I had looked into mountain biking gloves too, but they always had crappy palm padding. Yours look pretty good though. They're far from my size though. Height-wise I'm between Massa and Alonso and my "men's" glove size would relate to XXS. OMP is the only racing glove maker that has my size at all I think.
Shoe-wise, I started with shoes with a thin sole, but now I'm mostly bare-feet (but my feet are more used to it, I even do garden and repair work outside bare-feet). Maybe thin-sole racing shoes and a harder load-cell setting would make me faster, but at the moment I like my brake medium stiff.
On a weak to medium pedal, I absolutely believe that wearing no-shoes makes you better and I'm in good company... have you guys seen this video? One of my Top5 favorite driving videos (it's from RUF's test driver back in the 80s/90s edit: you can see that he's in socks when the camera shows the shifting):
I feel you on glove sizing issues, I have long fingers so most gloves are uncomfortable for me if I go by the usual measurement of palm size, so it's always a pain to figure out.
Love that video, have seen it a million times along with Faszination! I agree that barefoot definitely gives more feel on a normal pedal, I can't even drive a real car in any of the boots I own. I just have about a 1cm travel on my homemade loadcell though, hence slip-ons. If I had a set of clubsports or heusinkvelds where travel is (or can be) higher, I might not bother.
Although I no longer test for Sector 3, it shits me to tears when armchair experts hail one release a sim and another a simcade. The armchair expert is usual exposed as someone who is talking out their arse and has zero seat time in the cars they opine as being accurate and true to real world. The same can be said for tyre models.
(I'm going to preface this with saying that I've never driven R3E, and yet understand that Alex (I think?) is the man when it comes to sorting out the cars; nor have any real gripes with any sim I do drive, and almost always enjoy what I'm given)
I think it comes down to how people feel a car should behave. The vast majority of us have no experience in a race car, so it all comes down to perception. On one hand, we have no basis for telling a dev/maker with hard data about physics, but on the other, as you said even Thiim says there's no comparison to real life. I know from personal experience, for example, that spirited driving in something like a sim 488, aventador or 911 doesn't yield the insane corner grip I feel in real life versions of those cars. Is it tyre model? or physics? or just a limitation of ffb/lack of sensation or feel? I couldn't tell you, and have to go on (and enjoy) what devs provide. Objectively, devs can get things wrong as well. This is easiest seen (heard?) in the sound department, where sterile recordings often don't match up to the environments we drive in.
The question then, is do we go for an entirely data driven model that doesn't 100% match up to a real car according to drivers, an entirely 'artistic' approach, or somewhere in between?
I say this, because the first example (as devil's advocate) that I thought of was the first release of URD's GT500. I know they aren't going with nearly as much detailed info as someone like Kunos, but boy was that first release a mess. I've never driven a real GT500, but even I know that it needed much, much more grip to look/feel like what I see in videos of the real cars. Thankfully they finally 'fixed' it.
I guess what I'm getting at, is that I agree that people moaning and nitpicking about physics to those who have hard data and first hand experience (such as Alex) in these things is silly. However, I don't believe we can fully exclude 'feel' or perception, as subjective as that might be. After all, as much as we want to be pretend race drivers in a fully accurate simulation, they are just computer games meant for fun. I've never driven a 2019 F1 car, GT1, or an LMP1, but they feel how I imagine they probably would, and that's good enough for me.
