Dude, the biggest thing about the physics are the bounce you get when going over bumps. Especially braking into corners, the bounce you get.
Just out of curiosity, have you run the Ring in GT4 very often in one of the "challenging" cars? I couldn't even begin to estimate the number of times I've run the ring in the Yellowbird, Alpine 1600s, Elise, BTR, RGT, Lancia Stratos, etc. I just want to point out that, in all these cars, the ring is a wild and very bouncy ride. My feeling, from watching real-life ring footage, is that both GT4 and NFSS actually have that track rendered about right. Of course, we can't know for sure because we haven't driven the ring ourselves, the but the likelihood that two separate companies would manage to render the ring incorrectly but in a nearly identical incorrect way, seems pretty low.
That said, the more I play NFSS the more disappointed I am with the overall difficulty. As I mentioned in a previous post, the feedback is pretty convincing, and things generally seem to "work" as they should in the cars I've been driving, but there is still something wrong with the ease of "catching the car."
As an example: I boot-up GT4 and take the RGT around the ring a few times. I lose concentration for a split second and miss a braking point before a major elevation change. There is also a slight corner there. Suddenly I've lost contact with all 4 tires - during a corner! I'm in an RR car! Oh S**t! In real life, you would be likely to crash, burn, and die a horrible death. In GT4, you will be very likely to spin off and helplessly crash as the rear of the car swaps places with the front. It models the results of your mistake fairly true-to-life. Lucky for you it is a sim and you aren't dead. In NFSS, everything feels convincing up to that point, but then you are simply and magically able to catch the car. Not always, but far too often. I've twiddled every NFSS difficulty and steering setting I can think of, and I'm still not able to get the level of challenge out of it that I wish I could.
