I know we can adjust the colour with our graphics cards and screens, but I always look an unrealistic balance, with so much saturation. Example: Here the comparison: View attachment 9192
This is very subjective. F1 2012 looks more 'TV' to me, so if you compare to TV shots I'm sure it'll look better. Thing is, depending on the time, real life does look pretty saturated sometimes. Early on there was an rF2 preview shot with an official standing in front of a garage, and one of the comments was that it was too saturated, and an edited version was even put up with a slightly washed out look. But when someone in bright orange overalls stands in the sun... it looks pretty saturated. Your comparison shot seems a waste of time, because obviously in two different games they're not even showing the same thing. And what you see any at given track would also change at times - I was using google streetview to look at some detail at Monza the other day, and all the kerbs looked pretty dull and worn. But I'm sure at times they'd patch up and repaint things, and then it'll look bright for a while. A lot of tracks they paint the grass green so it looks better, or use artificial grass. And at a track that has actual grass, the colour will be different if it's been raining a lot vs if there's been a dry spell. The video above is Sepang - I'd be tending to favour very green grass. The rF2 kerbs in the video do seem to pop out in the red areas, but again - a bright red paint in sunlight doesn't suddenly appear washed out. It looks bright red. But I'm sure if you run it through an automatic adjustment routine in a paint prog it'll bring that back a bit, so the question is: do you want the game to look like you're watching a video, or try to sort of replicate what you'd see in person? Back to the old lens flare arguments. And that all comes back to design decisions, plus it seems likely the whole HDR side is still a work in progress, so I don't know if there's much to be gained in the search for 'real'.
