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Everytime someone drops by my house and sees the steering wheel mounted to the side of my desk, they immediately want to drive. I always put them in a formula trainer with all helpers and it still takes them a while to just keep the car on the track.

I've driven formula trainers at Skip Barber Racing School and the trainers in rFactor are very similar. Obviously no simulator is going to match the real thing, but rFactor is very challenging and luckily is a lot less painful when you make mistakes.

Here are a couple of videos I stumbled upon. Each shows a side-by-side of an F1 car and an rFactor F1 car around a complete lap of a circuit. Not saying these guys are on par with Michael Schumacher, but the realism of at least these two tracks is fairly apparent. And just to note, I still don't drive the F1 cars in rFactor. Just too fast for my skill level.

Found Video: "rFactor(CTDP F1 Mod) Vs Real F1 - Monza Circuit"

Found Video: "Comparison ME vs. Michael Schumacher" at Imola

This hotlap is from my third or fourth session at Bahrain. Still working out the line. Can't say I'm a huge fan of this track as the super-slow corners like 1, 8, and 10 leading onto a straight get kind of tedious. I like the 5-6-7 corridor and the braking zone through 9, but everything else in the first 10 turns could be better.

There are some corners at this track where you really need to practice looking as far ahead as possible. Coming out of turn 11, if I'm not looking way up into turn 12, I forget I have to keep turning. Same for turn 15. If I'm not looking way up the straight at least to the end of the curbing, I usually end up on the curbing because the corner goes around a bit farther than you might think.

Overhead View

In-car View

Along with how-tos, I'll post some things I stumble upon. This is a video that is a great overview of the various mods available in rFactor. Very well done by a person who also knows how to name a clip.

As I noted in the "First Impressions" post for Bahrain, this track can almost be broken into two sectors. The first is more technical and includes corners 1-10, the second is higher-speed and includes corners 11-15.

I'm going to focus my attention first on the corridor that includes corners 5, 6, and 7. It looks like the most technical at the highest speed.

I'll then move on to the corridor that includes corners 11, 12, 13, and 14 which looks to be the highest speed but is not quite as technical as 5-6-7.

I'll come back and work through the long braking zone of 9-10 before moving on to 15, 1-2, and 4.

Data from the AI car including seconds between midpoints of corners: