A common comment I heard from armchair experts in the past was that race cars with lower weight and lots of downforce are easier to drive, that adding all that downforce is to make them easier and require less skill. Of course, I've never heard this from anyone that's actually done any racing, not even virtually. It was always from folks that watch NASCAR on television and turn their nose up at open-wheel racing series like F1 or IndyCar.
I kind of get how it might seem this way. Folks with this perspective cite high car weight and almost now downforce as making the cars difficult to race, requiring extreme driver skill to handle them. This does NASCAR some unintentional injustice, as it gives the cars too little credit. Yes, they are heavier than most other types of race cars, and they have relatively miniscule downforce. However, as was stated in the movie Days of Thunder, there's nothing stock about a stock car. Sure, they can't compete with a Formula 1 car, but they're still purpose-built race cars with nothing in common with road cars, except the make and model names slapped on them. They don't really require low weight or lots of downforce for what they do, as they almost always run big, banked ovals, which don't hardly benefit from downforce. Worse, NASCAR sees close pack racing, with trains of cars drafting, but drafting hurts downforce so a key NASCAR strategy would render downforce basically useless anyway.
If you take a Formula 1 car around a large banked oval, it will be easier to drive. All that downforce would be completely unnecessary, and F1 teams and drivers would want to strip away as much downforce as possible to increase top speed. They aren't interested in ease but in performance; the more the better. Nothing an F1 car does is about being easier to drive, but about faster laps. The lower weight and higher downforce are basically useless on a NASCAR oval but very useful on road courses, as it means higher cornering speeds impossible with a stock car, more rapid deceleration into corners, and more rapid acceleration out of corners, which all add up to faster laps.
Let's look at Circuit of the Americas as an illustration. CotA is a 3.426-mile, modern road course in Texas, which hosts a range of motorsports including Formula 1, IndyCar, and NASCAR. Thus it serves as a great performance comparison between series. Of anything that has run there, F1 holds the record for fastest lap, at 1:36.169. LMP1 is next fastest at 1.47.052, followed by IndyCar at 1:48.895. Then there's Formula V8, LMP2, Indy Lights, DPi, DP. LMPC, LM GTE, MotoGP, Pro Mazda, GT3. Formula Regional, GT, Trans-Am, Ferrari Challenge, Lamborghini Super Trofeo, Formula 4, Moto2, Porsche Carrera Cup, Superbike, Grand-Am GT, MotoAmerica, and finally we get to NASCAR at 2:11.549. If you take a Formula 1 car around CotA at a leisurely pace of 2.11 seconds a lap, that should be pretty easy compared to pushing NASCAR around it at that rate. You wouldn't be racing, though. That's just going for a joyride. F1 drivers wouldn't settle for such a leisurely stroll. They'd shave 35 seconds off those laps. That's what low weight and high downforce get them.
NASCAR drivers are pushing their stock cars to their limits to get a 2.11 lap time, but likewise F1 drivers push their cars to superhuman levels to get times of 1.36. At that pace, F1 isn't easy to drive. A lesser driver would run wide or spin out, because F1 cars still have limits just as anything else does. It's just that those limits are farther beyond the limits of lesser cars. Whatever race drivers are driving, they're driving them at their limits. Those limits are just different for each type of car.