Not possible. The effects of mechanical damage (gearbox,engine,suspension,brakes) are hard coded.

There are things which are possible however:
Reducing the hub size of a lost wheel (to make it harder to drive/steer).
Removing locked diffs so that when you lose a driving wheel it is harder to get traction.
Reducing the deform distance before each stage of mechanical damage happens.
Adjusting the collision body in such a way that it can come into contact with the floor easier (so car underside can drag on the floor).
Increase car body vs surface friction, so the above collision body changes have more of a gameplay affect.
Its also possible to damage steering arms/rack making it impossible to steer,but i haven't found a consistent reliable method to achieve this.

Unfortunately some of the above cant be achieved without having access to the base game models. Or by adding your own cars from scratch

You might want to check out my online bangers mod on realistic damage mode. It includes most of the changes above. The downside/positive (depending on perspective) is its a total conversion mod,so all base cars are hindered for competitive online balance

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=740683245

I feared that this might be the case, it seemed really strange that no one would have taken a crack at it otherwise.
I definitely will, hopefully I can give you some feedback soon. Thank you very much for the answer.

Originally posted by Lyraël:

I feared that this might be the case, it seemed really strange that no one would have taken a crack at it otherwise.
I definitely will, hopefully I can give you some feedback soon. Thank you very much for the answer.

Np and much appreciated if you can. But yea its a shame it cant be expanded on more,yet (maybe they will open it up more,we can hope).

Steering damage is great imo,when it happens. Just wish i could narrow down exactly how to get it to happen. You'll notice it no doubt when running the mod,ai have a big crash and then have no steering on certain cars. For players it seems to be more intermittent

Originally posted by Sam#223:

Originally posted by Lyraël:

I feared that this might be the case, it seemed really strange that no one would have taken a crack at it otherwise.
I definitely will, hopefully I can give you some feedback soon. Thank you very much for the answer.

Np and much appreciated if you can. But yea its a shame it cant be expanded on more,yet (maybe they will open it up more,we can hope).

Steering damage is great imo,when it happens. Just wish i could narrow down exactly how to get it to happen. You'll notice it no doubt when running the mod,ai have a big crash and then have no steering on certain cars. For players it seems to be more intermittent

Will do, hopefully I'll have some time to spare tomorrow.
It's mostly about expectations, instead of how good steering failures might be reproduced. If you have any interest in cars (and chances are that's the case of most people still playing Wreckfest), you expect wheel dislocations and the like to have a significant, or at least measurable impact on your vehicle. Same goes for suspensions, which seem to remain in pretty good shape after collapsing, or the engine barely loosing any power... The list goes on.
Oddly enough, had the game never bothered giving warnings about those failures, I probably wouldn't mind (wheels aside, since you get visual feedback). But since it does and Beam provides a much more in-depht failure system, this always throws me off when playing.

Originally posted by Lyraël:

Originally posted by Sam#223:

Np and much appreciated if you can. But yea its a shame it cant be expanded on more,yet (maybe they will open it up more,we can hope).

Steering damage is great imo,when it happens. Just wish i could narrow down exactly how to get it to happen. You'll notice it no doubt when running the mod,ai have a big crash and then have no steering on certain cars. For players it seems to be more intermittent

Will do, hopefully I'll have some time to spare tomorrow.
It's mostly about expectations, instead of how good steering failures might be reproduced. If you have any interest in cars (and chances are that's the case of most people still playing Wreckfest), you expect wheel dislocations and the like to have a significant, or at least measurable impact on your vehicle. Same goes for suspensions, which seem to remain in pretty good shape after collapsing, or the engine barely loosing any power... The list goes on.
Oddly enough, had the game never bothered giving warnings about those failures, I probably wouldn't mind (wheels aside, since you get visual feedback). But since it does and Beam provides a much more in-depht failure system, this always throws me off when playing.

I fully agree. What i meant, is that mechanical steering failures are possible. The steering rack physically breaks,and you cant steer with 1 or both wheels. Not just the visual wheel pivot deforms that happen in the base game. I have managed to implement this in the banger mod by accident,and cant work out what the cause is.

example:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/348889633414971392/483367027889668126/20180826210616_1.jpg?width=1145&height=645

Wheel loss is much more noticable when the hub size is set to be much smaller than the base wheel size.

The other mechanical effects are just canned effects really,i agree they could be better but they do the job at least when the distance at which they happen is decreased (sooner)

Since you can tear wheels off in the base game I thought this was possible too, just not very noticeable. Bugbear surely has made some strange choices on this, despite how good the game is... That's pretty much like implementing limb damage in a shooter, but not giving any meaningful consequence to damaging a particular one...
Since Wreckfest does not behave like Beam, I don't think it really counts the wheels as no longer connected in your mod's case. It's more likely that the wheel just gets stuck in a position where the game cannot move it, while it's not really snapped off.
I'd have to play around with how you're gone about those latter effects, but I don't really see how lowering the requirements for them to happen would change much, since they are way too subtle to be felt in the first place.

