From what I've seen so far I think that it's going to be fairly undriveable (in the sense we're used to) with anything other than a wheel (having said that, Forza 3 is OK), the clips with the pads are all over the road like Sato on acid. That's only a good thing though, because it means the car will be less "on rails" like GP4 was with keys. I'll be using a wheel, which I have yet to buy yet for 360. I would love to use PC but my rig could NEVER run that with everything turned up. Since I refuse to not have everything turned up it really is cheaper to buy the 360 wheel (£70) than it is to build a new PC (£500). It's not that I would prefer to race on console, quite the opposite, I just can't afford to have it any other way.
To be honest I think it looks brilliant, very easily the best effort since GP4. My only issues are with AI damage, but over at CM forum today a developer said that AI, and I quote word for word "would suffer the same damage as the player". I know there are three damage modes: Off, Cosmetic and Full. Given that the Renault Monaco video was clearly either Cosmetic or Full, that's a bit worrying 'cause he hit the AI VERY HARD and you only saw slight damage to front wing. That said, there is a Ferrari video from Hungary (I think) which crashes into a wall at only slightly higher speed and destroys the front of the car. It's all a bit inconsistent at this stage and I dunno what to think of it. To me the damage IS important, and that's not because I love driving around crashing into things but because I think it adds to the immersion. If the damage is as realistic as possible in comparison to the real thing then the immersion illusion lasts for longer. For me the rFactor bubble popped when my front wheels went through those of an AI car. For such a small thing it REALLY annoyed me because it was so blatantly fake, not because of the detrimental effect it had to close wheel to wheel racing. The minute you get something massively fake like bad damage or dodgy handling then that realism illusion bubble shatters and you're left remembering that this is it, and the end of the day, it is only a game. But, as a developer, keep people fooled for long enough with top notch effects (which, like it or otherwise includes the damage model) and then as a developer you have won the hearts and minds of your sim (and hopefully arcade) racers.
So it would seem that this new game had pros and cons like all the rest. It's clearly still an awesome game, and like Go Alesi also said, I can take suspensions and wheels flying off in one go and front wings detaching themselves if everything else is good, and with F1 2010, aside from that pesky black screen driving out of the pits and the @#$%& replay system, everything else seems rather good.
However, still waiting on a couple of things:
"We want to wait to show the damage model off when it's finished. We have a feature video (not a developer diary) planned for this and it will be on the CM website in due course" - Stephen from CM. Are they holding something back?
"The final physics update was not in the Gamescom build" - again, Stephen.
We have not seen everything yet.