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Put simply: they are too fast for the beginner series and too inexperienced for the pro series.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One personal anecdote may well be true and valuable, but it still isn't usable data.
Normally this rejoinder is used by people who have provided data and received an anecdote in response. However, you haven't even provided an anecdote . . .
My estimated likelihood that you pose questions in order to make subliminal rhetorical points and so tend to readily project that behavior onto others would have increased, but one anecdote isn't usable data.
EDIT: Also, I see I forgot the question mark, which may have caused confusion.
Put simply: they are too fast for the beginner series and too inexperienced for the pro series.
Which means ultimately that they are dangerous, right? They drive too fast to be safe with the other slower beginners and they don't have the experience needed to be trusted to make good decisions with the people who drive in the faster circuit. It doesn't seem wrong, it just seems like a natural consequence of learning in a simulator.
One might suspect the same could become of other genres cough FPS cough ;)
As opposed to discussing an article it seems that normality amongst HN is to now debate the choice of title.
Not that our meta-comments are much better.
To those who complain about the title, don't blame me. Many times in the past I've created a more informative title and used it, only to have to "reverted" by the mods.
Well for a subject with such gravitas I can sympathize with the mods.
"Gamers perform too well in real-life to be considered amateurs" would have been nice.
The type of games these players play, how seriously they take them, and the advanced setups they use mean a more honest headline might be: "The best amateur racers with countless hours of simulator time are sometimes better than professional racers."
I wonder how much of that could be due to being less sensitive to danger than they should be. If most of the conditioning was in a context where there were never any severe consequences for failure, you'd expect trainees that were considerably more aggressive than those conditioned in contexts where consequences could include death.
Apart from the cost of training, where the GT players have the advantage is that failure is not as penalizing as it would be in a real car. If you crash, you can be back on the tracks in seconds for no cost and no time in traction. If you mess up a corner you can restart.
Rather than desensitizing them to danger, it allows for exploratory driving, which, especially when combined with the amount of track time available, would allow skills to be learned much faster than in the real world.
That is to say, the learning processes for someone driving a simulator and someone driving a real car are not the same, but these approaches must converge to a common end point which is the best driving style in order to be the fastest car on the track.
Perhaps when we can race real cars via remote control (with ultra low latency obviously) the gamers will rise :) One might suspect the same could become of other genres cough FPS cough ;)
Like America's Army?
I remember reading an anecdote about the development. Apparently the intent was a game that could be used to train real soldiers and it received millions of tax dollars of funding. However, as it was also intended to be sold to the public, the developers 'gamified' it because in playtests gamers saw it as 'boring' and even 'unrealistic' (because the basis for realism is usually Hollywood). This in turn made it too unrealistic for use as a detailed training program within the army.