Are rally games accurate?

The Game Room
1

This is not a post about whether the car handling in a rally game is accurate. I know that varies between games, and higher levels tend to increase the realism, etc.

What I want to know is if the length of the tracks is accurate. It feels like, when I play, that the stages are very short, and the corners are really close together; I mean, it takes only 5 or 6 minutes to complete one. Yet when I watch a real live rally on TV, the racing speeds look slower, and the stages seem way longer, sometimes it seems like they take an hour to complete.

So do they reduce the scale of the tracks because it’s a video game, to make it seem faster when you play and to eliminate potential tedium? Or have they recreated rally stages accurately?

Disclaimer: I prefer arcade-style rally games, because accurate car handling is more than I can be bothered with (I’m currently playing Colin McRae’s Dirt 1). Also, I do not drive in real life.

2

The “special stages” as they are called can be pretty short, less than a couple of kilometers and up to 50 kilometers, so the track length in games like the Dirt series are pretty accurate. The difference is that games only have a couple of tracks per rally when a real rally can have several dozens of stages.

Here are the stats for the first and last stage of this year’s Sweden rally:

SS1 Karlstad 1 (1.9km)
SS23 Rammen 2 (22.76km)