How Realistic Are Racing Sims in 2025? A Look at the Digital-Real Divide
"It's just a game. It's not like reality."
If you are a fan of racing or racing games, at some point you've probably heard something along these lines. You may have even said it yourself. In the early days of racing games, the disparity betwixt virtual and reality was a massive chasm. Even today, many racing games still don't strive for realism, in favor of more casual fun. However, that isn't to say this holds true with all racing games, with some striving for realism and taking us farther than ever possible a few decades ago. To date, a perfect 1:1 representation of reality isn't possible, but there are modern simulations that can take us pretty close; enough so that drivers can and do train in them.
What makes a simulation realistic, though? Graphics are nice, but graphics only cover the look. A rather unrealistic game can still have a very good aesthetic, even lifelike, without offering other critical elements of realism. Conversely, a game can deliver a very compelling driving experience even if the visuals look a bit lackluster. The critical part are the racing physics, which mean the difference between something bordering on reality at one end of the spectrum to something with car-shaped objects defying all known understanding of how objects should behave.
As we dive deeper into this, we need to explain this spectrum in greater detail. Many regard racing games as binary. In their mind, it's simplified down to simulation and arcade. The reality is that this is more like a gray scale, and everything falls somewhere along that scale, but not simply all lumped at one end or the other. We could look at it as "arcade" on the far left, then maybe "semi-arcade" where you have stuff that vaguely seems like reality but honestly isn't, "simcade" towards the middle right of the spectrum, and then true sims at the far right.
Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport fall into that "simcade" part of the spectrum, where they lean more towards realism than the bulk of racing games, but they still aim to be more forgiving and more accessible, including being comfortably playable on a controller. True sims, like iRacing, rFactor, or Assetto Corsa, aren't designed for accessibility or to appeal to casual players just looking to go fast in car-shaped objects, but rather deliver uncompromising simulation experiences replicating the unforgiving, punishing, nuanced reality of pushing an automobile to its limits.
Physics: The Heart of Realism
No matter how great your game looks or sounds, the core of racing sim realism is its driving physics. At the center of all the physics are your tires. Everything that goes on in a race car is transmitted through the tires. As the car's weight shifts around, it sets more on this tire and lifts off of that tire. As a car's downforce increases it pushes the car down, pushing the tires more firmly against the road. As the road surface changes from asphalt to gravel or from dry to wet, it's the tires that feel that change, and the rest of the car is at the mercy of those tires.
More basic racing games just focus on the car's grip, and even then it's frequently not in a remotely realistic way. Some make an effort at somewhat realistic grip, but even so in reality it's not as simple as X amount of grip with this tire and Y amount with this tire, or A amount on this surface type and B amount on another surface. In real life, even the same set of tires changes all the time as the tire heats up or cools off, as it flexes, as it wears down, and as it deforms. Real sims attempt to depict these things, which really changes everything.
iRacing, for example, is famous for its data-driven, incredibly complex tire model. Virtual drivers must manage heat and tire wear in the simulation just as they would in a real race. If you overheat your tires by sliding around too much, your grip will "fall off", just as you would experience in a real car racing around a real track. Any experienced real-world driver is plenty familiar with this "cliff".
rFactor 2 takes this a step further with its "Real Road" feature. During virtual rFactor 2 races, cars leave rubber on the racing line. This dynamically "rubbers in" the track, which improves tire grip on the racing line, while leaving less grip off the ideal line. This is exactly what happens on any real-world race circuit. I don't know if you would hear commentators talking about this rubbering in for every racing series, but I know if you listen to enough F1 broadcasts you will hear about it sooner or later, and I'm sure I've heard it discussed with other series as well. Regardless, it affects Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar, BTCC, DTM, V8 Supercars, WEC, and just about every racing series I can think of with maybe the exception of rally, where you don't run laps.
Assetto Corsa EVO, the successor to the highly-regarded predecessors Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa Competizione, brings a new physics engine that simulates suspension and tire damping at 1,000 Hz, as of update 0.3. This significantly improves vehicle physics for more responsive, realistic control under braking and cornering. It results in better control and smoother transitions by more accurately modeling the car's suspension movements at a very high frequency. For clarification, 1 hertz is one thousandth of a second, so ACE is calculating this a thousand times per second. That's an awful lot of calculating for exquisite attention to detail, obviously striving for unparalleled realism.
