The kerbs are not the only thing that is well modelled on the Spa track. The whole track seems very accurate and is certainly an improvement to what we've seen in previous ISI sims. The roller coaster style straights are gone. That doesn't mean that the track is smooth; there are a lot of bumps and like said especially under braking in some places you need to be careful not to lock up going over small bumps. Spa looks like it's still work in progress, because it looks quite empty with trackside objects missing. It still looks beautiful enough, and especially the textures look sharper compared to the washed out look in GTR2002 or F1C. The graphics otherwise are also more than good enough. The car models look great, the textures are nice and the cockpit is nicely done with the Motec display being a cool feature. You can use it to check your tyre and brake temps along with your lap info. I'm not a big graphics geek, but I think it's safe to say that everything in this department is in order. Regarding the cockpit, another nice feature is that you can move the cockpit view forward/backward and up/down with your left and right mouse buttons.

Going back to the driving side of things, there are a couple of things that bother me. One is the rear end of the car coming around without any warning at all when accelerating at low speeds. The car just seems to snap into a spin really suddenly and there isn't anything you can do about it. It's also pretty hard to feel the grip on the rear tyres under acceleration. One thing that contributes to this is that you don't really hear the squeal of the tyres like you do in Papyrus' NASCAR Racing 2003 Season for example. It's not too bad once you get used to it, but it might be a good idea to make the tyre and road sound volume level an option to tweak in the sound menu. The laptimes at Spa also seem to be too fast compared to what the real drivers achieve. I'm not sure why this is, because, like said, the track layout seems to be accurate enough. Eau Rouge seems to be a bit too easy, because you can take it flat out at least with a qualifying setup. Maybe there is too much grip at high speeds, but the fast laptimes are always a combination of many things. Other than these issues I haven't found anything major to complain about. The feeling of driving a racing car might be the best ever, certainly up there with the Papyrus Trans Am physics for N2003. This I feel is because of a combination of a few things. The sense of speed, the sounds, and the G-force effects. What I like most is the way you need to drive the car to achieve fast laptimes. You can't trash and slide the car around the track if you want to find the last second or the last tenths. You need to be aggressive, but still very smooth with your steering and pedal inputs. Drifting or sliding the car is possible, and it's a great feeling to do it in the fast corners, controlling the car with the throttle but the fastest way around the track is to keep it "tidy", like a certain Scottish F1 driver might say. In this way I find GTR more realistic than N2003 PTA, although it's of course hard to compare these two types of cars.

Overall, this press demo is very promising and it will be interesting to see what things will be added and changed for the final version. There are still some things that need to be improved to reach the level of the Papyrus sims. For example the replays in this demo look a little better than in F1C, but you still can't see the car suspension and other things working as well as you can see in Papyrus' NASCAR sims or GPL. Crashes still look very weird in the replays and if you flip the car it doesn't look natural at all. These are maybe small details compared to getting the online experience right. This I feel is the thing that will make or break the game. The rest of the game and certainly the physics engine is competing hard with Papy's best efforts, but if the multiplayer isn't close to the level Papy has set, then I think GTR will never be the number one sim for the serious sim racers. At the moment things look very promising, and I'm more into doing laps at Spa in GTR than playing N2003. I'm very anxious to see how things progress and can't wait for the full version of the game.