I hope so. As far as I remember SMS where involved in GTR/GTR2 so they should know how to get it in proper way. After I noticed that in this product I went straight back to GTR2, GTR Evo and rFactor. All there you have crisp correlation of your steering wheel input and front wheels reacting. No lag. Like you should have it with mechanical connection. Here in C.A.R.S. is steer-by-wire feel with inprinted lag.

All other things are there: immersion, force feedback, graphics and already exciting vehicles choice to drive.

RF2 can soon feel sorry for being so lazy with launch, as this one can be real competition for thin wallets of sim racers.

I managed to get the steering lag to the point of being unnoticeable.

You need to disable vsync and make sure you're getting a really good framerate (the higher the better, beyond just smooth looking). So far as I'm concerned, though, this is not an acceptable solution. It needs work. No matter how good a sim's physics may be, input lag makes the experience worthless.

Clearly nobody is really happy with the input/FFB due to all the threads with myriads of different configurations to make it work right. I suspect that people are really trying to find control settings that make the car drivable despite the lag, even if they don't necessarily recognize it as such. Once I had the lag minimized, I went back to the default G27 profile, and with a couple tweaks to get the overall level of force I like, this was actually better than all the combinations of profiler and in game settings I tried.

This should be their absolute highest priority, though I suspect it probably isn't so easy a problem to solve.

What I'm wondering - and I can't read it from their website - is if they are planning to have proper race weekends for proper car groups. I.e. the ability to run practice, qualifying, race against realistically similar cars. Right now they are talking about a "uber-career-mode" where you go from Carts to Formula1 and everything in between - but some people will want to jump right into the class they want to drive, set a weekend or championship there and get going.

Only quick race and career isn't covering the bases.

I wonder, can anyone tell me if the head of SMS is the same Ian Bell that was co-author of Elite?

Sadly not Having a career that went from space trading to motor racing would have been cool!


I'm sure this will happen. They'd be lynched otherwise.

Well, they never implemented Single Race Weekend or championship into the Shift titles. No clue how much of that EA caused.

Also, they should do away with the unlocking (make it optional at installation). I want Race Weekends and championships (a simple series of race weekends) against named opponents. Not the unlocking-work-your-way-up stuff.

I think you should really differentiate what they want to do with CARS from a paid job for EA called NFS Shift... I think they really want to achieve the Car/race simmer's dream with this simulator... yes, CARS use an evolution of the Shift graphic engine but the goals and the motivation are completely opposite from to be leashed by a powerful producer... the idea is brilliant actually: why not to do a dream car simulation with the open help of the sim racer community mixing two world in one? With CARS, SMS is beginning to give serious nightmares to ISI, SIMBIM and Iracing... all much more secretive and closed in their process to produce a good simulator.

Thanks for the previews all - I took the plunge. It looks and sounds great. I'm getting some input lag (G27), but I'll work on it.

I do notice what Darren said about the physics. Even if grip levels may be a bit high, I really don't miss the "Auto-Spin" included with some rF mods.
We'll see where this goes, but my first impression of C.A.R.S. has me wanting more.

I got my Team Member Toolkit as well....gonna wait until the Friday release with AI is posted before installing, was getting like 86k for a download speed, so I figured I'd wait for the latest version.

Seen a screen of that 70's Lotus...damn, that thing looks good! Hope they offer a skinning feature.

I have to admit that i can't put this down at the moment. The more i play it, the more it's obvious there's some heavy duty physics at work here. When you read on the forum that they are even simulating things like gear and throttle linkages you can't help but be impressed. After running C.A.R.S for a couple of days I went back to rFactor last night and i hate to say that it felt basic in comparison. I just hope that rF2 has got the firepower to compete because the competition is looking hot.

Ian Bell has already commented that the high downforce levels are due to the default setup which is maxed out. Today's build should introduce some basic AI with the ability to do a single class race, another couple of tracks, graphic fixes, basic replay function and removal of all the legacy gamepad code which the devs are hoping could help with the lag.


That 77 Lotus is my favourite car in the sim, it'll rattle your teeth and suck out your eyeballs

Here's a plan of the upcoming test track - hopefully in today's build.