it’s a practice thing mike… i flew past balls for my first 20 hours (which i think you’re still under for total play time). i think a lot of it has to do with the deceptiveness of the ball cam and how your car relates to it as you drive near the ball. for instance, it’s really easy to hit a ball that’s coming straight on to you, but it gets increasingly difficult as that ball vector goes more to the side. the worst case is when the ball is coming at you at a totally perpendicular angle, because ball cam just really, really messes you up. most of the balls i’ve seen you miss were this variety (and i miss them all the time too)
two things really helped me here:
a) i turned FOV up to about 95 (90 is the default), and camera distance back to like 280 (default is 240 i think). i see a bit more of the field and the ball comes at me a bit slower from angles, so i don’t miss as wildly. this made a really, really big difference for me, i suggest you try it.
b) i started driving around the ball wherever possible to try and line myself up as much parallel with the ball’s vector as i could. take a look at this messy diagram i just made: http://i.imgur.com/2onn0uF.png
it shows some base setup where the ball rebounds off the net and towards the left center, and you’re in the middle waiting to hit it. fig 1 is the approach where you drive, stop, turn, and then drive in a straight line… this works but is slow and you prob won’t get a shot. fig 2 is the best approach, where you drive “a bit wide” on your way to the ball, powerslide a bit back to the right, and end up with a vector that is pretty much straight on (you’ll be able to make contact here always, at least… the shot might not always be hard or always perfectly on line but you’ll send it back into the crease, and some percentage of the time it will also be pretty hard and on target). fig 3 is what i always used to do… drive straight at the “left side” of the ball and try to flip right at the very end. this is, like, a 100% miss shot for me, because ball cam confuses me as to where the ball really is and i have no idea where the net is. maybe really good players can do this shot but i can’t and once i stopped trying, i had a lot more success.
the scenario in fig 2 takes less time than fig 1 to set up, but it’s still not a straight line to the ball so sometimes you won’t beat a defender to it. the good thing, though, is that if you DO get to the ball first, you always hit it, which is way better than the fig 3 alternative. also, from your line in fig 2, you will be able to see if the defender is going to beat you to the ball, and your line is pretty well set up to get a piece of his clearance shot (maybe block it entirely and send it back towards the goal)