The issue is, the reason I noticed that was just because of how wonky the cars still control, like they're not... the way the front wheels anchor and pull the car along defies the actual physics that should be at play given the car's shape and weight. All the traction is in the front and the back wheels tend to have ZERO, which isn't the case with tires and wheels. Just because something is FWD doesn't mean that it can only grip the road in the front. The way they've been designed in this game, there's an excessive amount of fishtailing going on, and turning down the sensitivity only makes handling heavier cars more difficulty while the fishtailing issue still persists.
From my little experience with FWD little european sport cars (like ford XR2i, GT Turbo, 205 GTI, Golf GTI/G40 or Corrado G60), if you accelerate "too much" (no need to say "full") in a bend, it doesn't turn not at all, you go straight, directly into the sidewalk (and you will go buy new front tyres/aluminum rims the next day).
Speed is always a factor but ability to drift or control slide with FWD cars is important for that factor IRL, depends how good differential lock is and how it has been set up. I'm bit surprised to see Peugeot 205 GTI on that list having a bit of experience with that back in the day. Not sure if anything like that would be easily sold as road legal these days (it had nothing in common with other 205's but 205 badge LOL), but you could turn that thing on a dime if you knew what you were doing.
It's greatest enemy was perhaps wet tarmac, not because car couldn't handle that, but ride was so good that it could trick driver to false sense of security and not picking up proper lines regarding speed and of course going to turn with wrong line and car would end up understeering in situation like that. Snow and ice are certain ways easier as there's always bumps, tire noise that comes into cabin etc. that gives sense of speed.
Most cars I have driven aren't anything that exotic and have that weight balance, but going fast with FWD on snow or ice, if I put car on slide I do exactly the thing
@gakusangi described as unrealistic, find front wheels grip spot with throttle, use front as anchor as you say, and eliminate fishtail with front traction, what is needed to do with steering wheel depends how differential lock on front wheels work and you adjust according to that.
I'm not sure about terminology used, traction refers specifically for energy transferred from engine to wheels. In front-wheel driven car there can't be any traction on rear wheels because they aren't connected to engine. You can't compensate for fishtailing on FWD car by putting more energy on rear wheels as they are not connected to engine. No offence, but what you described as against the laws of physics, is something I don't understand, are you sure you don't mean grip?
It seems largely stylistic too so that the cars "feel" different, but that does mean it limits their use if you can't control them at all. Take the Quadra Turbo-R 740, for example. It's awful to drive that thing around, the compact design of the city just doesn't give this thing room to maneuver for how it fans itself out all the time. Compared to another super-fast car, the Rayfield Caliburn handles remarkably better, even at high speeds. They also both showcase the really strange way the Red Engine is coded to handle acceleration and deceleration. The turbo has a lot of get-up and GO to it, but it almost comes to a dead stop the second the break is let off, despite the face that like the Caliburn, it should carry its momentum a bit more before losing so much speed. At some point, they really need to completely overhaul the vehicle movement and handling in this game. Luckily, there's a lot of mods on Nexus that could probably point them i the right direction for that.
Since you mention mods and just to be sure. Is your platform PC and is your input method game controller or keyboard? I'm also curious about game version, are you on 1.3 patch?
That matters because console version driving physics wasn't that similar to PC at least to version 1.06 which version I finished my first playthrough. I didn't played game again until version 1.23 and based on what I read from the forums, PC and console version driving physics, including input lag was similar on that version.
Quadra Turbo-R 740 is very interesting example, as on XBox One X it's absolutely joy to drive, it this weren't story driven game, too good for its power but then, I'm not flooring it all the time but your comparison to Caliburn is off because Quadra is rear-wheel drive and Caliburn is all-wheel drive.
I do agree that cars have weird aspects and some of them are how they lose forward momentum and weight transfer feels bit different in 1.3 compared to 1.23 too. Timing when using handbrake in cornering feels far more important but then it might be that I'm just going faster in 1.3 because of better minimap.
Something is off though. I haven't been able to pin down how forward momentum really works in game, some cars lose it very fast like you say, that could be attributed to modeling aerodynamic grip with engine braking and wide tires but it feels inconsistent as something like Colby C 125 keeps pushing forward even if I try locking tires when braking and it's questionable if weight transfer (from rear to front, where Colby's engine is) is applied as this should put more weight on front tires that should give better braking performance, real car would do that but on Colby C 125 it's like that doesn't work.
There is other thing that game does, and does it better than some of dedicated racing games, and it's steering lock. On popular franchises, say Forza players using controller turning angle of front wheels is hard-lock limited to 50% or so compared to those who use wheels. Keyboard users may have yet different settings but I don't know. Anyway, what is relevant is that you can do some very useful things, like turn your car around in urban spaces with very small spaces because turning radius isn't limited by steering lock that much and that can be further helped with throttle (RWD) or handbrake (FWD), on AWD, depends of traction ratio between front and read.
Overall, while I wrote that I'm not sure if we are using the same terminology, your gripe with driving physics looks like you want every car to work like AWD car. Now that's an opinion, but it has nothing to do with realism.
Certain realism makes things intuitive but there's point where it might not be the best approach for this type of product. Someone like me could manage physics to the point of something like Project Cars 2 even on controller, but I doubt that would be what most players would find fun. On opposite side, making physics too arcade like creates other problems, has actually happened in this game. Game up to version 1.06 had this weird physic thing on Xbox at least, where every car at some point felt like they were AWD, now imagine this. You are taking a corner with slight slide and then counter steer to stay on right angle, suddenly your front wheels has power, -> you get sucked in the ditch by move that should have been the right move. For some reason that AFAIK was not an issue on PC but they had severe steering lag to the point where counter steering couldn't be timed right. Why's was that happening, I would guess because "lazy" steering can make cars feel bit more stable, on keyboard at least. We had that lag on Xbox on ver 1.23 and before that I didn't really understood how bad PC players have had it.
I haven't got that many cars on my current playthrough on 1.3 but for most part I'm pretty okay with the physics. Weight transfer is sort of a big deal on rear-engine, real-wheel drive cars and I'm curious if Johnny's Porsche still feels like 930 series 911 like in 1.23. People have all sort of images, for whatever reasons, but older Porsches at least were all about weight transfer.
It's all about compromises but something that has been there since day one is that player can do drift tricks on RWD cars like drifting 8 shape and for my experience that was still very true. There are some limiting factors due extremely forgiving differential but mostly because every car has automatic gearing so you can't control the radius and angle that much by power. Make every car AWD and that would mean even less options, which would be boring.
Think there's lesson that can be learned from Need For Speed: Heat and Forza Horizon series. NFS: Heat had this dedicated drift button to do that and I suppose it enable pausing the game and taking a screenshot with cool picture of drift but in the end, the top franchise Horizon, there's no drift button and it's perfectly possible to drift cars that aren't even built for that without any sort of drift button. What enables that is that players have more control and while NFS style has it fans and always will, Horizon is example of how sometimes more is more.
