The magic in AC and GT and even Forza for that matter is the illusion you could do the same thing in real life.
Lose a car at speed and it is not easy to reel it back in even for a professional:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr1qfg6zo_Q
I've done a lot of laps at CMP and this is the part of the track that puts hair on your chest every single lap. The video above shows JJ spinning a Corvette at the kink. It requires full throttle once you enter to keep the rear from stepping out. Full commitment or you spin (unless you are going so slow the car isn't loaded up, then I'd suggest a new hobby). Even in a moderate sports car with street tires you enter at 90mph and then keep it floored.
The point is even someone who knows what they are doing can't catch a slide with ease when they feel it begin if the car is already being pushed hard. AC makes those that don't know any better believe they can do stuff that would give a pro a hard time. Not digging on AC but I don't consider it a sim. rF2 is my benchmark and it still inflates our egos just a little bit.
*Tim even said rF2 isn't as punishing as it should be WRT to the tire model.
I somewhat agree. I'll copy and paste what I wrote on a very similiar thread titled "Assetto corsa not a Pure sim"
http://insidesimracing.tv/forums/topic/12562-assetto-corsa-not-a-pure-sim/
Assetto Corsa reminds me of the first 100 or 200 laps of my real-life F1600 and F2000 laps through a couple years, more than any other sim. In certain ways I believe it really is superior....
However....
After those first couple hundred laps, once I started really getting to the point where tiny differences in your throttle/braking/steering inputs can make huge differences (even dangerous) to the car's behaviour, learning how to brake even later than the point where you feel you have already braked too late and are going to head into the wall, learning how to really get the rear end rotated upon braking and initial turn-in, etc. etc. Well once I got to understand just how insanely sensitive these cars can be then I finally understood RFactor and IRacing.
If I never raced so long (probably over 700 laps total), and wasn't blessed with some half-decent skill, and only maybe did 50 or 100 laps then I also would have thought that Assetto Corsa was the be-all-end-all best, BUT, once I reached a certain area-envelope of what the car can do then a whole new can of worms opened up and it's a COMPLETELY different experience from the "I think and feel like I am pushing the hell out of this car, I locked a brake, i got some understeer" (but really am nowhere near the limit) type of experience. Once I got to a further level I realise that the more direct and sensitivty of RFactor and IRacings car behaviour modelling are actually superior, but only when really really pushing hard. In my opinion based on my decent amount of real-life experience that is.
The problem is that most people do not/cannot push cars to this area of their capability, and therefore will never experience this for themselves and therefore possibly won't believe when people say that in certain ways (but not all) that IRacing and RFactor car behaviour is superior to Assetto Corsa (not all the time) because they go by their own limited (or just not close enough to the cars maximum performance envelope) experience, and from that they gather that AC must be completely, totally, superior because they just can't believe that cars can be so tricky, edgy, on the limit, hyper sensitive to your inputs etc.
So on one half of car behaviour/physics IRacing and RFactor are superior, but on the other half Assetto Corsa is superior. The side that Assetto Corsa is superior on though is what the majority of people experience with their roadcars, or with a 3 or 4 day racing school course, etc. However for the EXTREMELY rare amount of people who have done hundreds of real race-car laps, and done them at a relatively competitive pace as well, then they should definitely be able to see the areas where IRacing and RFactor are superior as well.
So it's around 50/50, it's just that 99% of people won't experience that other 50% in real-life so when they experience it in a sim they think it's wrong and just can't believe it, and think it's overly & unrealistically difficult.
ALSO, not the pure physics themself, but PERCEPTION of those physics from the way you "feel" the car in a game can make a HUMUNGOUS difference to your perception of the physics, whether for better or for worse. AC does a good job with a very consistent car-to-car FFB feel, RFactor 1 did a horrible job with a consistent car-to-car FFB feel (millions of FFB options in the controller file + Leo plugin + RealFeel plugin + combinations of them, etc.). Feel, whether from FFB, visual, or audio cues, can really make you think a sim's physics are worse than they really are, or also better than they really are (not implying anything about AC or RF1, just saying). Our perception through these feel cues, unfortunately, can really affect our judgment of the pure vehicle dynamics / car behaviour of a sim.
(EDIT: and it's both physical and graphical)