Force Feedback (FFB): Bridging the Gap
If the physics engine is the heart, then maybe force feedback is the nervous system. It's not enough to do all those countless calculations to replicate all those real-world physics. The player needs to feel everything. We're not talking about the major, obvious stuff like slamming into a wall at 197 MPH or barrel-rolling end over end in "the big one" but subtle, useful information. A cheap racing wheel might be fun for a casual experience, but for a hardcore simulation experience you need a more sophisticated racing wheel that can convey a lot of tactile information.
rFactor 2 is credited for its communication of raw, detailed road texture and the flex of the car's chassis. Assetto Corsa is frequently praised for its clear and intuitive force feedback (FFB), making it easy to feel what the front tires are doing and to catch a slide as it begins. This sort of force feedback detail allows drivers to develop real muscle memory rather than just reacting to what they see on the screen. They can actually feel when their virtual car is at the limits of traction.
Car and Track Authenticity: Digital Duplicates
Recreating reality isn't just about the physics and the feel but about the cars we're driving and the tracks we're driving them on. It's one thing to make up a bunch of phony cars and circuits, but hardcore car enthusiasts and race fans will probably want to see the cars and venues they love in the real world to be drivable in their simulations. With fictional cars and tracks, you can pretend they behave however you want, but if we're depicting real cars and real venues, we expect them to represent those real vehicles and tracks. If I'm racing a Corvette around Laguna Seca in real life, I might want to get in some practice laps in a virtual Corvette around a virtual Laguna Seca, and I'll want them to be faithful recreations of their real counterparts.
When recreating real-world cars, it's no longer acceptable to just guess or imagine how a car should feel or behave. Today, developers get official Computer-Aided Design (CAD) data from manufacturers and input real-world telemetry, like engine power curves or suspension geometry, when building digital representations of real vehicles. iRacing is arguably king of official partnerships, with virtual depictions of NASCAR, IndyCar, and IMSA series cars that are so accurate that professional teams use iRacing for practice. Assetto Corsa is popular for its variety and character. It painstakingly recreates the unique handling quirks and engine sounds of a broad range of automobiles from a vintage Porsche to a modern GT3-R.
Once upon a time, eye-balling recreations of real tracks was good enough for folks. Take some pictures and a map and just go through approximating everything as best you can guess at it. Today, at least in the most realistic racing sims, guestimating isn't good enough. Instead, a team of people goes out to the real location and uses laser-scanning technology to meticulously capture every millimeter of detail. This means every bump, crack, curb, and elevation change of Spa-Francorchamps, the Nürburgring, or Watkins Glen is recorded to be accurately recreated. This is where iRacing shines as the standard for professional driver training. A driver can practice for an upcoming race with confidence in the braking markers, visual cues, and apex points are in the same places they'd be when in the real car on the real track.
Limitations: Where the Sim Falls Short
No matter how well the simulations take into account as much as possible and do all the calculations in the world, they'll never be a perfect depiction of real racing, right? Well, that's correct. There are some major differences, some of which can somewhat be addressed, at least hypothetically. Others are realistically impossible.
One major difference between virtual and reality is the sensation of G-forces. As we all know, one G is equivalent to what we feel from Earth's gravitational pull. At one G, a fifty-pound weight weighs fifty pounds. During a race, particularly under rapid acceleration, deceleration, or fast cornering, a driver can experience several Gs. F1 drivers, for example, can experience five Gs or more. My head, for example, probably weighs (I can't verify this as long as it's attached) around ten pounds. If I'm driving an F1 car and experiencing five lateral Gs, my head would be like fifty pounds, and not straight down but horizontally, pulling to the side, forwards, or backwards. Sims can't simulate this for most people. If you have a small fortune to invest in a motion rig, you can somewhat simulate these forces, but it won't be identical.
There's other sensory feedback we can't reasonably simulate. A sim can't make you smell hot tire rubber or brakes overheating. You won't be able to feel the heat of your engine through the firewall, feel wind blowing by, or feel your seat rattling. Hypothetically someone could create a peripheral that sprays assorted scents, and then a simulation could potentially utilize these, but it would be too much money for something that maybe three people would buy, and consequently wouldn't be worth anyone's investment. Likewise we could technically rig up fans and heaters for wind and heat, but who would waste investment in this if only five people would ever bother using it?
