As I mentioned, I have worked on many mods for Nascar Heat. That involves testing physics, hence doing lots of laps with a particular car model.

Often, when I first fire up a new car model, it will feel very unrealistic. There then may follow a few tweaks and before long, it starts feeling realistic, very realistic. A small amount of that is the tweaking, BUT the largest part is that I am now becoming familiar with driving this particular physics model and I attribute much of my comfort to the fact that the physics are now almost spot on. Now, this can take 2-3 months of course but the effect can be quicker.

Often, when we start to drive a new sim, we will rate it on how realistic it FEELS compared to our LEARNT DRIVING MODEL. I had to be very careful with this when working on the Heat mods but was fortunate enough to be race driving in real life most weeks as well, also driving other sims to some degree. I'm certainly not immune to it though.

I wasn't particularly impressed with GTR when I first tried it. I think I perhaps would have been more impressed had I played F12002 previously or maybe F1-2001 and some of it's mods. It would have felt more "comfortable".

Also, in coming to some conclusions on GTR I was fortunate enough to spend a days testing at Donington Park in a similar spec car, well only about 1/2 the horseposer at 228bhp but a similar handling model, loads of torque though as it was a Turbo .. anyway. I ran GTR at DP the next day and it was very far away from what I'd experienced the day before.

I did the same with LFS, which was and still is highly rated as being quite realistic. I had just spent a whole weekend racing a Ford Fiesta Race car (very much like the GTI in the game). A 6hr endurance race at Snetterton on the Saturday and 2 races at Brands the day after. I tried LFS and again it is very far from what a real FWD car handles like. It is a "convincing" sim and loads of fun, I spent many a happy night online with it, yes, it began to feel better and better, but after my next Fiesta race it felt as far away as ever once more.

A much less sophisticated mod is NetKar which I also tried. Even though it is much less polished I could feel the semblance of a real world car there. There are some oddities but less than games such as GPL and GTR2002 and there are some definite real world effects in there.

OK, so, even though I've perhaps been controversial enough I'll finish with something that might be considered even more so ...

So, both GPL and GTR2002 are flawed but the best we have at the moment .. Yes?

Well, No. Not based on my criteria of a sim as a Training aid. To recap, to be a good training aid the sim must model real life as close to 100% as possible. I've already said I think this is pretty much impossible at the moment (or at least intimated that) so we must look for a sim that comes closest to 100%. GPL and GTR have many real world effects which would rate it quite highly on this scale BUT, they also have numerous idiosynchrasies and oddities that count against it.

I have no idea how to actual rate this, these numbers are just picked out of mid air. Say both GPL and GTR rate as 75% on the "realistic effects" scale BUT they score 50 points for their respective items on "unrealness".

Now, personally, as soon as sim starts to score in the unrealness category it is flawed as a training aid and rapidly starts to decline as an overal "training sim".

I'm not equating the 50 points to 50% and deducting them from the 75% but using that sort of principal, a sim that scored LOWER on the realism count (say 60%) BUT scores considerably less on the UNREALNESS score, would, IN MY VIEW be considered by me as a better sim, specifically, a better training sim AND as being CLOSER TO REALITY.

Using that principle, some of the mods that have been developed for Nascar Heat (and not just those I have been involved in) are, IMO, CLOSER to reality than GPL or GTR2002, or in fact anything else I have driven.