And when you aren't actually trying to race with this racing game and isn't that a peculiar concept the game works very, very well. You can slam the curbs and gain time, but slam them too hard and you'll suffer damage. If you get into the gravel traps or the grass, your car is slowed immediately and considerably. If you stop in the gravel, you will be pretty much stuck there, and since that was a common occurrence for me, I used the spin recovery option to prevent my races from ending prematurely. The racers react to both power on and power off in a realistic manner and can be controlled through the turns with throttle alone.
Different cars have different characteristics.
The Ferrari is tight and nimble while the McLaren is like buttah, as Stuart Scott would say. The Prost feels heavy and underpowered while the Arrows feels light but lacks oomph on the straights. Instead, there are generic ones for grip, speed, minimum downforce, etc, but none of them are really any good at any track. Doofuses like me do better if there is the Papyrus-standard of Easy, Fast, Ace and Qualify settings for each track to at least point us in the correct direction. Until people started posting settings, I was totally lost.