esports drivers say the updated handling is a step back

The driving experience does still need further improvement but you have to remember that the esports and youtubers are min-maxing everything, using extreme setups and driving in an inherently unrealistic way to get the best laptime possible. I heard a few say the cars are 3 seconds faster than they should be, but they say that using setups they would never use in real life, on time trial which has no fuel or weight transfer, tyre overheating or tyre wear and perfect track conditions. So i'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt personally.

Plus lets face it, most of us are not at that level!

Finally someone who looks at the whole thing in a differentiated way. For one thing, anyone who says the handling was good when the game was released has never driven a race car, as far as I can see. The handling was terrible and the setup couldn't fix it.

Since the update the handling model has become much better. Not perfect but at least a big step forward.I think a lot of people who complain about the handling are just copying Jarno Opmeer or Brandon Leigh's time trial setup and thinking it's total crap. These setups are extreme right up to the top end and absolutely not suitable for casual racers.These setups are extreme right up to the top end and absolutely not suitable for casual racers. If you adapt the setup a little to your own driving style, it's really fun and, above all, oversteering in fast corners is a thing of the past. As an example, in Spain or Jeddah I drive more rear than front wing and it's really easy to control once you find the right balance, even without understeer.

The problem with release handling was that you couldn't be quick with a repaired setup that met your own requirements. With my adjusted setups, I'm finally able to get 6-7 tenths of the way to the WR, which I'm totally happy with.

I would advise some people here in the forum to take a closer look at the game and I'm sure that the complaints about it would be drastically reduced in the near future.

Nope i really worked much for Setups with many Variety and since the car just feels really understeery. I still reach my times but i dont get enough Feedback where the car is feeling not well.

I really hope they listen if we are loud enough its just not good enough how it is. F1 2020 and F1 2017 is good ngl but the other Games are all just not F1 23 was good but the Peak came naturally with this Game. Until the Update. I hope they just Set all back.

@Meza994 

Took me a little longer than I wanted to get around to doing this but I've posted some charts below where I've plotted the values for Peak grip, DownSlope, UpSlope and Shape against Load as it's defined in the context of Lateral Load and Longitudinal Load for the C5 compound. I pulled the data using the EGO ERP archiver application which I used to examine the tyrecompounds.erp file and then extract and save the XML contained within. I have the data from this file for both the launch version and the 1.3 patch.

I believe that the 'Peak' value as it's used here is the peak Lateral or Longitudinal force that the tyre can generate at a given Load. This data appears to indicate that the Lateral grip of the front tyres in medium-high load situations has been lowered in the new patch. In addition this shows the peak Longitudinal grip of the rear tyres was also lowered which is the primary tyre force at play during acceleration and when braking in a straight line.

The DownSlope value represents the rate at which the Lateral/Longitudinal grip decreases after reaching the peak grip. Once the tyre starts to slide, the Lateral and Longitudinal grip typically drops off, and the DownSlope quantifies this reduction. A higher DownSlope should indicate a sharper decline in grip once the tyre surpasses the peak force. As you can see in the charts above the Lateral DownSlope has been increased significantly whilst the Longitudinal DownSlope has remained the same.

UpSlope I believe to represent the rate at which the Lateral/Longitudinal force increases as the slip angle increases, up to the peak force. This would define how quickly the tyre builds up Lateral/Longitudinal force as it starts to slide. Ultimately I believe this indicates how quickly a tyre will reach its peak force in the Lateral or Longitudinal direction. The data above appears to indicate the tyres no longer reach their lateral peak as quickly.

Shape is a bit weird to me but I think this defines the overall shape of the Lateral/Longitudinal force vs. slip angle curve. This would influence how gradual or abrupt the transition is from the peak force to the post-peak region. This data doesn't tell us much since we don't know how they're applying it to the other values in the game but these would apply a smoothing function to the other values in some way. 

Hopefully someone who knows more than me can do a better analysis on what the data actually means and I hope if I'm misunderstanding anything that someone can correct me.

@shery_a_coleslaw Is there either real F1 data available, or data from other games (thinking of iRacing) that could be used to reproduce the charts you have done to compare with. These are really good - and makes the discussion more about facts and less about opinion. Thanks!!

@shery_a_coleslaw Was thinking that the values may not be the same - but shouldn't the slope be comparable? So could we compare the slopes...