Previews// Race Driver: GRID

The hills and bumps of the streets of another San Francisco course on offer only serve to make things more hazardous. You can’t steer your car in mid-air, after all, and if one of your front wheels hits the start of the gradient before the other as you climb the slope, you’ll be in bother when you land back on the tarmac.

Onto the Jarama course, and the chance to drive a BMW 320si among a field of 20 cars. A fast car on an unfamiliar (to yours truly) track with twice as many opponents as last time?

Cackling on the inside, off I went in a miasma of grey tyre smoke, eyes firmly fixed onto what was unfolding in front of me. Overtaking on the outside, thereby avoiding the multiple car pile-up on the inside of the first right-hander, I find myself in the lead! Needless to say, the combination of the equivalent of racing ring rust and fiendish AI means that I’m not there for long.

No longer cackling – inside, outside or any bloody side thank you very much – I put my virtual bloody foot down and got aggressive. Yes I bloody did! Unfortunately, getting the dog on and driving like a bonkers man leads to sorrow. Yellow flag icons start to appear, warnings from the pit are issued, and then – one impact too many, and the Beemer crawls to a halt and the screen goes red. I’m out of the race.

A few more laps around Jarama and I am convinced that Race Driver: Grid is possibly the best thing in the world, ever. In a bid to have my suspicions confirmed, I climb into a Nissan Silvia and try a bit of drifting, and this is where that ‘love at first sight’ feeling begins to falter.

I don’t know what the Japanese fella on the commentary is saying, but I will wager that he’s not entirely impressed with what he’s seeing.

Frustratingly enough, just when I think I’m getting the hang of something that I really couldn’t give a damn about, my ‘Incredible’ and ‘Awesome’ drifts are rendered useless by dint of ploughing the car into a container. “Sod it, I’m off to a proper racetrack”, I think to myself. Except that, apart from the aforementioned Jarama, there are no ‘proper’ racetracks in the preview version that we have.