Golden Lap Review (jaybrams)
This currently says "Not Recommended" but this is really a "Not Quite Yet". It's definitely worth putting on your watch list. There is plenty of good here to build on and the Devs are active in the community and promising tweaks, having already delivered on a few. I plan on following the patches/updates to see if the issues are addressed and am hoping to change my recommendation at that time.
The basic downside comes down to replay-ability and scaling difficulty (something they've promised to work on). Qualies are an absolute slog after you do it a few times. The races themselves are somewhat interesting just because of the stakes, but the strategy is not very difficult or varied from race to race. You rarely have to think much about tires or pit strategies because the interface makes it glaringly obvious what you should do. As long as you finish top 4 or 5 at the end of season one (which is pretty easy), you can essentially buy all the best crew and drivers at the start of season 2, and then you're off to the races, rinse and repeat.
I really like the simplistic interface and the traits do impact the player's strategy, but the AI is pretty straightforward and not hard to adjust to. I playtested some of my own mods to try and add variety and RNG to the results, but essentially the standings look the same race after race. I understand this aligns pretty well to real life, but the lack of variety doesn't translate to wanting to fire this back up.
I'm not giving up yet, it's got a good framework. If the devs can fix balance, challenges, and add some variation, this has good potential.