Would You Race Fictional Cars & Tracks, And Why Not?

Forza_Motorsport_2023_Maple_Valley_Raceway.jpg
Okay, so let me be clear from the beginning, I know the sentiment of the average sim racer. "Fictional is ew" is about on par with "no VR no buy". The main thing is trying to simulate real racing. That's sim racing, right? But with all the knowledge, creativity and imagination, so many beautiful fictional tracks and cars could come to life. Why would or would you not race them?

Famous racer and commentator Alex Brundle actually asked this question the other day. The brit tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1617301635805450241

And I have to say, it is a valid question.

I know from myself, though, the only race tracks I have not at all tried in RaceRoom, for example, were RaceRoom Raceway and the hill climb stage. Aka the only fictional tracks in the sim.

But why?

I don't even understand the reasoning behind it, to be honest, I just did what everyone said was the good thing to do, and that was to skip out the fictional tracks on RaceRoom.

However, as I said in the opening paragraph, with all the combined knowledge, creativity and imagination of the modding community, the greatest of tracks could become (virtual) reality. You may have never heard of them, but they could be more interesting to drive than the Nordschleife or Spa.

An Excursion Away From "Sim" Racing​

Come to think of it; it's only in the sim racing scene that such demands are being made. The much larger general racing gaming group has no such quarrels.

In most racing games, the player gets to experience something born completely out of imagination. Just take Need for Speed, one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. How many games in the Need for Speed franchise just feature real race tracks? Now, I get this is a very far stone's throw. So let's also take a look at something that hits a bit closer to home.

Gran Turismo is yet another gaming franchise among the most successful video game franchises of all time.

And what are the most revered tracks in Gran Turismo?

I have never played a GT game, yet I also know of Trial Mountain. And that is just one of the many great fictional circuits featured in the games, which I am led to believe.

Same counts for Forza. With the expected 2023 release of the new instalment, what was the first circuit they showed off in gameplay? Maple Valley Raceway. Another fictional track.

But let's get back on track because I would like to hear your opinion on the matter now.

So, tell me: Would you race fictional cars & tracks, and why not? Please, let us know in the comments down below!
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About author
Julian Strasser
Julian Strasser
Motorsports and Maker-stuff enthusiast. Part time jack-of-all-trades. Owner of tracc.eu, a sim racing-related service provider and its racing community.

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Comments

christoph1954
Are there any tracks at all that are NOT FICTIONAL? Or cars?
Is the old Nürburgring from the 60s REAL? or is it fictional?

Nothing in "Simulation GAMES" is REAL!
Everything is "make believe".

The Road surface, the tyre model, the car physics - there is no such thing as good soft body physics in simulation GAMES as it is impossible to calculate precise FE-analysis in realtime while racing against 31 opponents.
Real simulation has to take place in laboratories to create better technology with an enormous amount of high paid specialists within thousands of men hours work.

So I LOVE the modders creativity if they create beautiful impressive tracks - hopefully wider than the original ones so that overtaking is possible.
Our "race simulation GAME" is meant to be entertaining and give us fun and the possibility to hone our skills - like playing an instrument.
 
L
davehenrie said:
You want SODA: Off-Road Racing. Track builder baked in. Incredible physics. Think of it as a 2nd cousin to GPL.
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ah thanks for the suggestion. but i want to see such tracks in sim racing, with the modern excellent sim physics with wheel and pedals.

by "think Trackmania ... Mario Maker", i meant the speedrunning aspect, and the difficulty and creativity of the maps.

i really badly forgot to write this: I want to see *speedrunning* in sim racing. Speedrunning is amazing (see video "Half Life in 20:41"). Perfect driving, going for the perfect drive, with various cars on ridiculous tracks. Would love to see setup perfected for various car and track combinations, and get the explanation for each setting. Go watch Karl Jobst, Summoning Salt, etc. to see what i'm getting at.
 
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L
What i see from reading these comments; You people want the tracks to look real. What i see very few talking about, is what the track layout, design and challenge is in the fictional/fantasy track.

Jean-Pierre Sarti said:
I'm all for plausible fictional tracks.
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That's the word! Most of you are interested in plausible fictional tracks.
 
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Antony Snook
Boby Kim said:
Racegames ARE fictional and so are the tracks. They look like the same on the screen but it is Just a fictional as every other game
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So when F1 drivers run test rigs they are runing on a track un relistic to the one they will race on. Goot to know. I thought modern sims where more realistic
 
Antony Snook
Spinelli said:
Every track and every car in every sim is fictional. It's just numbers fed into a physics engine.

It's purely psychological unless you're specifically doing something like re-creating a real-life season of a series - then, yes, you'd only pick the "real" car/s and "real" tracks and in the real order - or if you're trying to prepare yourself for a real-life upcoming race.

Vehicles
You can get the same car in 10 different sims and it'll drive differently in all 10 different sims. So how could they all be the "real" car? That makes no sense. So are you just going to declare 1 of them the "real" car and ignore the rest of them?

