esports drivers say the updated handling is a step 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.