A common complaint I've heard from armchair enthusiasts is about overtaking/passing or, more precisely, lack thereof. I've heard NASCAR fans bemoan insufficient passing on road courses, and even at local dirt tracks I've heard lifelong fans complain about "follow the leader" and "no passing."
It sort of reminds me about American criticism of football ("soccer", the football actually played with feet) and lack of scoring. The American philosophy seems to be that the easier it is to get points, resulting in bigger scores, the better. Sports aren't supposed to be challenging, it would appear. Just imagine how much better we could make basketball by dramatically ramping up the scoring if we drop the hoops to like two feet above the court and make them ten feet wide. A blind man in a wheelchair could sink tons of baskets. Scores would be huge. Heck, why stop there. Take the hoops out of the picture and just make it so if the ball touches the correct half of the court your team gets points just like sinking baskets of old. Nobody would fail to score.
I don't know what exactly people are expecting drivers to do to increase overtaking during a race. It's not like they could be passing but just aren't interested. Every driver out there wants to be ahead of where they are. That I can safely assure you. Every single one of them wants to be in the lead. Wanting it, however, isn't enough. The car isn't propelled by wishes and wants.
Take a look at the onboard (cockpit) photo above. We're inside your car. I'm in the yellow one just ahead of you. Alright, now pass me.
How do you do it? What's going to give you a big, sudden burst of speed to launch you around my car? Our cars are roughly the same with roughly equal performance, so what special power-up is going to send you cruising on around me?
Yeah, you're drafting me, so you can match my speed without using quite as much throttle, so you can simply dart out from behind me and floor the throttle for a sudden speed burst, right? Well, it's not going to be massive, and it won't last. Now you're no longer getting the benefit of the draft so your speed boost will drop off, and it wasn't dozens of miles per hour advantage to begin with. Additionally, to go around you're taking a less ideal line, which is going to hurt your pace.
That's not all, though. It's normal for tens of cars to be lined up in a drafting chain, with every one of them benefitting from it. If you duck out from behind me, the cars that were behind you may not follow you. They may pull up behind me, completing the chain again, helping me but leaving you hung out to dry. Now you're the slowest car on the track and you're reward is dropping like a stone, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even plug yourself back into the line of cars because your gap was closed off and unless you shrink your car down to six inches you aren't fitting back in. You tried gaining one position but instead lost maybe twenty or thirty.
Some people get this. Race drivers get it. I'm not telling them anything. Even virtual racers get it, because even though they aren't in a real car the same principles apply. Well, at least if they're racing anything half-way realistic, anyway. This is why I wish every race fan would get them an Xbox or a PlayStation and play some Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo, Project CARS, Assetto Corsa, F1, NASCAR Heat, et cetera. Yes, they're not technically real, but at least they'd be exposed to the same scenarios and woes.
As for overtaking on a road course versus on an oval, yes there is a lot less, and for good, logical reason. We've already addressed that you can't just simply go around someone just by really wanting it, even on an oval, but it's even harder to pull off on a road course. If we go back to the basketball illustrations, if overtaking on an oval is equivalent to the outlandish notion of easily scoring with massive, unmissable nets, overtaking on an oval is a three-point shot into a normal basket from halfway across the court. It's harder to pull off and more rare, but a big deal when it happens.
On an oval you can try to make a move anywhere, and often you don't have to pull it off right away. You can pull up beside me and hang out there for multiple laps; no hurry and no big deal. You can't do that on a road course. Even though they're technically wide enough to go two-wide, three-wide, or more, depending on the track, you can't realistically run that way. You get ahead of me or you stay behind me.
This is because of the nature of driving a road course. It's not like driving to the store where there's marked lanes and everyone stays in lanes. On a road course you weave about taking the fastest possible route, which in simplest terms is taking the widest possible radius through corners to keep speed up. You're constantly weaving back and forth. A textbook cornering move is out-in-out, whereby you approach a corner from the outside edge, curve across to the inside edge, and then sweep back out to the outside edge. That's faster than slowing down to take a much tighter route through the turn.
Every single driver on the track is going to do that because, if they don't, they might as well park the car and go home because they're nowhere near competitive. If you and I are running side-by-side, neither of us are taking an ideal, fastest route around the track. You and I are now the slowest two cars on the track, by far. We're no longer part of the race but just goofing off between the two of us, doing our own thing and in the way of the drivers racing for real.
Passing, or at least trying to, on a road course is risky because of the fact that we're weaving back and forth, and our speeds are fluctuating wildly from high speeds on straights to suddenly braking hard and reducing our speeds by fifty, a hundred, or more miles per hour very rapidly, then rapidly accelerating back out. If you're messing around beside me, there's a good chance of us coming together, and that can result in going off track, damage to our cars, or both. You tried taking my position but now you've lost ten seconds playing Lawnmower Simulator, you've damaged your car resulting in lost performance, may have to lose time pitting for repairs, and will probably get a penalty for the collision.
In short, it's not as simple or straightforward as it seems.