Review: RACE 07™ The Official WTCC Game

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Somewhere, A Yuppie is Crying…

The Honda had to be the standout in the touring cars for me, even if it looked like rolling billboard. A Chevrolet I’d never heard of, something called a Lacetti, seemed to me to be the worst handling vehicle of the entire stable, but to be honest, the touring cars were really the standouts of the sim, with so many to choose from and so many tracks to wreck them on.

The F3000s, on the other hand, also proved to be a major selling point with me, at least from a multiplayer perspective. I’d never gotten into the Formula One racing phenomenon on the PC and I’d never even heard of Formula Two. According to my research, the 3000 designation comes from the 3000cc (or 3.0L) engine size of the car. These engines were normally aspirating and dealt a lower state of tuning than the slightly smaller (but horrifically more powerful) 2.4L engines of the big boys, the F1 cars.

Less powerful or not, the damn things handle like a squirrel on ice, but have to be the most fun I ever had on a road track. Not very fast in top end, they have a powerband as wide as Rosie O’Donnell’s airline seat and within the six gears of the transmission, you can just about pick any one of them to do whatever you want. Stick a finger in the spokes of your steering wheel, pick a gear, and dial for dollars.

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Can I Get it in Green?

The graphics are, like every other Simbin title, a feast for the eyes. All the 2006 and 2007 tracks (and their variations) bring a feeling of local flavor. Puebla’s stark mountain landscapes and bleak, arid surroundings made me think of camping trips at Big Ben with my father, the color and feeling brought to life so well. The clean and tidy nature of Oschersleben gives credence to the notion that this is what a race track would look like if it were built by cardiac surgeons.

The sound’s not so bad, either. It’s actually pretty darned good for something as cheap as this software is. You know, in the cockpit of some of the cars of GTR2, I never heard the sound of asphalt pinging against the bottom of my car like I do in RACE 07, which caused me to wonder, was I in warp speed as mere asphalt couldn’t catch up with me in a Ferrari? In either case, the sound of loose gravel on the undercarriage of the car was a satisfying plus.

Altering your controls was a little more of a chore than it should have been because Simbin seemed to have not wanted you to change their default profiles. You create a new custom profile based on the game’s default one and you can then change it to your liking. I thought that was a little odd, that another step would be added, but it involved (someone call Stone Phillips) a few more clicks of the mouse and my Logitech MOMO was set to go.

The customizable nature of the game has not been lost. Every garage tweak you’ve come to expect from these gearheads is in here. From tire camber to suspension height, it’s all yours in its (let me consult a Roget’s here… maniacal, fanatical, extremist, militant…) fiendishly detailed glory. You can also tweak, twist, and adjust every graphical and environmental setting possible.

The environmental adjustments (from the cockpit of the car to the trees whipping past you) are pretty much the same as you’ve come to expect from Simbin. It’s also very versatile when it comes to your machine’s specs. I had every detail slider cranked to the max and never dipped below about 18fps. The annoyingly perfect attention to detail, the slavish devotion to every little nuance of the racing experience, they’re all here, keeping the level of obsessive-compulsive disorder just about par.

For those that value realism in damage and physics models, you can expect all the normal mayhem, destruction and vociferous admonitions of impending doom from whoever the hell that is on the radio. The damage model is as believable as anything else the crew from Simbin has ever published if my vehicles are any indication at the end of a race, as I’ve never managed to get one out of a race without a few missing body panels. The physics are miles above anything else currently on the shelves at your favorite retailer, keeping our Swedish friends at the head of the pack, so to speak, when it comes to racing simulations.

The single-player is pretty comprehensive, throwing in Time Attack, Practice laps in any of the default tracks, and Championship. The default championships mirror the 2006 and 2007 seasons. The Championship mode does offer a sort of Subway sandwich-style, "create-your-own" Championship by allowing you to select your car and then the tracks you want to race on. You can create your own racing season, adjust the parameters of the views and rules to suit your taste, and depending on the difficulty, kick your own ass.

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