Furthermore, you can get a "real" car in a sim that you love, slightly change the shape of it (which makes no difference to performance, it's just polygons with no connection to physics, air, mass, etc.), remove the company's logo pixels from the car and, what? Now all of a sudden a "real" car is not real anymore because of some different pixels and because it has different text for it's car name/model in the videogame's menu? Are you now suddenly going to dislike the very car you loved for years and never drive it again because some changed pixels and menu text means it's not "real" anymore? No sense nor logic behind that.

Tracks
A track is a track is a track. It's just a series of corners and straights. Whether that same design happens to physically exist somewhere on Earth at the present time, in the past, or will in the future, or not, has no affect on how that affects driving it in the game.

When I first got into rFactor 1, I thought some of it's tracks were real-life tracks. I was in love (and still am) with ISI's fictional tracks. I only found out maybe a year or so later that tracks like Toban, Lienz, and others did not physically exist in real life. So what? So should I now all-of-a-sudden switch from loving driving those tracks to suddenly hating them and swearing to never drive them again because I just found out that they just-so-happen to not be currently physically built somewhere on Earth? No sense nor logic behind that.

There are tons of tracks, especially mods, that I don't even know if they're currently real, previously real, or never real. So, before I decide to do some laps, before I can decide if I love or hate driving the track, do I have to research the track to see if it's real, and if it's real only then I can love it and if it's not real then I must dislike it and swear to never race it? What difference does it make? What if some day that track design does in fact become built in real life? Are you all of a sudden going to stop ignoring it like you did for years and then all of a sudden start liking the track? No sense nor logic behind that.

Exceptions
Of course I'm not talking about incredibly unrealistic vehicles or tracks, eg., cars with 9000 hp and weigh 35 Kg or tracks that have banana peels in the middle of the circuit or have a large hole or speed bump in the middle of one of the straightaways. I'm talking about "normal" cars and "normal" tracks - ones that people can't tell if they're real or not just from driving them.

Side-note
I hate tracks, real-based or not, that are just a bunch of repetitive, long curves as if you're driving on some country road or the highway. I see a lot of Gran Turismo's tracks are like that (I'm guessing they're fictional but they could be real). Another good example is Azure Coast in Project Cars 1/2 along with the majority of the driving in Forza Horizon and Need For Speed games.


P.S. You can apply everything above to reverse tracks.
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The tracks with long repetative curves are realistic to modern day. F1 races on tracks usualy built for motorcycles. As they dont need straights. The F1 cars have downforce that allows you to carry speed and grip through turns so you loose less speed, and cary more into turn and need less in stright following, so it can be short. Its almost like a superspeedway oval where you barley have to lift of in turn's. But yes the cars are getting to powerfull for tracks and it dose not help that perminent tracks are hard to look after so you end up on street circit's as they are low maintinance. But dont make good racing in my opinion as they lead to to many accidents and pace car that eats race laps so you are robed from pure racing.
 
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Antony Snook said:
The tracks with long repetative curves are realistic to modern day. F1 races on tracks usualy built for motorcycles. As they dont need straights. The F1 cars have downforce that allows you to carry speed and grip through turns so you loose less speed, and cary more into turn and need less in stright following, so it can be short. Its almost like a superspeedway oval where you barley have to lift of in turn's. But yes the cars are getting to powerfull for tracks and it dose not help that perminent tracks are hard to look after so you end up on street circit's as they are low maintinance. But dont make good racing in my opinion as they lead to to many accidents and pace car that eats race laps so you are robed from pure racing.
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I'm assuming you're reffering to the "Side-note" part of my post. If so, then I think you misunderstood because no F1 tracks fall into the category I was referring to. I'm referring to tracks like Azure Coast in Project Cars 1/2 and the majority of "tracks" in Forza Horizon and Need for Speed games (some Gran Turismo tracks have this feel too but I'm not sure what they're called) that are basically just highway driving or feel like highway driving. I don't know a single F1 track or any racetrack in a real-life series that's like that
 
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F
I am more of a casual racer and don't care that much about what's fictional or not. I think there are some awesome fictional tracks, like Dragon Trail in Gran Turismo, or @doublezero 's tracks which are a blast!

What makes real tracks more enjoyable than the track itself is being able to put myself into scenarios I've seen on tv or, in case of classic tracks and cars, to experience a time long before I was born.

But if I think about what keeps me coming back to Gran Turismo, and even get back on my PS2/3 from time to time, it's tracks like Dragon Trail and Apricot Hill that I really enjoyed.

As long as I get the impression that it COULD be real or I get some "woah, that's the future I WANT" vibes from it, I'm all for fiction!
 
