AC Vs Real Life – Alfa Romeo 4C @Modena Circuit (Aristotelis Vasilakos)

Kunos Simulazioni’s physics wizard Aristotelis Vasilakos teams up with his good friend and automotive journalist Maurizio Spinali, to test drive some cars that are also featured in the Assetto Corsa Simulator.

During the test sessions, Ares and Maurizio came up with the idea to record some laps on the track and in the simulator in order to create a comparison video showing us how similar the real and virtual (AC) world have become.

The weapon of choice was the Alfa Romeo 4C coupé. It was put trough its paces at the Italian Modena circuit which was the ideal track for testing the handling and cornering performance of the sports car. The Alfa Romeo 4C is powered by an  all-aluminium 1.75 L 4 cylinder turbocharged engine that delivers a respectable 240BHP that can propel the car to a top speed of 258 km/h (160 mph).

This was Aris his first attempt at a comparison video, but he intends to create some more and better videos in the near future that will also feature voice-over comments. Keep your eyes peeled for an Aristotelis Talk & Drive session soon.

Aristotelis Quote:

The car had street tyres and it was a rather fresh day with around 15°C ambient temperature and a green track. In the video you can see two laps, one is very “dirty” just trying to figure out how the car reacts when pushed to slide around. The second lap is a another go with a bit more smooth driving, although the shot rear tyres started to act on corner entry. Same approach on the virtual driving just trying to find out if the car reacts in the same way if given similar inputs.

I’m sure plenty of you will think I’m not driving good enough and you’ll be able to point out various errors, but the focus was not on laptime. On the contrary what we wanted to do, was document the first couple of laps from my stint so that I wouldn’t had the time to get accustomized to the car handling or the circuit layout, but rather to understand how the car reacts on various situations close to the grip limit and if I could use the same techniques the simulated car forced me to use.

The Alfa Romeo 4C… is not perfect when pushed hard. Understeer on power, oversteer on turn in and a difficult to understand power delivery… but brakes are excellent and the lateral grip is impressive. When you decide to go at 8/10 then it’s perfect and the looks… oh the looks! This is a proper Italian diva.
You might also notice that we are not changing gears up to the limiter. We decided that way as the gearbox had plenty of journalistic kms on its life and occasionally was acting up strangely if pushed right to the limiter. 400rpms lower and it would stay perfect and make us happy all the same.