Toshi
I disagree. GM could make a car that was competitive with Ferrari's best, but the don't not because of safety concerns but because of price point. Corvettes are $40-60k generally, and the market would not bear having the next generation 'Vette all of sa sudden jump up to $200k.
Price point and performance are surprisingly unrelated figures. The Porsche GT3 costs 3 times as much as the Corvette Z06, but their performance on the track is essentually identical.
My point is that manufacturers make the cars go as fast as their customers want, not as fast as they can possibly make them go. With only $10-20k aftermarket alterations, the vette easily outperforms the stock half million dollar cars put out by Ferrari, Porsche, etc while still costing only a small fraction. And that's because price point is affected by many other factors besides actual speed.
This isn't just true for the vette... lots of cars can be made substantially faster for only a small outlay of cash. And it's not because the engineers don't know what they're doing.
So I maintain that the cars are just as fast as manufacturers want them to be. And manufacturers want them to be just as fast as their customers want. And there is a limit to that. Notice that even for the folks on the forums here they decide that the rediculously fast cars in the game are not much fun to drive.... and they don't even have to worry about paying for them or dying or anything. It's just too much car for them to handle.
When you get into the big time sports cars in RL, that immediately becomes a factor. I've offered to let some of my friends who have other sports cars drive my vette, and they decline because they find their own sports cars difficult enough to handle as it is... they doubt their ability to handle a car with nearly twice as much power...
You know... it sounds neat to drive around in a car that can light up the tires at 80mph... but when you really drive one in RL, there are certain realities of that situation that become apparent right away...
Just one slip at the controls could be real bad news.
Furthermore, the Z06 is selling just fine.
http://lang.motorway.com/home/articles/chevycorvette.asp suggest that ~20% of Corvettes are Z06 models.
Yeah, that's a recent phenomina. The buying public has become more interested in performance lately. Notice that Chevy has responded to this by bringing out the new C6 Z06 with 500 horses under the hood _stock_.
It is not very difficult for a vette to get 500 horses out of that V8 block (come now... just look at the horsepower manufacturers are pulling out of tiny 4 cylinder engines. When you apply those same techniques to small block V8's, it produces horsepower in the four digits). So it's not like it took them until now to be able to to do it. The difference is the public wanted it. A decade ago, the public would not have bought a 500hp version.
But they want it now. So they get it.
Finally, let me state again that GM is not competing with Ferrari, so your final paragraph is ridiculous. There's no moratorium among manufacturers. Rather, each one tries to make the best car that they can at their chosen price point, whether $50k for a Corvette or $500k for an Enzo.
There isn't a formal agreement among them, sure. But one of the realities of business is that if one company severely undercuts the others, it turns into a bloody struggle for survival with all of the companies involved trying to knock eachother completely out of the industry.
Businesses definately want to beat their competitors. But it turns into something different when a powerful competitor believes that it's kneck is on the chopping block. It can lead to struggles like occured in the hard drive industry where the margins actually went negative and drives were being sold for less than it cost to build them. Have you noticed that there are a lot fewer names on hard drives these days? That industry almost completely collapsed.
Oh... and... if you think GM isn't competing with Ferrari, you haven't been watching the Le Mans races...
Now... all that being said, I don't totally disagree with your points. You do make a good argument. Price points do have an effect on the equation... but I'm pointing out that the total equation is much more complex than that, and price point doesn't effect performance as much as one would expect. The world of the automotive industry is a complex beast for sure. And I doubt that either of our points of view on the subject is entirely correct.
- Skant
I can't speak for every car and every track in GT, but I can say that having driven the real thing and virtual thing back to back... the simulation of my car on the local tracks I've been to is pretty damn good. Good enough that I use it to practice for RL events rather extensively.