Taruffi
John Roberts said:
I have no problem at all with fictional tracks, as long as they are realistic. My all-time favourite track is Mid Field from GT, and Tyrone's version of it in Assetto Corsa is my most-driven track. Real tracks are often restricted by the terrain, or were converted from old airfields or public roads, and that dictates their layout. Also, safety concerns mean that some features are not practical, like flyovers. Fictional tracks are not constrained in the same way so they can be challenging, interesting and fun in ways that real tracks can't.

In some ways I feel the same about fictional cars, as long as they keep to the 'spirit'. Pessio Garage's 'Porknose' is a perfect example of a fictional car done right. It doesn't represent any real-world car, but it captures the feeling of a classic open-wheel Formula car from the 60s combined with modern suspension and engine. A field of them blasting around the banking of the High Speed Ring is an impressive spectacle!

An interesting compromise is to build a fictional track based on real-world scenery. There's an AC circuit called Cannock Chase, which is a real place near where I live, but there isn't a track there - only mountain bike trails. As far as I know, the designer has used real elevation data and built their fictional track around it. In theory, someone could go and build that track for real because the location actually exists. You can do the same with cars - rather than building an outright fantasy car, build one to an existing ruleset - for example, a GT3 Jaguar F-Type. Or a completely fictional manufacturer and body shape, built to GT3 specs. As others have pointed out, almost all of the available cars are 'fictional' to some extent, especially the old ones. Who REALLY knows what a Ferrari 250 GTO is like, flat out around the Nordschleife?

Where do 'Classic' tracks fall in this? Most sims feature historic layouts of tracks like Spa and Monza. Those layouts no longer exist and you can't drive on them IRL, so are they technically 'Fictional'? Driving on one would be 'unrealistic', and wouldn't bring any 'immersion' - would it? I really don't feel that the question of 'immersion' is valid in this debate. I've never driven around the real Spa, and never will, so it makes no difference to the sense of realism or my level of immersion whether I'm driving around this week's layout or one from 1966. The tracks might go in different directions, but they still feel equally 'real' (or 'unrealistic') to me, and I think that's the important thing. Does it 'feel' realistic?

As a final thought, there is a possibility that one of the most popular fictional tracks from GT - Deep Forest Raceway - is actually based on a real circuit that closed in the 1960s. If that's true, it really puts this debate into a different light.
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I'd like to see a good track map of Cannock Chase.

With regards to Deep Forest from the Gran Turismo franchise, it was said to be inspired by, though not strictly based upon, Greenwood Roadway in Indianola, Iowa.

Here's Greenwood, brought to us courtesy of Sergio Loro's tireless work:

 
Taruffi
I was watching through would of Daniel's/Casual Sim Racer's videos from a while back again recently, which brought this post to my attention. Fittingly enough, given my interest in historical racing, the latest piece up on RD is about Bridgehampton.

Anyway, I would probably echo a lot of the comments here. I want good fictional, not fantasy, cars and tracks in a racing sim I'm going to partake of very much. Leave the purely fantasy stuff for the arcade racers.

Of course, I've long enjoyed a number of the tracks from Gran Turismo (Deep Forest, Trial mountain, Grand Valley, Midfeild, etc). There have been a smattering of other in more recent sims. And Fat-Alfie's Fonteny I think has to take the cake for quality and scale.

For cars, I'm sometimes less clear on this, but if it sufficiently resembles something real, and especially has believable physics, I'm more likely not to be too bothered by it. It might mot be my first choice to drive, depending on what the other available options are, but yeah...

I will say, it can be tough with fictional tracks though, especially those trying to seem more m"modern", but still try to explore the boundaries a bit more compared to existing F1 tracks especially. That's kind of where I sometimes have trouble with the efforts of DoubleZero and others. Anadara, for instance, reminds me of a sort of generic homage to the old, 5.0-mile layout at Interlagos.

And unfortunately, even if they look good and feel fine, too many fictional tracks just seem too "busy", too many corners for the lap length, particuarly if there are a relative abundance of slow- or medium-speed corners and/or chicanes/chicane-like complexes. So, for example, I like the Trophy Circuit at Horsma, but the other layouts have more chicanery than I care for.

The Vitus circuit that was mentioned farther back in all this is another one that definitely...it's just "too much"... I don't know if the creator was trying too hard, but yeah...

And urban street circuits can be especially tricky. If the course just looks generously wide, and too consistently wide, unless it's a street circuit that actually exists and is like that, it takes away from the plausibility of it. Yeah, it may be harder to overtake on, but maybe you need to adjust the AI, or if racing online, be in a more moderated group, so other players are less likely to be driving like dicks.

I guess the main, specific thought I have regarding fictional cars would be certain "Whatif" cases. Like, what if Alfa Romeo had made a streamliner out of their 12C-36 or 12C-37, or a longtail version of the 33/SC/12 to go to Le Mans. From another manufacturer, I've thought about "fixing" the Maserati 450S Zagato Coupe that was originally so badly botched.

Anyway, hope this all makes sense.
 

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