Coming from someone that has about 17 years of real life track experience my opinion is the only thing playing a racing video game that is available to the masses on a console gaming machine will generally help the average person is that of learning a tracks layout and learning a proper racing line or how best to string together different sections of track to maintain speed and momentum.
My experience is from 2 wheels and I will flat out say that sitting in an open wheeler racing seat in your moms basement will not prepare you for the perception of speed of running 165 mph or how fast things happen at those speeds. A console racing game does a poor job at giving the perception of speed that would mimic that experienced in real life.
It will not prepare you to actually develop and understand where you are as far as reaching or exceeding maximum grip levels in the real world where such understanding can be a difference in a good day or serious injury or even death of you or someone else on the same track as yourself.
Again without the seat of the pants feel and actual change in the feedback of the controls of beginning to lose traction a video game gives poor actual information of how hard you are pushing the tires available grip.
Not to mention how exaggerated control inputs and directions that you can get away with in the video game would never in the real world be close to what you could do and not crash.
Sitting in your moms basement in your open wheel racing seat will not prepare you to be both mentally prepared and physically capable for racing in an environment that can easily exceed 100 degrees fahrenheit or 38 degrees celsius for several hours in the summer and remain fully alert and focused and physically ready to wrestle a vehicle around a 3.5 mile circuit lap after lap within a few tenths of each laps time.
Driving a video game does not prepare you for how a vehicle will react to ripples in a track surface or the actual differences in the physics of grip between going downhill or uphill in the real world.
A video game does not accurately teach you control inputs or control feedback with your Thrustmaster wheel and pedal set up that you will feel through the controls of an actual race vehicle.
And no it does not teach you the feelings of the g forces which those feelings and interpreting what they are telling you play a major part in actually racing a real vehicle versus playing a game in your moms basement.
So while you say you are racing in a beginner spec miata class on who knows what kind of circuit perhaps your real world experience has not allowed you to run a fast enough speed or experience spinning up and losing the back end out of a fairly high speed corner to properly realize just how much different the feedback between a game and real life racing is.
But I will tell you braking from 165 mph down to 60 at the end of a long straight the game does not at all accurately duplicate all of the different input senses you feel or the same feeling of where you are on grip level between making or blowing the corner.
So perhaps you should quit making statements such as,
"but literally the only difference between sitting in a race car and sitting behind a T300 is the g forces, and the very real physical consequences of crashing."
as that statement alone shows just how little you know or understand about racing in the real world versus sitting in your moms basement playing a game.
The skill of racing a video game is very different from racing in the real world and if you fail to understand that then I question the validity of your statement on whether you have ever actually been on a track in real life at all.
