With my limited mental capacity I would have thought a Virtual safety car would be easier to implement in the game than an actual car to model. I am not a programmer so I'm sure someone will say otherwise, it was just a thought.
If you think of a car (or any game feature) as a cake, then there are recipes and ingredients.
The recipe is the physics framework - it's telling the computer what to do with all these ingredients you're feeding it with.
The ingredients are the data of the car - torque, weight, wheel base, gear ratios, suspension settings, etc.
The mixing of the ingredients is done by the computer, when it takes the ingredients and runs them through the recipe and the finished cake is what the player can see on the screen.
You can have a whole group of cars sharing the same recipes, and just adjust the amounts of each ingredient. A car that's radically different from the other cars (like, having 3 wheels or tank tracks) will probably need a different recipe, or at least a recipe that is tweaked in some ways to suit the unique character of this particular car, but most cars can use the same sets of recipes.
So once you have the basic recipes done you can easily add more cars to the game, all you need to do is to adjust the amounts of each ingredient.
As for the safety car, there's no existing recipe for it, so they'd have to start by creating that, which is a different process than simply adding ingredients:
They need to decide its behaviour, properly identify the events that will trigger it, work out what will happen when it goes back to the pits, what will happen if you overtake someone while the SC is out, what will happen if you overtake the SC, etc.
It's probably doable if they're prepared to spend some time on it, but then it's a matter of how important this feature would be for the game, and how it compares to all the other items that are on the to-do list.
The most frustrated I gotten when playing this game so far. I'm in my 5th season btw driving LMP2 cars. Enjoying playing online with friends though as some of you saw from my videos.
