Question about steering wheel impact on cars

Hello all, just came here to ask something about the general car on steering wheel behavior

Consider yourself in the scenario of a Steering wheel with full force feedback support, against yourself in a real car.

When you approach a 90 degrees turn, at a high speed, anything higher than 120km/h and you *dont* break enough to reduce the speed for proper turning, *IF* you try to turn your steering wheel *entirely* (anything higher than 600 degrees) in reaction to try to turn your car the most possible (as any common reaction of any casual person who tries to play a game), I get the following idea:

1. Real car: By turning your steering wheel entirely, your car starts spinning and crashes horribly.

2. Sim-game car: The car simply understeers and you go out of the track, eat all the grass that follows until you hit the closest wall.

So, my question is, am I wrong on my comparison? I think that, approaching at high speed, force feedback *should* endure and avoid you from completely turning the steering wheel, by feeling tougher and heavier, and *IF* you override this strength, actually the car should start spinning side ways. But it seems *all* the racing game have this wrong, you can turn your steering wheel how much you feel like, and still the car simply understeers.

 

Well it depends to an extent on setup.

Most cars in real life are set up to understeer in that situation (would say all, but some lunatics may not be). If real cars did that, people would crash left and right, as it's very unsafe...

The main way to do that is suspension setup - the antirollbars and general spring rates are usually higher in the front, which means the front is stiffer and loses traction first when the car rolls. If the difference is high enough (eg. alfa GTA) the front inside wheel will pick right off the ground so then you have 2 rear vs 1 front tire and the rears can easily maintain more lateral traction, preventing a spin.


If you were to drop the front arb and raise the rear one in a car with wide ranges of setup options, you could probably see spins just by turning the wheel...

 

Thats a common misconception, real car (especially a normal "family friendly" one) will understeer even harder than the sim car in such conditions.
It will look kind of like this: (Youtube link) - and note that this is still a racecar, designed for balance, real cars will understeer much harder and will not require more throttle for it to occur.

As for force feedback, in real car and in sims, the steering wheel pulling strength comes directly from the lateral force front tyres generate (big simplification), only it's just much weaker. If you turn the wheel too much the front tyres will end up sliding on road surface and produce >less< lateral force, and therefore the steering wheel will get "lighter" the more you turn, and the car will be turning less - understeer.

If you live in a place with snow/ice you can test it in a real car on safe speeds... a normal tarmac provides too much grip to start sliding the front tyres, requiring much more speed so it's very rare to see it.

 

Had to do that in a car safety training. At some point the car just goes straight no matter how far you turn the steering wheel.

 

Watch this video of a car driving at high speed on a straight line and then it loses control, and goes spinning from the road to the grass. The car used in the video is the BMW M135.
Start watching from min 3.

Try this experiment with the BMW 1 Series M coupé from the game, simply known as the bmw 1m. The same can happen as in that real life video, but depends on the situations of the track, weather, how the car was built, and the driver's inputs. The other car from that video, VW Golf GTi Mk7, didn't lose control and spin out like the M135. I've had the BMW 1M from the game lose control in a similar way, but it wasn't exactly from a straight line high speed. I was driving at high speed in the first low angle bends from Vallelunga track, after you pass the lap line and there is a bend to the right and after to the left. I've lost control there and spun out on the tarmac and the grass. Is kinda like the car got some air under the tires/or tank slapper as I was turning from the fast bend right to the left bend, in 5th gear speed.

 

True. Did that a lot when driving to my previous home. There was a looong left hander and way too low speed limit so I was always entertaining myself with the car. If you do a quick steering movement, your car will go absolutely straight until the point speed is slow enough for front tyres to regain the grip.