I was playing Gran Turismo 4 on my old PS2 this morning for old time's sake. Anyways, I spent a few hrs in Time Attack mode driving all my favorite cars on Nurburgring to see how they stack up against each other. I knew I had to find a way to make it a fair contest, so I made some rules for myself: All cars used must be default stock, no changes to parts or settings allowed. All cars must be driven with Sports Medium tires and no driving assists and manual transmission. Also, I needed to be sure that I knew the best racing line for the Ring, so I drove it over and over until I was very familiar with the course and could get the same times consistantly.
Here's where it get's interesting... I decided to check my Nurburgring times with the real times of the same cars. I was amazed to find that they were allmost identical! I never expected that from an old PS2 game. Here is an example of my findings:
NSX-R - 7:56.783 Nurburgring - Gan San Kurosawa - Real Life
NSX-R - 7:56.915 Nurburgring - [SMOKE] - Gran Turismo 4 PS2
Stock default NSX-R, no upgrades of any kind, no driving assists, sports medium tires, manual transmission. And no video game style driving: no shortcuts, grazing walls or anything. Just proper racing line driving the same as the guy driving it in real life on youtube. Anyways, I thought that was kind of interesting. It surprised the crap outta me - so I thought I'd share with you guys.Added (2011-07-29, 2:53 PM)
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This makes me wish LFS had an NSX-R and the Nurburgring - to see if it would be the same in LFS as well. I know that Gran Turismo 4 doesn't have perfectly realistic physics, but for whatever reason, the times are the same. Maybe because the cars are acurate to the real ones and the track is accurate to the real one - and the physics are close enough. Either way - this had made me really appreciate Gran Turismo. Now I want to take my car in the game and add just one part and test, then remove that part and add one other part and test - etc. To see which part I should buy in real life to get the best feel and results. 
