As for the game getting harder soon after the start I remember i had similar problems moving to the golden era the first time. One reason for this is that the cars get suddenly really powerful and since they are tailhappy porsches you really need to drive a while to get used to them. Other big thing is adjusting your car setup. You can make the car much faster and more stable by tuning the settings for suspension and brakes(and you don’t need to buy more expensive parts for this). After finishing the games for some 3 times the AI races really got too easy for me and I started to drive them with lot worse cars than the AI.

The best part of the game for me was the original cars. The cars seemed really well finished in the game and you could find special properties in each one of them. However I think they made too many ancient cars and left some of the newer ones undone. They later released some of the less popular new porsches as updates, but those cars seemed far less finished than the original ones.

The multiplayer would have had great potential, but it had some crucial issues because the race options were limited (as was the player amount). It was impossible to allow fine tuning the cars without allowing custom cars from the player account. This meant that it was impossible to tell what kind of parts the opponents had in their cars so it was pretty much useless to play like that.