You really need to increase the friction. I am sick of every ODE demo sliding around the road like it's ice.
as I said before, ODE is not being used here.
As for the friction, this is a gravel track and therefore slippery. Rest assured that the car has much more grip on tarmac - in fact, unless you pull the handbrake it's very hard to get it to slide, altough the back end does kick out exiting corners under power.
but the original view gives it a more unique feel...
You still have control and physics issues, right? So if you develop AI right now, you are going to be building on a system that is unstable
Personally I'm happy with the way the car drives - the physics system is never going to get better than it is now (and I know this because I have worked on it ever since the car physics code I posted in the archives just after B3D was released) but I still don't like the 1st/3rd person viewpoints - I shall revert to the top-down view primarily because I want this to be an old-school racing game along the lines of Thrash Rally, Nitro, Supercars etc..., not to be another Colin McRae wanabee.
I tried car physics with ODE, but unless you are prepared to get into the Pacejka stuff for tyre physics the results are always extremely twitchy, flicking left to right with little sense of progressive sliding. I had more success using Tokamak than ODE, despite ODE's car wheel joint, but this current system still feels more solid, and much more fun to drive. If someone can develop a car physics system in ODE/Tokamak that feels good, I may reconsider.
I think it will become a Rallycross game rather than a pure rally game though, as I like the pack racing feel and the single short rallycross circuits negate the 'no-idea-where-the-track-goes-next' problem that is inherent to a top-down racer. I currently have the AI racing 8 CPU cars around, albeit only on a single path, but they jostle and spin out and it seems to be fun, which is more important than realism.
Rallycross tracks also don't have jumps, which is good because I'm not that happy with the way the car jumps at the moment.