I agree with that. I've had similar thoughts about e.g. flight (combat) simulators, I rarely see a reason to try out some older flight sims if there is a newer one available. Like, say, playing Falcon AT or Falcon 3.0c instead of Falcon 4.0 (or something better).

After all, these games (e.g. racing games and flight sims, and quite often sports games) seem to rely on:

- good graphics
- realistic physics

and those tend to get only better with newer games. If you play an older racing game, it just feels the same but worse graphics and maybe less believable physics. With sports games there's also the teams and players, which are more up to date in newer games (sport fans want their current idols to be in the football game or whatever).

Unique games that offered something more on top of being merely vanilla racing or flying games are exceptions, like the Carmageddon games, maybe the Burnout series etc. Also, maybe some Papyrus classics like Grand Prix Legends or Nascar Racing (2) are such games too as maybe there haven't been that many newer racing games presenting the same races or eras of cars (or maybe I am not aware of it, maybe consoles get new Nascar Racing games every year?).

There are lots of mods for it, including grphics and physics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CueLDceMnW0

There are a couple of free games on Steam but most use paid DLC/Season pass etc.

The game stated above, Live for Speed has a limited free version, wich many people use for years, only 1 track and 3 cars available though but can race online. Autocross is extremelly fun :D

X-motor racing was free if I correctly remember. That was a hard one to master.

The game I had in mind was indeed Live for Speed. Seem to recall there were more than 1 track and 3 cars back when I tried it out, but it's many years ago (a decade?) so I'm fuzzy on details now.

Colin McRae was a lot of fun too, and not brutally difficult from what I recall.

That video you linked looked difficult though, and especially so based on the video description. May have to be an actual rally driver to complete! :D