[Blarg]

Edge made a great response. There's more to the racing than it seems if you just note that cars are doing nothing but turning left.

It's damn hard to turn left that well! I used to think racing was one of those things that people want to call a sport but is not, but I've come to accept it as a sport. It gets brutally hot in those cars, driving for hours handling those cars is supposedly very hard on your hands and forearms, but most of all, you can't hope to excel in it without exceptional timing, depth perception, perception speed, and reaction speed. And the stakes are high -- you might not come out alive if you space out or make the wrong move. The mind and instincts obviously have to be operating at peak level to keep you both safe and anywhere close to the winner's circle.

Those guys don't just drive well, their driving skill is on another plane entirely, even if they mostly only turn left.

Ever try that NASCAR PC game? It can get complex, and supposedly is extremely realistic. It simulates figuring out what tires to use, how to warm them up, how the car should be balanced, etc. And trying to get up a good speed and still maintain control of a damn heavy car isn't all that easy. Playing it showed me that going left is harder than it looks; if you drift off an ideal path, it can take a while to recover, because everything you do creates momentum, which interferes with everything else you might want to do. Finding that ideal path is tough, and maintaining it is hard, especially since you will usually have other cars in the vicinity you have to worry about, too, sometimes just inches away.

The raw power of the machines comes through very well in the game, too. It made me finally appreciate and respect NASCAR a bit, though I still find it dull sometimes after a while on t.v. But I know if I were sweating in a 120 degree car and trying to manage everything for hours in terms of fractions of a second, I would be plenty hyped up.