Signed up for Manufacturers just to give this thing a go, ran it around Nordschleife as I had heard it was a murder machine there.
First impressions, first lap - lacks rear downforce but feels similar to GT Sport, was having trouble through the fast corners.
A few laps later
I love the thing!
Very pointy front end and a huge amount of traction coming out of the slow corners allows you to put the power down hard and early.
The similarities to sport to me is the overly stiff suspension, which means it doesn't enjoy curbs so much, which in GT7 are much more punishing by comparison to sport.
So the way I started to tame the car was to learn what curbs I can go near and what curbs to avoid. The 2nd point was to control the behaviour of the car through the high speed corners. After a few laps with the controller (PS5 Dual Sense), I thought I would plug in the wheel (T300RS default settings) to try out the difference and see how far away I was from what I remember from GT Sport. First time using the wheel in GT7.
The wheel makes it much easier to control through the high speed corners, I can be much more precise with the steering input and carve nice lines through the high speed corners, so I'm not feeling as though the rear downforce is lacking as my first impressions.
It is less stable in the medium speed corners. So I have found I have to drive through the corner. By that I mean, I brake in a straight line, and then am somewhat on the throttle to stabilize the car through the corner. If I try to not use the throttle through the corner, the rear end of the car wants to step out. It teaches a lot of control and patience, corner entry setup is very important to creating a fast lap time, and that is much easier said than done.
I then fired it up again this morning on the controller. This is the first time I have noticed such a difference between the controller and the wheel. The controller must have some sort of stability built into it, or some sort of smoothing, as the car is more stable in the slower speed stuff than with the wheel, but is more difficult in the high speed corners.
I totally get why people do not like this thing, and even if I decided to get competitive with the car and practice, it would be very track dependant on how well it performs and from a competitive standpoint that isn't great. I think it is less competitive than GT Sport at Nurburgring, where it wasn't competitive there in the first place, but feel a smoother track with less aggressive curbs it could be right up there, but certainly not troubling the best cars. I feel the fix would have to come from car setup, I don't feel the physics are broken, although can certainly see people jumping to that conclusion and writing it off.
But as it stands, it has been one of my favourite drives in the game yet!
I am happy to produce a video for anyone wanting to see it, noting a few comments in this thread recently.