

That wasn’t good enough, of course, and before I knew it, I was already in my second race, bagging a better grid slot and finishing in a (slightly) more respectable position.

After watching the ‘Racing Etiquette’ videos (which are like those videos you watch before going karting which explain how not to be a douchebag), I entered my first race, span out, and came second to last, beating someone whose driving was so bad they must have been either blind drunk or a toddler. I’m not a massive fan of racing online - unless it’s with people I know - but GT Sport has a knack of drawing you in and getting you hooked from the off. There are even FIA-endorsed championships to work up to if you’re feeling especially serious.

The online stuff is good, though: ‘official’ races are happening all the time, and you’re given the opportunity to practice and qualify while you wait for the start. There is a limited arcade mode with decent AI (albeit AI that’s hamstrung in a weirdly artificial way on lower difficulty settings), but that’s not what you buy the game for. The whole point of GT Sport is online gaming: if you’re not going to partake, it’s simply not worth buying the thing. It operates on a sliding scale from 0 - 5, so you can wean yourself off as your driving improves, rather than having to go cold turkey and switch it off entirely when you want to up the challenge. Special mention has to go to the traction control settings.

Like many driving games, GT Sport isn’t brilliant at replicating lift-off oversteer, nor the operation of a limited-slip differential in a FWD application. The only real blight is with the front-wheel drive cars - they’re a little more two-dimensional. All the cars I’ve tried thus far are wholly satisfying to drive, but it’s arguably the slower, softer stuff where the developers’ understanding of car physics really shines. There’s a real sense of the designers thinking properly about things like body roll, steering response, balance and what a car is supposed to do on the limit. Of the handling models from the three racing games that have come out over the last few weeks, Project Cars 2’s is unrealistically twitchy, Forza 7’s is perhaps a little too forgiving, and Gran Turismo Sport’s is just right.
