My question to the people who have track experience and who have pushed cars to the limit… when does going over the limit and not catching become acceptable in your eyes? From everyone perspective we all should be Platinum Drivers and never spin out a car, or always catch them when they get outta wack! That was the worst part of GTS to me.. It was like every car I could master and drive like I was race car driver, then i would switch to AC with a much less powerful car and spin out, go off track, really have to concentrate to get a clean fast lap.. and this is with TCS on.. AC has a setting called factory which gives you the cars real driving aids it’s awesome, but yeah when does that line cross because every driving doesn’t have the same skill.
There is no rule you can measure it by, personal experience does come into, as does an understanding of basic vehicle dynamics.
Let's talk about Road cars first:
Most FR road cars are not going to be snappy over the limit, the layout and weight distribution gives them a much higher Polar Moment of Inertia, combine that with soft suspension (certainly by track or race car standards) which communicates the speed of load transfer better, as well as more progressive road tyres, so when cars of this
nature break away it's relatively slow and in most cases well communicated. That gives you more time to react and, to a degree, is more forgiving when it comes to catching it. Obviously the further you let the over-rotation happen, the harder it is going to be to catch and correct it, but with practice
its more than possible to do so.
FWD is arguably the easiest one to deal with, as rotation is mostly induced via lift-off oversteer and again is normally well communicated, the main thing you need to be aware of with them is wheelbase. The shorter the wheelbase the greater to load transfer is, so if you're not paying attention the snap to oversteer can be very quick (Pug 205 GTI's were notorious for this). Still very catchable, as it's an easier process than with other drivetrains, counter steer and
bury the throttle will do the job.
Mid-engine cars are potentially the trickiest of the road cars layouts to deal with, they will normally have the lowest Polar Moment of Inertia, so is the layout that will want to rotate the most, as such you will generally get less communication of over-rotation than FR or FWD. However the street focused suspension and tyres do help out here once again.
Rear-engine cars are a particular breed, and contrary to popular belief are not dynamically prone to on-throttle oversteer, quite the opposite, the are prove to understeer. Where things go wrong is that if you don't get your entry speed right, understeer set-s in and you lift-off you are going to end up with the mother of all lift-off-oversteer. That's why RR cars have a reputation for trying to kill you, not for throttle abuse, most are relatively difficult to lose on power oversteer, as all the weight is over the driven wheels, and as you apply power you get even more load over them. Once you get lift-off oversteer in a RR car you need to be very quick to catch-it.
4WD cars very much depend on what torque split bias they have to a degree, but as most have a relatively high Polar Moment, they tend to act quiet a bit like FR when they let go, one additional factor that can be a bit tricky with them is, due to the higher cornering speeds than four driven wheels and a full compliment of diffs can give you, the forces involved can be higher, and as such present a bit more of a challenge.
Finally you also have the main factor, which is that they are road cars, and with very few exceptions they are all dynamically set-up to be biased towards understeer, to illustrate just how much can be done with set-up in this regard we will take my wife's car. It's rear-engine, has a short wheelbase (under 2.5m), and weighs less than a tonne. Sounds like a design built to lift-off oversteer doesn't it?
well I can assure you that you will not get this...
...to oversteer. The suspension set-up and narrower front track than the rear more than see to that.
This is why the likes of 350Z, MX-5's, etc should be far easier to catch and correct, even when you have stepped over the limit by a good few degrees than the are in GT 7. Will you catch them every time? Of course not, but with a bit of practice you should be able to get the majority. In that regard they breakaway in GT 7 far too quickly and are far harder to catch than the should be.
Now when we move onto race cars, the same fundamentals from above still apply, but you are now in cars that are far stiffer sprung, much lower to the ground and will have had everything done possible to reduce the Polar Moment of Inertia. Examples of how far the PMI point can be taken can be seen in the likes of DTM and other spaceframe silhouette series, where the driver in practically in the
middle of the chassis and the engine is far further back that in the road car its trying to look like, they will even ensure the brake callipers are as close the middle of the cars as they can if regs allow it. Add in race tyres, and you have a mixture than will be snappier, more willing to rotate and give you less notice its going to do it, and be less progressive in terms of the tyres.
Race cars should be less easy to catch when they let go than road cars, but again depending on the car it will vary. A Spec-Miata is going to be friendlier than a Formula Ford, but none of them are impossible to catch, you just want to try and avoid silly angle in them, both because they will be trickier to catch and because it's slower around the track.
TL: DR. It varies from car to car, race cars are harder than road cars and GT 7 still has work to do even post 1.06.
