The above in no way is meant to criticise GPL, it's designers, programnmers or players. It's a phenominal acheivement and has so much is good, but again we are trying to compare to real life.

The real reason that GPL fares badly for my purposes is that "you can go faster in GPL by doing things that would make you slower in real life or by exploiting effects that simply do not occur in the real world".

So, back to the original question .. How does GTR2002 rate? Well, I'm sure had I said that it is the equal of GPL at the start of this post, many GTR fans would have seen that as very positive, well, IMO it is very much "like" GPL in that there are some things it perhaps doesn't do that you would expect in the real world and, sadly, it does many things that a driver can make it do which are totally unrealistic.

It does appear from the many VCRs I've seen that these are the things that are producing the very fast laps.

As a driver training aid then, it is very much compromised. As I said with GPL though, you can still learn a lot and it does have great value as a training aid but there are other games which perhaps you would not consider that are much better for this purpose.

It is of course HUGE fun and a fantastic acheivement, I salute all those involved in it's production. The flaws that I speak of I believe are in the F12002 physics model itself.

I think some of the things I feel are unrealistic could be made better by further work on the GTR physics. I myself have worked on many mods with the MGI engine in Nascar Heat and know that you can always improved things and that it's not simply a question of proving real world values. Much of the recent progress with Heat mods has been through tinkering with values to acheive the right effect and not relying on the MGI engine correctly modelling the (real world) values provided.

I have been impressed with the M3 mod but I can feel the same issues in the underlying physics model.

I read a comment by Doug which I'm not sure I have the same wording but it went along the lines of "the goal is to make it convincing rather than real".I don't think that was totally it but I think what Doug meant was that he feels it's pretty much impossible to make something that feels 100% real so the goal is to make something that is as convincing as possible. Lets face it, 99.999% of sim drivers will never drive a race car at the limit for real and have no "real" idea how that would feel. I know many here think they do but I've never met a driver that knew before he'd experienced it.

Do we really want realism? well of course BUT, take away the G-Forces and general "fear" that you experience in real life driving a real life race car without these would be "pretty boring". Most here have seen in-car video of race drivers at work and it all looks very relaxed and under control. Playing a game we are effectively getting the same view BUT under our control and maybe with a bit of reasonable force fedback through the wheel.

In many ways I think a sim needs to be larger than life in order for most people to take it seriously. Take the tire-sqeal we all know and love in sims. In real life, on slick tires, you should never hear tire squeal under normal driving conditions. Try turning it off though and many sim driver could not judge the level of grip and the whole experience is less intense.

One issue I have with GTR is the "pitching" (back and forth movement). Sat in the cockpit I see the car jumping around like a kangeroo on hot coals (OK, I exaggerate). I think it is most defintely overdone as an effect in it's own right BUT it does make the car feel more alive and teaches smoothness.

The real cars do pitch a little but as a driver in the car you have a very sophisticated shock absorber to lessen this effect on your eyes (i.e. your body). I thought long and hard as to whether the pitching was realistic and it was just the static "hard" view in the car that made it seem not so. But, after some time I do think the effect is OTT and this is one of those things that perhaps could be made better via the GTR physics files. Part of the reason I have an issue with this is that in some of the VCRs I've seen this effect coupled with braking and turning is producing very much unreal handling. As the driver is able to drive 100s of laps he WILL start to use this effect to his advantage, it's simply in everyones nature.

I want to step back a little and just cover an "effect" that again, we all will experience.