- 358
- CA
- Z-Crazy
Speak for yourself,
Got a couple of of racecars under my belt. All on rock-hard super cycled slicks in a demo reference, but racecars none-the-less.
I do agree with you on sims and aero though. All they can do is preprogram situations for a particular value of simulated grip and drag.
As far as the soft, hard, medium thing goes... I prefer the tire that allows me to go the fastest. You'll never see me using a tire that doesn't offer an advantage over another, but at the same time in a spec racing class or setting I have no problem using what's available. My real gripe about the hard tires is they are too slow in terms of lap time in comparison to the softer tires. Longevity is good between all the compounds but they are spaced a little too far in lap time. People don't use them because there's is no advantage to them. One exception, appears to be the GT300's. They can use a Hard or Med tires very effectively.
Yeah, the actual info is very hard to find, but some companies will make public their figures over time. Here's a link to a cool LMP site, http://www.mulsannescorner.com/ . The site is geared toward very technical reading, but still good to go through. They also have an aero-database for many different types of cars through many different genre's. Take a look through, I noticed they had the McLaren GTR that raced in both the FIA championships and the Super GT championship so thats the closest thing I can find to a Super GT car and the level of downforce they create. However the site have tons of LMP/Group C/GTP figures. Its cool to get more insight on how some of the cars in the past were so dominant. For example the all dominanting late 80's-early 90's Nissan GTP car. When you look at the amount of downforce that car generated and the drag levels it had its easy to see why an excellent driver like Brabham was so dominant.
I used to think this as well, but there were outliers to that way of thinking. E.g why was the Denso SC430 so good on the Dunlops? It didn't make sense to me at first. All the other Dunlap cars were pretty bad, but after I read a few of the descriptions it became very clear. PD went out of their way to model the cars to the pecking order of the class, Most of the cars in that list were alone in development. Meaning they had no help and had to do it alone. That's a big deal as far as tires go. I think PD handicapped the cars as best as they could to portray that, in some cases I think they went too far, Clarion GTR and Epson NSX. But I believe the Stealth NSX is actually a quite good car even on the Dunlops.
I think I was getting 2:16's on mediums from testing. Maybe faster because my gearing was wrong. 2:15's are probable. 
