It has been vocalised a few times in the past, I've even said it myself.
Accurate lap times on laser-scanned tracks are just one more way for us to try and fool ourselves that the car is somehow accurate to its real-life counterpart. Of course, claiming that any sim car provides an accurate experience is like playing Call Of Duty and claiming you know how a soldier feels in the heat of battle. Sim racing is a videogame, and even sitting in a g-seat in VR on a motion platform with surround sound, FFB wheel, shifter and pedals... it's still just a videogame. We can use all the technology available to our wallets but it'll never really feel much like driving a real car around a real track. It's still bloody good fun though. But let's not try to pretend that an accurate lap time means that the car is somehow accurate, or that we have the skills of motorsport professionals. Devs and modders know that lap times are one of the few metrics by which 'accuracy' will be judged by the average Joe Simmer, so car specs are often fudged to achieve this. It's pretty meaningless.
I find it laughable when people start arguing about the minutiae of which version of a car is most accurate in any sim. You can only say "this car feels better to me" or "this car is closer to what I expect the real car to behave", but nothing more concrete than that.
Real F1 teams spend millions on state of the art simulators with full motion rig, wraparound screen and a room full of technicians monitoring telemetry. Not to mention all the CFD and wind tunnel testing. They download literally terabytes of data from all sorts of sensors from 2 cars over a race weekend to feedback into the sim to make it more accurate. And yet, sometimes when they test a new part, the sim says it makes them faster, but when they put it on the real car it doesn't do anything or even makes it slower. Sometimes even from free practice 1 to free practice 2 the track conditions change slightly - temperature, wind speed, dust/rubbering - and the car feels completely different again. The brightest engineers and technicians in the world cannot figure out why and they just shrug "we just can't get the tyres to work today".
So the next time some modding team claims "this is the most accurate simulation of x" and wants you to fork out your cash, think again. A free version of the mod someone cooked up in their basement may well be more accurate, or both are wrong, or both are right depending on which session IRL you compare it to
Then the next race the team brings upgrades and that's it, your mod is obsolete.
Road cars are generally easier to simulate but even then you don't know all parameters. And for low volume/handbuilt/old cars there can be small variances in the build quality at the factory, you just cannot guarantee what is accurate because the baseline always changes. So yeah, for me as long as the car roughly handles the way I expect it to, it's good enough
P.S. We haven't even taken into account the differences in wheel equipment and FFB settings, or any of the myriad CSP physics adjustments. Even the same mod can handle totally different for different people.
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