A few things about the controller steering, so we can figure out whether there is in fact a bug or not, as internal testing showed significant gains:
Filtering is only active if your device type is not a wheel. It does not, however, use steering rates, but rather raw direct inputs. The smart filter is basically just a smart version of speed sensitivity - instead of limiting your steering to an arbitrary value, it uses slip angles to determine how far you want to be able to turn. At 100% steering aggression, it allows you to turn in at a 10° slip angle, which should be way more than enough to overdrive just about any tyre, for example. At maximum countersteering, it will aim the tyres towards the direction the car is going, to correct slides. Meaning if you keep the stick neutral, it will stay in-between those two possibilities, which usually is not fully enough to correct slides for you. It does, however, result in small steering movements reacting to your car - similar ones to what you would experience if you were to let go off the steering of a real race car, in fact.
If, and only if, your controls are digital (dpad, keys, etc), it will additionally use steering rates which were fine tuned to be as unintrusive as possible, however, they were hardcoded.
There is one known "bug" (less so bug rather than design problem) where if you use the wheel setting to disable all filtering, not setting your steering angle to the same as the max allowed steering angle in the settings will result in rather broken feeling steering, so make sure that's not the case here.
Either way, with analog controls, steering movement should still be absolutely instant, just within a certain range of slip angle of the front wheels.
Internal testing actually showed slower steering was preferred, but untofrunately introducing actual steering rates to limit it turned out to make it too tricky to catch slides (either you'd be unable to correct them or you'd simply overcorrect and crash, and it would generally feel detached) so we decided not to use them for now. As you can see, ironically, for the exact reason that is being complained about.
While a steering rate setting would have been ideal, unfortunately actual steering rate systems meant for racing games are far too complex for a single setting to control them, and we don't want our users to require a degree in rocket science just in order to set up their controllers.
The Grand Prix series of games found a pretty nice way to solve it, which happens to use slip angles too, and due to this happens to have similar steering behaviour as our system where the steering wheel snaps back when you let go. They are a great example for how complex steering rates would get, and allow very limited adjustment for that reason. If you've played those in the past and find this does not apply at all, please let us know (ideally with a video showing controller input and actual game steering) and send us your controller file to investigate.
There's a reason we decided to keep the wheel option filter free. If yours is definitely not filter free, please send a recording and your controller file our way as that would have to be fixed ASAP.
I am not in my office right now but once I am, I will record and post a video how it's supposed to look. Either way, a game that wants to be taken seriously needs an easy way to make gamepad controls work for more people than hardcore enthusiasts. We found this one to improve controls and laptimes significantly, even for advanced players, to the point where it was no problem to get within a second per lap of even esport times without much practice, and without feeling intrusive. So yeah, as stated, if it doesn't do that, please let us know.
