actuial detail of application remains the same.
As such, no not "
All the skills racing drivers learn apply directly to being a good street driver", in fact in the case of this one it would not make you a good driver but an irresponsible one.
You misread what I wrote (or else it was badly worded haha). I didn't mean you learn 80% of what you need to know from GT5 or other sims, I meant 80% of what you learn from GT5 can be applied in some shape or from to driving in real life, whether on the street or on the track.
And really, unless you are playing Mario Kart, any sim played with a good wheel setup will build muscle memory, which is soooo important in all driving aspects. The physics engine in most cases doesn't affect things terribly, as long as it's decent. I know, that sounds crazy, but hear me out.
Would you say (and we are talking real life here) that learning, lets say, how to drift in a front wheel drive car helps with being able to drift a rear wheel drive car? I would say most definitely yes. Will it teach you everything you need to know? No, but it sure does help.
I know what you meant and I still disagree with you, 80% of what you learn from GT5 can not be directly applied to real world driving at all.
Lets take muscle memory, now unless you have a sim in which the wheel and pedals are simulating exactly the same steering ratio, pedal throw and resistance as a real car (and this would then need to be exactly right for every car) you already have a major problem with muscle memory. You would also need to have the feedback exactly right from each of these components; steering (GT5's FF is corrupted by primary ride FFB that a real car doesn't have - 2.09 is better but its still not right) and its has no feedback at all via the pedals.
As such any muscle memory you gain from GT5 (or almost any sim - but in particular console sims) is not transferable, hell most people race with the wheel set to the totally wrong ratio for most cars, let alone that many cars have differing ratios and the resistance and feel differs totally from brand to brand and car to car.
Stay with me here. When you are trying to get a FWD sideways vs a RWD it's a little different. If it's a high powered rear wheel drive, you might step on the gas to get it sideways, but try that in the FWD and it nets a completely different result. But still the FWD drifting experience would still help, even though doing the same thing with the gas pedal yields a different result.
This can be likened to physics engines.
I know that was long and might not have made much sense, but that's the way I see it. And my the experiences of me and others that I know back that up. It helps.
Sorry but I have no idea what you are trying to say with this analogy, as it doesn't support your claim. Getting/correcting oversteer in a FWD and RWD car are different so that makes 80% of what you take from a sim a skill transferable to the real world?
Not only is that an odd one to use but it also doesn't support your claim, as you say they can be initiated in very different ways, and doing the same in both can net different results (which doesn't support you point - quite the opposite), not only is that true for initiating oversteer but also for correcting it.
While a (very) flawed physics engine like GT5 won't yield the same results as real life, even when the same action is performed, it still helps.
It helps with reflexes and the basic ability to react to a situation, that's not even close to 80% (your claim) and for everything it
may give it also causes a number of problems, and that I have already backed up with cited sources (rather than anecdotal comments).