New player here. Dabbled with Project Cars but only ever put like 10 hours on it. Just got PCARS2 and I'm loving it. I started out with a cockpit FOV of 85. Wasn't particularly thinking about it, just most 1st and 3rd person games seem to go best with FOVs between 75 and 95 in my experience so my habit is to just tweak FOV up until I see the wide angle effect (you know, straight lines curving at periphery).

That was a big mistake.

I thought I was just terrible at this. Constantly spinning, losing control, bumping other cars, etc. Did all the car tweaking stuff messing around trying to play better. Thought "hey, I drive a dinky Hyundai in real life, maybe I'm not used to high horsepower cars" and tried some races with the Toyota 86. Nope, still awful. Poor braking, poor turning, spinning out and running off-track even in a 197 HP car.

Turned out it was all FOV. I used a calc and got a FOV recommendation of 31. Nope, too low, game only goes to 35. Set to 35 and it just felt like I was sitting on the dashboard, so maybe "correct" but way too low. After fiddling with it a bit via trial and error, I got a comfortable and relatively realistic FOV around 48-50 (I just split the difference and picked 49. 48 still felt too forward even with moving seat back and 50 felt wrong).

Suddenly I'm able to judge distance properly. It feels like actually driving, despite using a controller. With a better judge of distance now I know when to break, feather the gas or only apply lighter pressure. Suddenly I'm lapping people and taking first place when before I couldn't even stay on the road. It's amazing and I'm hooked. Now I just can't wait until I can get a wheel and pedals, this is amazing. All the fun of driving, none of the traffic. XD

Just thought I'd post this, since I'm sure others have had issues as well. Maybe it's common knowledge, I dunno. But FOV matters big time. And if you're only on a 16:9 TV screen like me, it'll seem weird at a low FOV, not seeing the whole dashboard and interior. Mirrors are offscreen. It's weird. But trust me, you'll get used to it and it makes everything just click into place. This game just became awesome for me.