No brainer - RL is RL. Even if the simulation would get to be super true, super honest and super high quality. I'd still rather race some Miata or some old BMW spec cars in two three tracks, for example just around Baltic states.
However, there would be pros for racing in eSports instead of RL:
- Comfort - no need to leave home sweet safe home. But it is also a con for obvious reasons.
- Pure racing without any logistic worries, accomodation problems.
- No need for crew, but it also means you are mostly lonely.
- No damage expenses, no risk for health (no injuries or fatalities due accidents).
- Theoretical posibility to race anything anywhere including time dimension. Although we all know that e-sports is just an advertisment tool for existing RL racing, so this point is practically obsolete. It would be brilliant if simracing e-sports could stand by itself.
- Possibility to have perfect weather, or weather on demand. Possibility to have summer all the time, in other words - racing season all the time.
- Posibility for everyone to race absolutely identical cars. Although IMO this point gets perverted with introduction of fixed setups, which eliminates reward of having mechanical knowledge.
- Possibility to review racing replays from all imaginable view points and angles.
- Relatability. Because everyone is few hundred euros away from racing same stuff: basic controller + software + content.
- Simracing esports is trully electric, that means supposedly safe for environment.
Few of the biggest e-sports disadvantages comparing to RL:
- RL is RL, it is just simply real. In simracing realism is not totally stable or guaranteed, not only due to technical and understanding limitations, but also because it gives people posibility to alter the "reality", thus things that are big challenge IRL can easily get tweaked out. Thats especially sensitive if it is some mass market product. Basically simulations can be based on lies intentionally or not.
- No need to explain that people not getting together IRL in person is simply less social, not having teams and all the preparation stuff that is necessary IRL is also taking away big chunk of the meaning and character building.
- If simacing e-sports would become a substitute, it would hurt RL racing industry.
- E-sports can compromise simracing itself by investing itself too much into this industry and forgetting other fun and interesting racing related things that does not do that well for e-sports which is backed by RL modern racing organisations: historic content, less known content, fantasy content, non-racing content (street cars). Furthermore - it absolutely was doing that for the past few years.
- People may find esports racing a lot less thrilling, lacking character and grid girls. Oh wait... thats just how it is actually IRL now... no issue for esports then.