NTM improvements

Tire model has been updated in some cars and change is HUGE. I had my first test last weekend racing a few laps in Road Atlanta with Mercedes GT3 and I must say it is awesome.

Looking back my background with GT3 cars, which is nearly non existent, this could be a very unimportant opinion from who doesn’t have enough feeling with previous handling, but in retrospect you should know how many time I tried to drive these series while I hated car behavior. Before, cars were unpredictable, racing in wooden tires while you could feel nothing from them or the road. Impossible to be constant, impossible to love, missing apex and braking points, a torture to drive.

Last Porsche addition included these tire model improvements and now some GT cars have been updated for the good. You can read forums to see almost 90% iRacing drivers are amazed by this update and impressive to see real drivers enjoying GT3 cars again.

Everything is closer to a real car. Feeling the road, bumping, kerbs and above all, braking and lateral slipping. Predictable, driveable and at last, enjoyable as always should be.

Beano:

I did a number of laps in the Moocedes around Sebring Pre-built, and then tested just now, post-built.

My best set of yesterday was totally useless, over a second slower than the new baseline set of the new built. Overall, the car is also ~1 sec /lap slower now, but it feels significantly more planted compared to the previous built. A very welcome change.

Recovering from power-slides have always been easy in the Moocedes, but now, it’s even better and easier, and, dare I say, more accurate. With a bit more Camber and a fair amount more Castor, it feels really good, almost real-life like….just my humble opinion, but for sure a very big step in the right direction.

Samuel McKenzie-Sell

RUF 12R Track is probably the biggest change I’ve experienced. That car was feisty, snappy and a pain in the ass before the update. It would skid for no reason, with no recovery (unlike almost all other cars in the service, and unlike ANY other light-midweight car). Most of the skids it made were “normal”, but one little bump wrong and it would spin like it had RCS thrusters on it.

Just drove it at Road Atlanta, times were on par after a few laps. I feel… well that’s just it. I can feel the car now. The understeer scrub as you turn in whilst on the brakes, the sudden grip spike as the speed matches the angle and the weight transfers over. Most importantly, when it skids, or starts to skid, there’s a bit of a transition. A point, at around about 10 degrees slip, where you can really feel the “edge” of grip and the sudden falloff that exists past that.

On bumps, kerbs and ABS it has plenty of responsiveness. I felt comfortable letting it clip on one corner on the track in order to run FFB a few points higher, it felt like the FFB was “higher resolution” and turning up the FFB let the grainy feeling of scrub come through.

The only “downside” was a little bit of looseness in the center, followed by a “notch” feeling of ffb kicking in despite turning down the minimum force setting to below what should have been required (and the feeling still existed at 0 minimum force). This is a tough one to get right, and I prefer it as it is now 1000x over what it used to be. Some cars in real life have that loose center (especially if there’s no steering assist) and many cars with steering assist use a shitton of damping to make the wheel stay still on its own, which messes with most people’s understanding of the forces involved.

On the brakes, slamming the foot to the floor is a little less effective with ABS. The best braking moment is just a few milliseconds after you put the pedal on (once the brake has heated, but the car is still producing downforce – I’m talking GT3 type cars here) and slamming it to the floor will skip the wheel as the ABS kicks in, wasting that moment of amazing grip. That said it wasn’t a huge change, a tire like this may make a big difference to open wheelers in the future.

TL;DR: Much fun. Good change. Back to racing

Andrew Massey

I’m loving it as well. Spent the last 4 hours out with the Audi GT3. It’s amazing. My setups didn’t change that much but the car is more predictable and well, drives as you would expect a real car to drive. I do have GT experience in real life (Motorola Cup car) and this feels more like what my car felt like…. well without that whole seat of the pants thing.