Then there's the fear factor. Jeremy Clarkson once addressed this on an episode of Top Gear. When racing virtually, there's nothing bad that can actually happen to us. Okay, technically, I once had a racing wheel mounted on a wooden computer desk and it jerked so hard that it actually ripped my desk apart, so it did actual physical damage in the real world, but that was still a trivial fix and a fluke. When driving virtually, we don't have to overcome fear of the what-ifs. We don't dread violently tumbling down a hillside or slamming hard into a tree at 156 MPH. No harm will ever actually come to us. It's not just physical harm to our own bodies, either, but also the car. If you're an amateur racer racing out of your own pocket or if you're driving for a struggling team, demolishing the car is a big worry. In a game, you can destroy it until there's nothing left but bits of scrap metal and it doesn't cost you a real world dime. Unless sims include us playing with an actual loaded gun pointed at our heads or something insane like that, the fear will never be there.
Real Drivers, Virtually Driving
Thus far a skeptic can still say this is all just fancy words puffing up a toy, that talk is cheap. What if we back it up with real-world professional drivers? That should lend the sims some street cred.
Let's start with the road from simulation to reality. Believe it or not, several professional drivers have began their careers in the virtual racing world. Jann Mardenborough started out in Gran Turismo, which isn't even a true sim but just a "simcade", as discussed earlier, but he went on to the GT Academy and from there to a range of real-world professional motorsports. (Click here to see his accomplishments.) Glenn McGhee went from iRacing champion to Lamborghini Super Trofeo world champion. Without ten more paragraphs, other drivers transitioning from sim to reality include Jimmy Broadbent, William Byron, Connor Bell, Jeff Giassi, Norbert Michelisz, and Sebastian Job.
Okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything, right? People play with Hot Wheels as kids and later drive real cars, but that doesn't mean Hot Wheels taught them to drive. Well, what about real professional drivers that still use simulations between real races? As it turns out, there are several prominent examples of these professional drivers that still utilize the sims.
We already mentioned William Byron as a driver that went from sim to reality, but he still continues using iRacing to prepare for his real-world NASCAR Cup Series race weekends, where he drives for Hendrick Motorsports. NASCAR Hall of Famer Dale Earnhardt Jr. has used iRacing for decades to prepare for races and was an original iRacing beta tester. In more recent history he used iRacing to help design and test the reconfiguration of Atlanta Motor Speedway, running virtual races on the proposed layout to vet it before investing millions of dollars building it for real. Rajah Caruth is another NASCAR driver that used iRacing to develop his skills and to get noticed by real-world teams.
In the world of Formula 1, current championship contenders Max Verstappen, driving for Red Bull Racing, and McLaren's Lando Norris, frequently spend time in iRacing and stream their sessions. They compete against top sim drivers to practice skills and remain sharp between real-world races. F1 veteran and two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, and current championship contender Oscar Piastri are also known to use iRacing. Verstappen, Norris, and Piastri happen to be the top three drivers (not in that order) in a closing battle for the 2025 Formula 1 World Drivers Championship, and iRacing veterans.
It's not just NASCAR and F1, of course. There's Tony Kanaan, IndyCar champion and Indy 500 winner as well as frequent iRacing user. Shane van Gisbergen, V8 Supercars champion, is a famously skilled and versatile sim racer, which has been credited for his ability to adapt to new cars and tracks quickly. Alex Palou, another IndyCar driver, is another racing sim user.
I'd go into detail about some of the hardware these guys use, but that could be a whole article itself. The top tier professionals like Max Verstappen and Lando Norris are using equipment beyond the reach of most sim racers, though. For more casual players, a few-hundred dollars is a lot to ask, and that will just get you an entry-level wheel, but they can get a lot more expensive than that, even just for regular consumer hardware. Some, however, use setups costing $30,000 or more. Verstappen, for example, uses stuff like a Simucube 2 Ultimate wheelbase, which is priced at well over $1,000. His McLaren Artura Ultimate wheel looks to run another $1,400, give or take. Then there's hydraulic pedals from brands like Simtag or Cool Performance, which use a real master cylinder.
Final Thoughts
I suppose in summation, simulations can never be a perfect recreation of reality, but we can get you pretty darn close. We can come close enough for sims to be of value to people that drive real race cars for a living. If that isn't evidence enough to the validity of true racing sims, I don't know what else we can do.
You can check out Max Verstappen in iRacing action from his team's YouTube channel:
