(Sans April 1)
A great car to drive, and handles just like I'd expect a rear engined 60s car to: Squishy, loose, and heavy. It's hard to push to its limit, but despite that, it's actually remarkably forgiving and not that difficult to drive. With some practice laps, it's fairly straightforward. Far, far from a modern sports car in handling, but that's to be expected.
In essence: The thing handles like you're driving a particularly large dog running on mud with a dumbbell on its rear. I love it. It's perfect.
I'm docking two stars at the moment, though for a couple of reasons:
The stance of the entire car seems to be far, far too high compared to every Stinger I've seen in real life, stock or not. The ride height in my opinion should be reduced significantly, by 2 to 3 inches, if not more. The springs feel like they should be a *bit* stiffer, too, in my opinion; though admittedly I don't exactly have experience driving an original Stinger to corroborate that particular hunch.
The wheels really do not match the car at all, and I have no idea where they're from; Stingers stock from Yenko had 13x7 painted steel wheels, with all others aftermarket; most often I've seen the ever-present Minilites fitted, but nothing remotely close to the rims fitted on this one that look more like they'd be more at home at the Baja 1000 than at Lime Rock or your neighbor's idyllic 60s surburban driveway.
The driver's hands do not line up at all with the steering wheel, floating above it and clipping through it on turns, which is incredibly egregious and annoying when using first person view like I typically do. The interior also feels a bit... unloved, for lack of a better word, like it was unfinished or not correctly lit.
Finally, the lack of any kind of racing-style skins despite it being specifically a race car, and very prominently used as such. This isn't major, but it does mean it visually doesn't fit at all while racing with contemporaries. I'd love to see some of these, it would really make this thing look right at home with the Alfas and Fords and etc. I've enjoyed racing it with. Some historically accurate ones would be icing on that cake. I'm sure some other users will make skins, but it would be nice to have them as an option right off the bat. I also understand that this is supposed to be the roadgoing version of the car versus a race-prepped version, but it would be nice, regardless. This also goes back to the wheel complaint: if this is supposed to represent a stock car from the "factory", what are those wheels from?
Those things being fixed will gain two stars right back, easily. There's no fundamental issues with the car, and the model itself is beautiful and well-detailed -- It's a hoot to drive, too. But it feels unfinished, like it should be in beta versus a 1.0 release. With some issue fixing and tuning, this is definitely a 5-star car. The Stinger has always been one of my favorite racing-modified cars; one often drives in the local vintage grand prix near me and it's just as fun to watch. Being able to actually drive it and slide it makes me respect the real drivers that much more.
