that is correct, but what is missing is the occasional need to rotate a car beyond its turning radius. it seems like there might be a time when a very brief loss of traction, which is usually undesirable for fast times, might be outweighed by a car's ability to then get around the corner only a little bit faster (by effectively making the corner smaller) and then begin moving straight again, sooner.
perhaps what they don't have modeled correctly in GT is the tire's loss of performance when heated too much? Maybe if they did model it correclty this "outweighing effect" wouldn't be beneficial to use?
and... maybe Yokohama gave them bad data to make their tires seem more badass? LOL maybe.
I guess maybe wht I'm really getting at here is that in game time trials, people are trying their darndest to find little physics tricks to use, some considered "legal" and some not. Even the legal ones may or may not be realistic, but that still isn't the point -- which is that in real life we simply don't have the time, money or any other variable at our disposal in order to find those physics tricks. And if we did, they'd be extremely difficult to execute, so we wouldn't count on it working for us. If we gained a 10th coming out of a corner by using a small slide like this, our team manager might instruct us not to use it because it was detrimental as an overall strategy, and we'd avoid it.
Even a racing team with a very high budget couldn't do hundreds of runs with the same driver on a track for weeks on end to find all of the tricks. But that doesn't necessarily mean that said trick wouldn't work in a limited fashion.
I say there might be a middle ground where the loss of traction is outweighed by one's ability to get around and going quicker, because even though I tried my best to mimick what those top drivers were doing, I found that the loss of traction usually worked against me. The ability to nail that perfect balancing act is what I really respect about what they were able to do.
Either way, I'm not really trying to say I'm right and you guys are wrong. I'm just arguing that we perhaps shouldn't insist that a momentary loss of traction will ALWAYS be detrimental, but rather almost always impractical and not worth the risk.
Perhaps the tire model, if it actually is realistic, should be made less-so, in order to make this impracticality something sim-racers intentionally avoid?