Why top GTA times show no finesse at all?

[dsgerbc]

It would take transforming

What you're describing is a real-life equilibrium of what is really happening in practice. There are valid reasons for it. IRL, grip is not a constant in a given turn for a given car. There are bumps/humps/surface grain variations etc. What a typical trackday enthusiast/amateur racer can 'find' is a trajectory that does not take one into the area where the tires start to lose traction/break away beyond the skill/reaction of the driver. And the reason people avoid overstepping the limit is because these small variations in grip make the car a lot harder to control IRL than in the sim with glass-smooth surface. So small variation in grip is not that relevant to the existing practice, but it is relevant if one were to try sliding through corners consistently. I have nothing to disagree with in what you're saying about the existing practice. But that existing practice itself is a consequence of what happens to the grip on a real-life surface once the limit has been exceeded.

 

[Exorcet]

What you're describing is a real-life equilibrium of what is really happening in practice. There are valid reasons for it. IRL, grip is not a constant in a given turn for a given car. There are bumps/humps/surface grain variations etc. What a typical trackday enthusiast/amateur racer can 'find' is a trajectory that does not take one into the area where the tires start to lose traction/break away beyond the skill/reaction of the driver. And the reason people avoid overstepping the limit is because these small variations in grip make the car a lot harder to control IRL than in the sim with glass-smooth surface.

Not necessarily, the on/off grip in GT5 (that remains but isn't quite as prevalent in 6) makes things overly difficult. Breaking traction doesn't have to be an event. The first time I broke my rear wheels free at an autocross I countersteered and that was the end of it.

All the variation in grip plays as much of a role when the tire is below the grip limit then when it is above, so if you can drive consistently below the limit, you could probably do the same above if you tried. This is what professional drifting is actually. Surface imperfections or not, if GT6 physics are accurate, people would slide on corner entry. Clearly this doesn't happen in the real world.

So small variation in grip is not that relevant to the existing practice, but it is relevant if one were to try sliding through corners consistently.

It has the same impact no matter how your driving, because it all goes back to the tires. That patch of track that is slightly smoother and slightly less covered in rubber than the surrounding track doesn't care whether or not your tires are gripping or slipping, it's going to change how much grip you have available.

9 times out of 10 though the change is so small that it does nothing to the car.

But that existing practice itself is a consequence of what happens to the grip on a real-life surface once the limit has been exceeded.

Drifters seem to have no problem with consistency.

 

[dsgerbc]

It has the same impact no matter how your driving, because it all goes back to the tires. That patch of track that is slightly smoother and slightly less covered in rubber than the surrounding track doesn't care whether or not your tires are gripping or slipping, it's going to change how much grip you have available.

Don't think so. If you're around the maximum grip of the tire, a little bit more or less slip in the contact patch is not gonna do much to overall grip. If you're already beyond maximum grip, more slip is gonna reduce the grip further, leading to more slide. Then it's up to a) driver's reaction and b) further changes in grip, exacerbating the slide. If counter-steering/changing throttle was all there was to it, nobody would ever spin. Where in fact everyone who tries to get close to the limit spins/crashes at least sometimes. Because sometimes when you overstep the limit, random contributions from the track make the slide unrecoverable despite timely steering/throttle response. And that's my point: in GT6 these random contributions are seemingly absent, so if you can induce a slight slide that you can catch later, there is nothing that will make it unrecoverable.