They yes, it is not needed.
You can have async physics enabled (that is project wide setting), but have the async physics tick disabled in your objects.
The async physics tick is only needed if you need to do work at the physics step level (make sense in a vehicle simulation).
Even then, the async physics tick has a non-trivial per impact, so if you don’t need blueprint support for the work you are doing in these, it would be better to implement your own sim callback object
See TSimCallbackObject.
Sadly we don’t have a tutorial on these yet, but depending on what version of UE you are, there are a few code examples in engine, as a few systems use these sim callback objects.