The various game selections, options, and setup menus are simple and provide easy navigation throughout the game. Graphics settings that are selected on the main screen are about the only items left unavailable once at the track. A few graphical tweaks are offered but if your system cannot handle the tasks and settings that you have selected before the track has been loaded, you will have to start over from the beginning. A few have encountered an issue with selecting and assigning the current car set up to the current session. Although you would assume that the current car set-up would be automatically assigned, this is not the case. The interface does allow the user to edit and save the set-up without overwriting the old settings. This allows the driver to make edits to the set-up without the commitment of overwriting the previous choices, thus removing the fear of not being able to find their way back. The interface simply denotes the edited setup with an asterisk (*) and saves it separately until you decide to keep the changes. The remainder of the set-up menu is standard fair for any garage area and contains the ability to change springs, shocks, air pressure, caster, camber, steering lock, etc. The coding engineers deserve high praise for their work on the relationship between the set-up interface and the correlation to the physics of the car. The adjustments that the user makes in the garage create a predictable reaction on the track. Setting up a racecar to outperform the competition and at the same time make the driver comfortable to a point where the maximum potential of both can be reached is not a simple task. The guys and gals that excel will be the ones that do their homework in the garage area. NSR stores telemetry data from saved replays and displays that data in various charts and graphs. To those who are mechanically challenged, this interface may seem useless. For people like myself who enjoy the mechanical nuts and bolts of racing, this will be an amazing tool to compile and reaffirm the reactions of your racecar. NASCAR teams spend countless hours working on and testing set-ups. They create volumes of data related to the set-up options that generate speed. NSR will require you to do the same if you want to succeed.

Once your set-up is tweaked and assigned to your particular session all that is left is to blend off the pit lane and drive. The first thing that becomes apparent in pulling out of your pit stall is that the engine seems flat. Whether you use the Auto-clutch feature or a pedal on the floor, the car just does not seem to jump to life the way 750 HP should. Once the car begins to roll, everything seems to be ok but the first 50 feet feels like the car is in the gravel trap. SimRacing is about driving. Aside from some of the distractions, the game does drive well. Physics have always been on the top of my list when it comes to driving games and I will give credit to the physics of this game because honestly and objectively, they are darn good. As the game is now, there are a couple of things that were missed in modeling the Detroit Locker rear-end coupling but a painless text edit to the player (.plr) file will remedy that. Having said that, I really have to wonder why NRS was released without some of these simple text edits in the first place. Since there are different driving modes for specific ability as well as corresponding car set-ups, I am a little baffled at how it slipped out the door and onto the gold copy. It would seem rather straightforward to leave the edit out for the arcade mode and include it in what they term as the “Veteran” and “Expert” Mode. This edit alone changes the feel and the dynamic of the cars to a tremendous degree. The sad thing is new EA Sim-Racing customers who do not have this information will essentially miss the experience because of a 2-digit text edit. All projects of this magnitude get crunched near release time but concessions in other areas would have had much less effect on the final product.

Not every sim-racer will have the desire to compete solely against the AI drivers but by the same token not everyone has a broadband connection required for multiplayer racing in NSR. For the most part the AI cars in NSR are quite good. I will qualify that statement to say that they are selectively good at selected tracks. At a few of the tracks AI stands for Aggressive and Intelligent, yet at others AI stands for Abhorrently Inept. I drove a few truck races at The Milwaukee Mile where there were caution flags almost every other lap and believe it or not, they were not caused by me. Yet in the same race there were stretches where the AI drivers were tough, aggressive, and intelligent all in the span of a few laps. They gave me room to race, yielded a little when I slid up the track and fought hard for their position. Their behavior was actually more lifelike than some of the real-life racers that I have competed against in other venues. Regardless of people’s perception, there is a little give and take on a racetrack. Not every driver enters the corner or hits his braking point exactly the same every lap. Some corners you win as a driver and some you lose, and there lies the challenge. Racing is not about doing perfect laps. Racing is about competing with other drivers, racing the track as well as the competition, and using your skills to put yourself in a position to make a pass. The AI drivers do compete amongst themselves as well as the player and in one instance I even got a little bump on the straight during a caution. Whether that is a bug in the AI tracking, my imagination or maybe I upset that particular driver on the previous lap---I’m not sure. If it was the latter of the three, I can only hope that driver had a meeting in the “Oval Office” after the race! It was definitely not one of those out of control braking maneuvers that we have seen from other AI pilots. He jacked me up right at the flag-stand and spun me out.