Review
December 26, 2007

RACE 07™ The Official WTCC Game
Finally, A Racing Sim with Cars Normally Seen Taking Children to Soccer Practice

by Chuck "PFunk" Bellows

Introduction

Europe has always brought interesting things to this continent. Stuff we would have never thought to come up with on our own. Things like Guinness Stout, The Statue of Liberty, and venereal disease.

RACE 07™ The Official WTCC Game is a simulation that is based on the World Touring Car Championship racing circuit, one of the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile’s (FIA being Europe’s governing body for motorsports) many championships. Think of it as being roughly analogous to one of NASCAR’s different series, only not as many Winnebagos are clogging the cobblestone roads and vegan items are available at the concession stands.

I actually had to educate myself on what the WTCC really was. It really is a bit like NASCAR, complete with garishly painted vehicles slathered by stickers bearing the corporate logos of the car’s sponsors, but with an ascot and correctly spoken English in weirder accents. 

Apparently, when these people win a race, they actually begin add to weight penalties. I suppose this means they toss the driver’s luggage (lost courtesy of American Airlines) and the racing groupie he had stashed in his hotel room in the trunk of the car, but I’m not sure. In NASCAR, if you win, they just hose you down with Budweiser.

Also, an entire race weekend actually consists of two races, each 50km in length. An overall winner is declared on points earned when placing in either race, sort of like a high school track meet, but with fewer kids tripping over the high hurdles.

Don’t I Know You?

If the garage tweaks, the views, the settings menus all look familiar, there’s a reason. Simbin wisely decided not to screw with a winning formula. One thing that really shocked the hell out of me was getting used to the fact that the cars were really small.

As are the tracks. It feels a bit like getting accustomed to a new racquetball court, you find the walls a few times before really getting into the contest. The cars may be a shade slower than the stable found in GTR2 or GT Legends, but the default tracks chosen by Simbin aren’t. Imola has to be one of the most exciting road tracks ever built and it was here that I discovered that gravel is one of the major food groups of the beginning driver.

Worse was Macau. Whoever put a race track on the streets of a city the size of Miami (it looks a hell of a lot like it, too) must’ve thought that the smell of burning race car drivers was appealing. What might be a morning commute in the Third World turned into a mind-bending roller-coaster ride of terrifying proportions. The grip marks in the rubber of my MOMO wheel still haven’t gone away. 

The amount of content is immense. Where TOCA Race Driver 3 attempted to throw in every racing discipline known to European mankind, RACE 07 gives you a lot to look at, but with a lot more polish and finish. Both the 2006 and 2007 WTCC seasons are included along with setting the Way-Back Machine for a decade of unfortunate hairstyles and even odder pop music with the inclusion of the 1987 classic series. But Simbin didn’t stop there. They also chose to include Caterhams, a Mini Cooper series, Radical’s little racers, and the F3000 series.

The touring cars take some getting used to. I remember braking for the first curve out of Imola (a track I’d seen many times before in GTR2 and GT Legends) and stopping way shorter than I was used to. It was at that point I realized, "Hey, these things don’t go that fast". The cars handle very convincingly, however. It’s obvious from the get-go that you are no longer behind the wheel of a Saleen S7, so a whole new set of racing guidelines apply.

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