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In my mind there are 2 very distinct areas where a sim can be said to be unrealistic.
- It exhibits characteristics that are not true to life, often these even defy the laws of physics themselves.
- It does not provide all the effects you'd feel in real life, or they are "muted" in some way (i.e. sims that do not model (for instance) high frquency bumps.
So, they either have stuff in them that is unreal or they lack stuff that is real. Of course, you can have a sim that does both and perhaps ALL sims have both to a greater or lesser degree.
Again, I will stress that I am mainly looking at a sim for it's value in the real world of race driving.
The problem with 1) is that, because it is doing extra and odd things, you end up doing extra and odd things in your driving that you wouldn't do in real life. What is worse, these are the things that make you fast in that sim. If I consider just GPL and GTR2002 for a moment, the fast lap replays/videos you see are out of this world, no wonder the drivers of these are often referred to as Aliens.
By out of this world I mean that they totally defy the laws of mechanical physics and go against much of what is proper race car driving technique. Hell, I'd say that most defy the laws of physics themselves.
Is this a problem? well, not to the computer games/sim drivers who are playing the game for it's own sake, whether they be playing for fun, aiming for the hot lap rankings or racing on line. It is a problem however if you were to consider using a sim as a training aid for real life drivers.
Now, there is value to real world drivers in all sims of course, you really need to run the correct line and use all the track to go quickly and all sims that I have played respond to correct line. You need to be smooth with the throttle application and I'd say this is also reflected in most sims to a degree. The concept of maximising exit speed is also a key to real world and sim pace. These elements are even catered for however in the more arcade type games and many console games.
So, will you learn more about real world race driving from GPL than from playing Grand Tourismo. Yes, of course, but much of what you may end up doing will be unrealistic and you may get totally the wromg idea about what it takes to go quickly in real life.
I was pretty active with GPL and raved about it at the time. Whilst the handling felt very alien to me at first, this was really my first serious sim and I put much of this down to getting used to the lack of feedback from computer sims. I did find that by employing the real world techniques I'd learnt, I could go quicker in GPL, I got quite quick, quite soon.
I happened to stumble on a guy who was quite quick as well but trying to go quicker, he offered his replays for viewing and I was astonished with what I saw. Essentially the guy was not much slower than me but his driving was totally unrealistic - his line was awful but he'd managed to go quick by learing to exploit the inconsistencies in the GPL engine (he had been driving GPL for 3years+).
I wrote a package and did some example replays and this was very popular and many drivers found that by following the techniquues (not mine, just the real world ones that are taught) they became much quicker and more consistent.
I was quite pleased with myself and was often heard to rave about GPL as a learning tool (it does have great value). Problem was I wanted to go even quicker. I found that I was getting quicker and for some time I thought it was just my hightened skill that was getting me there BUT I soon realised that I'd now started to do things that were totally unrealistic and I now too was exploiting the GPL physics engine.
Once I realised this and stood back and looked at GPL I realised how "unrealistic" it was. Theres a huge amount of value in GPL, perhaps the most is the online community and "virtual" racing experience it can give that is invaluable in the real world. BUT, we are talking here purely about how close to real life the handling is and in that respect it fares quite poorly in my view. Poorly in that it doesn't provide a number of the "effects" you get in real life but more importantly, it does quite a lot of things that are "unreal" and there is quite a bit of inconsistency in those things which are "de facto" in real life in that they obey general physics principles.
  
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