SnyperP
You say that PD made the same mistake with the GT series and I say they are making great progress.
I wasn't referring to the control or realism, which has indeed improved every time. I was simply referring to how they program a single component, and just apply it with those same settings to every single car in the game, regardless of whether that car behaves that way in real life.
A good example is the TVR Speed 12. They give it traction control, which is fine, since a lot of casual gamers wouldn't be able to drive the thing otherwise, despite the fact that TVRs don't have traction control. But it's applied with the same "generic" settings as every other car. Even with TC maxxed out, the car will still spin the tires all the way into fourth gear. That simply isn't realistic, regardless of how much power the car has. The Bugatti Veyron in real life has significantly more power than the TVR, and yet it'll barely bark the tires off the line. It worries me that if that car, or one like it, is in GT5, that I won't be able to actually use any of the car's power, because of the crappy application of generic traction control.
That's the sort of mistake they made there, and it's similar to how they applied the wheelie/stoppie physics to the bikes in TT. The restrictions that they set in place for the casual gamers, and the "generic" settings applied to the bikes causes most of them to be very difficult, or impossible, to wheelie, even though they can do it in real life just by gunning the engine.
I think part of the problem is PD's insistance on including as many vehicles as they can. With so many cars/bikes, they're forced to apply generic settings to all of them, since it would take far too long to actually tweak each car/bike to exactly match it's real-world performance. In most cases, this works, because of how the physics engine reacts to things like power, weight distribution, suspension settings, etc.. but it doesn't work for everything. We saw it in GT, and now we see it in TT. It's a flaw they should pay more attention to for next-gen, and hopefully they can.. the extra space on the disc and the extra computing power of the Cell could allow them to create more individual tweaks and settings.