Be Excellent To Each Other

I think auto-aim should be optional in games.

As for automatic vs manual in racing games; if you have the choice, what's the problem?

I think it's that Dudley uses manual because it's apparently the right thing to do but keeps losing, because he's crap.

Torque converters aren't, by themselves, the reason for "slowness" of autos. Although they turn some of the power into heat, bear in mind that while you're accelerating hard, the torque converter is doing its job of turning excess engine RPM into.. more torque. This makes up for the loss and helps compensate for the few, wide spaced ratios that the auto gearbox has.
The loss shows up in needing additional cooling and making the fuel economy awful, especially if you drive in kickdown a lot.

This.
I used to hate the idea of automatics, believing that people using them just sat in the car and steered it rather than drove it.
Having had a couple, though... They are so much nicer to drive. I'd never take one on a race track* and like Mr Gaywood says you do miss a manual box when hunting around country lanes near where you grew up, but on motorways and in London traffic they are worth their weight in gold.

Slowness is perhaps the wrong word, but aren't they a cause of sluggishness?

* saying that, the only form of racing I currently do is my Range Rover, which is an auto. Having a manual would be shooting myself in the foot - you don't want to be fucking around trying to get low-third when, say, you are climbing out of a river. And you don't want to put the clutch in, well, ever.

The cause of sluggishness is more due to the other reasons mentioned: fewer ratios with a big gap between them, additional weight carried, and in older models the gear-switching logic is vacuum and oil pressure controlled, which isn't always going to shift at the perfect point.
Remember there's also measures taken to make the shift smooth, and therefore slow. For racing, the box can be modified to change more snappily, and you'll probably find that the latest big cars with autos have a fair bit of computer intelligence to adjust parameters like this, under control of the "sport" button or even the rate of change of the accelerator pedal.

I haven't compared the 0-60 times of modern auto cars against their manual counterparts, but I'd be surprised if there was a big difference these days.

All that said though, you will still notice it while driving because essentially, a downshift will happen *after* you've chosen to accelerate (causing an annoying lag), rather than you setting up the right gear before you need it, such as going into a tight corner.

I would have to say that griping about gearing in Forza is probably wasted effort.

There are always people more into simulation in racing. Forza isn't even in the ballpark when you're reading a forum full of people demanding that gear-shifts be slowed by a further 0.2 seconds in Live For Speed to slow down those "gamerz" who don't use a clutch pedal. Or people bitching endlessly about how "kite flyers" (chase camera users) should be excluded from racing leagues on the grounds of being too lightweight to compete.

Forza2 is the best racing game/simulator I've found on any console, but it's not the place to complain about automatic gears. From my own mucking around, I've found the auto-gears a total pain. I was doing a lot of lapping at Mugello in the group D, trying to get close to the record times. Having auto gears shifting on you mid corner is awful.

But yes, my point stands. When you have a Sparco bucket seat bolted to a frame, with BRD pedals and wheel, with three PCs networked to give peripheral monitors, then after you quit trembling from the nerdgasm, you can complain about driving aids. Realism in racing sims is really a rabbit hole best left unexplored.

You can link three 360s and three tvs to do that, can't you? Or is that PGR4?

I love you.

Can I offer you money to write things for me?

Yes. Well you could, I couldn't.

Forza 2 can do it.

So could Forza 1 for that matter.