In fact, if you are at the beginning of your simracer career, you'll learn a lot more racing. You will learn less only when you'll be able to cheat physics.
At this point, if you race fixed setup series, you can stay real close to real racing.
The fear of crashing in sim and real life is obviously not the same.
If you crash in an official sim race, there's consequences. That's not on offline Mario kart championship.
To drive a quality race in iRacing. You'll need one week of training for that specific event. You don't want to ruin that.
You may have spent the previous year to get the license to drive that specific series. If you crash, especially if you take someone with you in the crash, you may loose your license and go back to lower level racing.
Obviously you would loose championship points.
Racing behavior in simracing is extremely strict. You have to be very clean. Most F1 drivers would be banned.
If you crash others in simracing, you'll get a hard time.
In real life, the fear is mostly money related. Which is totally different kind of pressure. If a pro driver crash, he can easily loose his job.
There is differences in the way you learn. You can't use 100 tires a day IRL (if you are not a CSG driver apparently
). And you can't learn by going too fast in a corner and slowing down lap after fap.
But in sim, the pressure can be absolutely amazing. In iRacing, you're put in races with guys with the same skills you have. It doesn't matter if you're a noob or Alonso. The opposition is massive and you'll get the pressure.