Why do you say beamngs approach is weird? They seem to take a bottom up approach and I think it's a decent way to do it.
Germany has two state of the Art companies developing tire models and their parametrization and instead of relying on the decade of research and experience in that area they are ignoring it all and are going to some company around the world to get any data at all. This is just totally bizarre, they likely could have saved themselves a lot of time and money by just hiring a couple of guys from that sector and just implementing well studied approaches or just worked together with world leading experts in that field.
>They seem to take a bottom up approach and I think it's a decent way to do it.
If nobody else had ever done tire simulation, sure.
I’m sure you’ve driven it, so you’d know that it’s not the best but it’s no slouch.
Or maybe they're operating at a level of fidelity much higher than the game needs? If they're working on simulation e.g. for Formula 1, they might be doing full fledged numerical simulation (FEM etc) rather than simplified models for real time games.
I'd be curious to know more though, what else do you know about this?