I was trying my best to bring an open mind to this review because I wanted this to be the open-wheeled racing simulation that has been missing in our community for so long. Regardless of what other platforms and situations came before, I think it only fair to judge a game on its own merit. Even the fact that the game came on 2 CD's was somewhat impressive. Surely a title that comes in the form of 500Mb would have a tremendous amount of depth to it, although at this point I'm beginning to wonder what took up so much space! It certainly wasn't in the victory lane celebration after my first win.

There were a couple of things that really put me off right from the start. The first was in the initial install. Anytime there is an advanced option for the install of any software, that's the first button I look for. Even though I'll never fill my hard drive to capacity, I always look for ways to save space and more importantly there's no need to install a bunch of junk that I'll never ever use. Obviously, I must have chosen not to install something that was critical to the game function because the second time I installed it, it wouldn't work. It would be nice if the installer mentioned just exactly what was critical to the game and what was not. Because I would honestly like to know what it was. I guess my best advice would be to install the game to the directory of your choice and leave the rest of it alone. The second item that got me hoppin' mad was the fact that I could not calibrate my controller within the game. There is just no excuse to omit that critical part of matching the users' controller to the input of ANY game engine. DirectX is there for a reason and I just don't understand why these coders can't get that through their head. Now there are some controller options that are within the game to adjust for speed sensitivity and dead-zone and they honestly do what they are supposed to. But on the other hand there is absolutely no information in the readme or anywhere else I could find that would actually explain how to adjust these settings. You have to just cut and try the settings until you can drive the car the way you want. In my own situation, I had to drag another controller out of the closet just to be able to drive the game. The controller that I built many years ago and works with every other title that I've wanted to buy simply would not work. I could steer the car but the brakes and gas were full on. There was a suggestion in the readme to disable the brake for a hard-wired split-axis-type controller. I tried the suggestion but I still had to push down on the gas to slow down in the corners. One thing that I did discover was that the game will accept multiple controllers. My trusty wheel and the Act Labs pedals and still more cut and try efforts in the controller options were the only thing that let me drive the game in the manner I am used to.

Now that I can actually drive and explore some of the other options in the game, I thought I would try out some of the other tracks to see what they were like. Since I have had some seat time at the Kansas Speedway, I thought that would be a logical place to start. I know where the groove is there and I'm familiar with the banking as well, so I figured that to be a good place to test my setup knowledge. After reading a few of the help tips in the setup menu, I thought I had the car setup well enough to race. I seem to remember that one of the setup tips stated that at tracks where good speed is maintained that the down-force on the body itself is generally enough to balance the car. In other word, you don't need a bunch of wing in the setup to make it handle. I'm left to assume that 200 mph isn't enough speed to create down-force with the body alone because I had 14 degrees of wing angle in the front, negative 4 degrees in the rear wing, completely bottomed out the weight-jacker and the car was still an under-steering pig. With that series of setup parameters plugged into a real IRL car, it would have flown down the straight with the rears off the ground. I don't expect to need a mechanical engineering degree to create a decent setup within any simulation but at least they could come closer than they did. I tried every setting in the menu and the car still pushed like a shopping cart. I even dragged another controller out of the dungeon thinking maybe it was my wheel that was the culprit. After wasting another 30 minutes getting that contraption installed and configured to the game, nothing changed. Now there are 2 wheels and 5 pedals attached to the game and the darn thing still won't turn.