That is part of the fun, though -- pure horsepower drags are the perfect introduction to racing since they teach the fundamentals of upgrading a car. Sure, the focus is on beefing up the raw output, but it still teaches a valuable lesson about what order nitrous, tires, limited slip differential, intercooler, turbo or NA-tuning, flywheels, exhaust, transmission and so on should be improved (hint: slapping a level four twin-can NOS system in a car with 300 bhp will not win you any top speed races if your car normally redlines at 140mph). Though it took us a bit of trial and error to find the right drivetrain (we opted for all-wheel drive), car (Subaru Impreza WRX STi) and parts combinations, the rewards were readily apparent as soon as we threw down.

You can do that in a couple of ways; either freely roam to a hotspot on the map where racers congregate (or tap the select button, pick a hotspot and warp over there), or just find someone on the street to ride up behind and flash your high beams at, TXR-style. Hotspots obviously work better because you'll not only start out at the same speed, but you can actually get a peek at the rewards for beating them, the car they're driving and a little profile written with loving detail for each of the real and fictitious racers. Career racers and even writers from car magazines make appearances in their own rides, in a nice little bit of payback.

After picking an opponent, it simply becomes a matter of outdriving them on long stretches of highway. There are some hard corners, sure, but for the most part this is a race of speed, stressing proper shift times and strategic use of nitrous to win races. You can beat the other guy with just raw acceleration and top speed if you've topped things out, but where's the sport in that? Here, more than any other part of the game, little things show themselves. Adding grip tires and a spoiler add a tangible sense of control to things where whence there was none, and with a fantastic sense of speed, it comes in very, very handy indeed.

We were pleasantly surprised to find out that when you beat the head of a particular racing gang, you'll bank their car, and when we'd mistakenly chosen form over function in a car purchase and upgrades, we weren't stuck restarting because we had a pre-tuned vehicle that allowed us to sell our other car and win some races until we could afford a new, smarter purchase.

With a little highway experience under our belts, we headed up into the mountains to get a some basic lessons from Daijiro Yoshihara on how to drift. Touge racing has seven basic schools of throwing a car into a controlled slide; Power-Over, Side Brake, Braking, Clutch Kick, Accel-Off, Feint and Manji. All of the techniques are simple in concept, but plenty difficult to successfully pull off, and our AWD car that was built for straight speed was horrid for drift battles because it all revolves around basically breaking the basic rules of how a car is supposed to handle by shifting power and weight -- two things that all-wheel drive cars are built around doing for you to maximize grip at all times. Luckily, there are grip races, which are more or less straight point-to-point races against another person with the sole goal being to get to the finish line first.