3 mpg is pretty believable. It's amazing how quickly a track day will suck your fuel tank dry. My vette gets 24 mpg on the freeway and somewhere around 5 mpg on the track. It has a 20 gallon tank, and I will have to refuel at least once.
As to the argument about whether PD got all the gas tank sizes or not... let me start by saying that it's probably not very important whether they did or not because... while different cars have different sized gas tanks, the fuel range is almost always approximately the same. Manufacturers choose the size of the fuel tank to match the fuel consumption of the engine. So most cars have a fuel range of 300-400 miles.
So giving all the cars a standardized fuel tank and fuel consumption wouldn't be all that far from the truth.
On the other hand, researching the fuel tank sizes for 700 cars wouldn't actually be all that difficult. And it seems certain that PD would have a great deal of technical data on every car they've included in the game anyway. So I don't see any reason to assume that would somehow be too difficult for PD to include in the game. Here... a 10 second web search reveals that the Cizeta's fuel tank has a 120 liter capacity in RL. Not hard information to come by at all, even for a rare car.
I don't think the fact that they show 80 units for all cars necessarily proves anything one way or another. I don't think its correct to assume that it would necessarily tell you if it knew. The game knows _a lot_ of technical data on these cars which it doesn't display. Because why would the user care how long the suspension arms are, anyway? Why would they care how many gallons are actually left? They don't have to pay for the gas, so its pretty moot. Arguably, a generic unit representing a percentage of the tank is actually easier for the player to use. I mean... if it says you have 7 gallons left... does that mean you've used less than half your tank, and you can do another stint without refilling the tank? That's really the decision the player is trying to make, isn't it?
That said, it would actually be the other side of the equation that would be harder to figure out. The fuel consumption. As has been mentioned, fuel comsumption on the track is nothing like fuel consumption at cruise. Fuel consumption is directly impacted by rpm. Which means that your gear selection and the way you shift gears as you circle the track will alter your fuel mileage substantially. This could make doing 'lab tests' with GT4 to determine these answers rather difficult and less than scientific. Provided that GT4 models this behavior of fuel consumption, that is.
Nobody (except an idiot) races on a track with 25 gallons of fuel in their tank, usually about half a tank is used.
How do you come to this conclusion? I'm wondering because I think you just called a lot of RL racers idiots. Including myself.
There are a number of reasons to run a full tank:
1) The track can eat an entire tank of gas in an hour or two.
2) Starving the fuel pump during sustained hard turns can become a problem sometimes even with as much as half the tank remaining... but more typically a quarter tank or so.
3) Fuel sloshes around quite a bit when the tank is half empty. This is actually throwing a significant amount of weight (100+ pounds) that can upset the car.
4) The fuel tanks are positioned over the drive wheels in many performance cars, and the weight of the fuel load will increase traction (most useful in drag racing).
And, of course, the reason to run less than a full tank is to save weight.
Which way you run depends on which pitfalls you want to face, what kind of car you have, and what event.
Formula cars generally get much faster when the fuel load is lighter (since the fuel load is such a large percentage of the car's total weight). But in production based cars, they could even get slower as the fuel is expended.
I run a full tank in my vette. The tank is positioned right over the rear wheels, and I need all the help I can get planting the power down out of the hair pins.
- Skant
i cant believe my fellow americans are always complaining about gas prices being high. they should take a look at the rest of the world.
