No matter what feature you put in, you always have to think about it fits into the game, and it’s something that trips people up all the time. Alot of gameplay features that aren’t realistic can be a lot of fun, and things that are very realistic can make for a bad game.
You arent being penalized in any way for drafting, instead your lap is being classified.
When people found out that tthey could get to the top of a leaderboard by drafting, pushing, corner cutting, wall riding or ricocheting…they did.
So the whole clean/dirty lap classification started to make sure that top laptimes were just you and the car on the track.
THIS - level playing field with the ONLY variables in a clean lap time being the car and its tune and the monkey pedaling it.
And those that claim it is a penalty - it isn’t (it doesn’t affect your winnings or affect your place in the race results so the only effect is on the LB place and honestly in a race the important thing is how you race and where you finish, not your best lap while doing so). And most real world lap time records are done in qualifying, often with a single or very few cars on the track - in the old days of things like Touring cars/V8 Supercars and F1 most teams ran a specific engine or tune just for qualifying and then a downgraded and more reliable setup for the race.
Mods are the same - some of them give you a different starting position, others affect weight, power, braking and the like - effectively giving you a small cheat as far as the PI system is concerned (take you car to the PI limit for a race and then try and reduce your weight by 10% and see what happens to your PI - this is what those mods do).
They won’t take away the dirty lap because of drafting because way back in forza 3 i think people were working in teams and using drafting with the sole purpose of getting better lap times for lower class cars using higher class cars baaically pulling then around…pretty much cheating
There’s lots and lots discussing this issue and why drafting dirtys the lap
Dirty lap is probably not the right term
Should be “not clean”
“Back in the day” . . . cheaters got to the top of the leaderboards on lap times by literally pushing a small, light car (like a Mini Cooper) sometimes twice the speed it was capable of doing - just for the time.
Even further “back” the times used to be recorded by the race for the total laps, not individual laps, so we had to be consistent to record a “record” time for an event.