Is the tire selection (Hard/Medium/Soft) actually difficulty selection in GT5?

Question

Races are so much easier to win when you put the Soft tires on, that you can afford to make mistakes and still beat AI with better performance cars, is this intended? I know that they give you best grip, but sometimes it feels like cheating :) The difficulty with Medium tires is little more challenging and with Hard tires it gets pretty difficult sometimes (you can't afford to make mistakes, worse acceleration, grip, ...).

I didn't find any difficulty settings in GT5 (except for assists), so I was thinking - are the Hard/Medium/Soft tires equivalent to Hard/Normal/Easy difficulty?

I'm talking about A-SPEC races here of course, special events/licences have their difficulty indicated by bronze/silver/gold trophies.

I've not played previous Gran Turismo games and I've just sunk myself into GT5, so I don't know if it's like a common GT-way of doing things?

Answer 1

No, I don't think they were meant to represent difficulty levels as djsmiley2k said soft tires are better than medium and hard tires but wear out quicker so you would have to change tires more frequently in longer races.There are races in the game that can have 10+ laps(I remember doing a 60 lap race once) you should use medium and maybe even hard tires in these races so you don't have to waste time changing tires. But if you want to I guess you can use it as a difficulty setting there is nothing stopping you from using hard tires on a 2 lap race just to challenge yourself.