Edit : I've heard of your mod before (Failrace covered it a couple times), but gee 9gb of data... Congratulations on the achievement, that must have been a lot of work

With wheels there are just 2 states. Attached and detached. With detached being a scaled version of the original tire (bugbears reduced scale is quite forgiving, i use 0.01 of original size).

All the visual stuff (locked/bent/twisted/moved position) is just visual as you are actually driving on a invisible physics tire.

What ive managed to do in the mod (that ive not seen happen in the base game). Is break the positioning of the invisible physics wheel, so you cant steer. Itll make more sense i guess when you get around to trying it,watch for ai's which cant do anything other than drive straight.

I really wish i could work out why,so i could implement it for player cars more consistently.

By increasing the 'mechanical damage' scales its much more noticeable as happens a lot earlier in the race,especially on lower performance engines. Where the canned effects affect revs a lot more.

Suspension is similar,if you stop everyone using stiff racing suspension,then the canned effect is more noticeable. But like a lot of things in the base game,they are very forgiving by default,an understandable design choice imo for accessibility.

Thats the good thing about the mod support really,you can change almost everything. From very early on in backing this game i repeatedly nagged about wanting rfactor-esque physics with softbody damage. And i believe we kinda got that,just dumbed down for accessibility.

And cheers,its a big mod yea. 42 additional car models,200+ skins,a bunch of tracks, makes the size seem more reasonable i guess.Team effort really over 2 years,with me overseeing it.

Got it, it's kind of what I thought then.
I see, but here's the thing : When the game first launched, people, myself included, wanted a true FlatOut 3. As it turns out, we didn't quite get that. Given the game's more realistic approach (and the existence of a ''realistic'' damage model), I'd have expected something a bit more in-depht, at least as an option, since Bugbear really wouldn't have to change much to implement proper failures. In the end the game is kind of stuck in-between a proper arcade game and a sim, which is fine to some extent but ultimately somewhat dissapointing for me. Hopefully there are mods to bring the game closer to either end of the spectrum.

The numbers alone are impressive, and from what I've seen the content is on-par with what is already in place. You must have gone through compatibility hell on such a timespan.

Originally posted by Lyraël:

Got it, it's kind of what I thought then.
I see, but here's the thing : When the game first launched, people, myself included, wanted a true FlatOut 3. As it turns out, we didn't quite get that. Given the game's more realistic approach (and the existence of a ''realistic'' damage model), I'd have expected something a bit more in-depht, at least as an option, since Bugbear really wouldn't have to change much to implement proper failures. In the end the game is kind of stuck in-between a proper arcade game and a sim, which is fine to some extent but ultimately somewhat dissapointing for me. Hopefully there are mods to bring the game closer to either end of the spectrum.

The numbers alone are impressive, and from what I've seen the content is on-par with what is already in place. You must have gone through compatibility hell on such a timespan.

I agree, the base game isn't really my cup of tea either really. Its a big step in the right direction over similar titles (dirt showdown,flatout2 etc). In that it tries to be more realistic, rather than just full on OTT fantasy,but at the same time i think they missed a big opportunity with authenticity.

Like its a banger racing/amateur rally cross/derby-esque game,yet doesn't deliver on the authenticity in those areas fully. Of course a lot of people don't care about these motorsports,because they know nothing about them,but at the same time they could've provided that additional realism. Whilst those who had no idea about the real life inspiration, would have been none the wiser, and just as happy about the end product.

Its what i tried to do with the mod,scrap anything that wasn't 'authentic' and try and push game to be as realistic as possible. And yes its been an absolute nightmare to develop at times, especially when large changes were made to the base game. Nullifying large amounts of previous time and effort. Although im very understanding of these changes being necessary.

Hopefully that's all over now though and we can simply focus on further improvements and additions. Hopefully more improvements to the base game also, which dont break things :)

My thoughts exactly. Oddly enough, Codemasters has done an overall better job at implementing those aspects in their games (I've barely played Showdown so maybe not there), even though it wasn't really ever a focus for them, being less 'authentic-looking'.
Games are a great mean to educate a plyer, to an extent. Given how well they can entice somebody to learn (i.e to gather informations outside of the game), they've really squandered that opportunity indeed. It's not like that would have required much effort on their part either, since they've probably had to do the research for themselves. They've just underutilized it.
I guess that's something you have to consider when modding a game that's not in its final stage. Still, I can see how nerve wracking that might have been.

Anyhow, if you want to pursue this discussion, we might want to use MPs instead, while we're still on-topic we're not really answering my initial question anymore.