Just a short not @ hero:
GT5, F1, DIRT or any other of these games, also available for consiles are nice to play but nowhere near simulation. They call themselves racing sim, but they aren't. They are fun to drive and they could also be difficult and the speed in F1 is quite nice, but it simply isn't a real simulation.
I do not want to make these games look bad with this comment, because sometimes it could be better to go a bit more arcade to get an immersive game for everyone. And the fact, that these games also need training and learning is the best development, you can get. I like these racers, because they really need training, although they are a bit arcade. You find other genres, that you can simply play without a need of learning.
So I cannot say anything about the race genre, as all sorts of racers have its fun factor and difficulty levels. So it is a good history, but this is nearly the only genre, where all players like it near to reality. This genre is a healthy ones and you can see it in the quantity of playable games and also the quantity of new real sims in the horizon like project cars, rfactor2, gtr3, etc (although project cars could turn out to be not as reastic as they perhaps intended, it could chance to a better gt5, because of the low quantity of real racesim fans, taking part in this project; but we will see).
To optimize f1 with a functioning engine and with this amount of experts in coding games is realistic. But il2 is much more sim and the team is smaller and the mechanics behind it makes it difficult. You cannot say, that they are without faults. I think they also know it, but lets see the future. Another small sim developer shows, that a working engine is essential. As soon as they have it, we could really see, how fast they can react on community and how fast they can implement new features or new content. We will see!
