The real cars in the game are awesome. 4 Lotus F1 cars from 67 to 86. Some sweet old touring cars. A 90's Trans Am Mustang. None of the cars have full real liveries though. No ability to paint the cars yourself. There are like 40 real cars representing something like 10 brands. Not a single GM, Mopar, Nissan, Subaru, Honda, Toyota, Ferrari, Lambo and on and on. None. Then a bunch of fake made up race cars. There's a late 80's NASCAR that for whatever reason wasn't given any brand. It's just a fake car. Even though there are Fords in the game and it most resembles an 87-88 T-bird, it is generic. It has a sweet knock off Davey Allison livery in the preview to get in it, but has a different shitty livery when you actually drive it. Not much content car wise. Many of the car classes only have one car. Many other classes have only one real car with a couple of made up cars. So from a racing stand point all you really have is the ability to run spec races.
When you start the career it asks you what number you want. Then the number on your car isn't that. Minor thing but still kind of annoying. Why ask if that isn't going to be used? I wouldn't have thought anything of the number it gave me if it hadn't asked me what I wanted it to be.
I find the cars incredibly hard to drive with a controller. I tried some sensitivity settings I found that someone else posted online. It helped but I still can't drive even the 104 HP career beginner made up GT5 car worth a damn.
There's a cool look to apex feature that I find makes the car harder to drive. It's a video game so you can't feel the car yaw so you have to rely on your eyes to see yaw. Well when the camera turns to look at the apex which it really does quite well, it looks like yaw to your eyes so you are trying to correct for a car that isn't experiencing yaw. So, I turned that off. Turning that off helped too but still find it incredibly hard to drive with a controller.
The track list is pretty amazing. I like the track list a lot.
I'm not saying the physics aren't good. I really can't evaluate them at all with the controller and the sensitivity settings I'm currently using though. The cars I drove seemed to have their own feel and driving characteristics. The 80's turbo touring cars seemed appropriately laggy.
If you're friends with my on XBL you have probably chased my ghost plenty in Forzas and I can't even get a car around the track in this game. I haven't logged a single lap time yet as a not clean lap is just completely invalidated and goes down as nothing.