|
Five years after its release, there is still no better Champcar sim than Papyrus CART Racing (originally released as IndyCar Racing 2, aka ICR2).
Modern sims such as Grand Prix Legends and F1 2000 have left ICR2 behind in terms of physics, graphics, and Windows compatibility. However, no one has yet released a better Champcar sim.
In early 1998, Papyrus announced plans for a CART sim based on the GPL engine, but that project appears to have been shelved indefinitely.
It's still my fondest dream that someday someone will release a Champcar sim based on a modern game engine with state of the art physics and graphics.
CART/ICR2 remains useful for conversion of its tracks to GPL; the combination of GPL, the CART tracks, and graphical updates created for the Rendition-Ready re-release of ICR2 make a very exciting and satisfying Champcar racing experience.
See my CART and ICR2 pages for more details about the original sim and its re-releases; see the CART section under GPL for information about conversion of the CART tracks to GPL.
CPR was eagerly awaited but turned out to be a disastrous failure. Many users complained about the AI. I found the driving model and the controls to be so poor that the cars were virtually impossible to drive.
CPR does have the distinction of having been used by Juan Montoya to learn the various CART tracks before racing on them in his rookie - and championship - year in 1999. The developers reportedly put a lot of effort into the tracks, using GPS to plot the track contours, and the track models do seem to be done fairly well.
If you're interested, there's much more information on my infamous CART Precision Racing pages.