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Other annoyances in this mode were the canned cheers and applause that greet the driver when completing the challenge successfully, and the "ahhhhhs" when you fail a challenge. The audience sounds like the in-laws sitting in your living- or computer room, or in the rear-seat of your car. Why not make it more realistic by having your instructor, perhaps even a real life driver in the FIA GTR series comment on your performance instead?

Luckily the offending sound files can be deleted without consequences from "GameData\Sounds\DrivingSchool" (or just rename them so you can restore them should the need arise).

The other slight grievance is the fact that each time something has been unlocked, you’re presented with the same short generic racing video on the screen. It's OK the first time, but having to watch it more than once is just incredibly irrelevant. You can’t even skip the sequence.

These two features are meant to be motivational and to give the user a sense of achievement and reward. In reality they are quickly becoming rather annoying.

If you want to hand out rewards and introduce some sort of incitement to succeed, why not award the driver different course-completion certificates, or different categories of racing licenses?

That would relate slightly better to the real world than handing out bronze, silver or golden gears.

Overall however, the Driving School is a great and fun addition to the GTR series, offering lots in terms of entertainment value and driver improvement.

Chasing the instructor down the straight

Ghost in the Machine

Many racers enjoy tracking their progress by means of a ghost car. This way they can see immediately if they are faster or slower than their previous fastest time.

I'm usually not one of those players. I simply get completely confused when the ghost car and my own car ”collide”.

GTR2 has such a ghost car feature called Time Trial, and much to my amazement the feature is implemented in such a way that even this grumpy reviewer didn't get too messed up. The ghost is firm and solid in appearance when it is some distance away from you. If it is close or overlapping your own car it is almost completely transparent.

To cut a long story short, I might actually learn to enjoy racing against my own previous best time yet, or against ghosts from other drivers. The feature really is working very well.

Looking for a way to create a ghost lap myself I stumbled upon the ”TimeTrialInstaller.exe” in the GTR2 root directory. How does this thing work? There is no mention of it in the documentation so I and all other users are left to figure this out for ourselves. Is this user-friendly? No (Still haven't figured it out at time of writing).

I did learn that to create a ghost thanks to the patience of "Chunx" who told me. You have to click the ”time trial” tab and then click ”save”. If "Chunx" hadn't told me, I'd never have figured it out in a million years.

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