Started building a car simulator, focused on F1-like car characteristics. It's reasonably detailed in terms of simulation, but is ultimately meant for games/machine learning, so it approximates some of the behavior. It isn't physically accurate.
The first piece is the car simulator itself - https://github.com/cmdr2/car-sim. This module is a numbers-only simulation, i.e. it doesn't handle visualization, interaction or anything that's not related to the simulation of vehicle components.
I've started from the point of contact between the tire and the road, and will work backwards from that. I've got a basic tire friction model working, which computes the "effective friction" against the track surface, by taking into account: tire material, tread amount, road type, road condition, tire width, tire hardness, tire pressure, tire temperature, tire wear and tire camber.
This model is independent of the vertical tire load (i.e. downforce + car weight). Instead, the output of this model can be multiplied by the vertical load to get the max traction force.
It uses numpy and all the operations are vectorized, so lots of tires (and conditions) can be simulated in parallel.