NHRA Championship Drag Racing: Speed For All

My first thought booting this up was cautious optimism: a proper, officially licensed NHRA title covering five classes including Top Fuel, Funny Car, Pro Stock, Pro Mod, and Super Modified, with 38 real drivers on real tracks. That is a solid foundation on paper. The reality, unfortunately, is a game that stumbles at practically every checkpoint it needed to clear. Let's start with the career mode because it is genuinely the most defensible part of the package. You start as a rookie with minimal cash and a beat-up car, and the 24-week season structure forces you to think like a team owner. Managing sponsorship requirements, directing your R&D department to develop parts over multiple weeks, and rationing your 30-minute repair window between rounds gives the career real texture. Getting from the lowest class all the way up to Top Fuel drag racing is a slow grind, but it does have a pull to it. The race weekend itself follows a Friday practice, Saturday qualifying, Sunday single-elimination format, where only 16 cars make the field. Blow your engine in qualifying and you might bankrupt yourself replacing parts before the race even starts. That kind of consequence is genuinely interesting. Here is where things fall apart. The actual on-track physics are deeply flawed. The core vehicle dynamics do not behave correctly: nitro-powered cars should roll forward under their own power and require the driver to ride the brake during burnout and staging, but the game treats them like ordinary street cars requiring throttle input to move. Real-world drag racing is essentially a puzzle involving elevation, humidity, air temperature, and track conditions changing the way your 11,000-horsepower engine breathes from session to session. Speed For All strips almost all of that out, leaving a car setup that performs roughly the same at every track in every session. Once you find a working tune, the actual racing collapses into a repetitive button sequence with reaction time as the only real variable. The tutorials are long and largely unskippable, which is especially punishing on PC where controls are limited to an Xbox controller layout with no remapping and zero steering wheel support. In 2022, on a PC racing title, no wheel support at all is a serious oversight. Multiplayer is another missed opportunity. There is no real-time online head-to-head racing; you race against the ghost times of top drivers, essentially a time trial dressed up to look like a duel. Split-screen is present, which is the one small mercy here, but the honest answer to "is this fun for a group of friends?" is no, not really. The presentation throughout is thin: no post-race interviews, no winner's circle celebration after a big weekend, no broadcast-style stats overlay. Visually the cars look decent up close, but the surrounding track environments do not hold up well. Reported input lag on PC makes the reaction-time gameplay feel even more arbitrary than it already is. If you are an NHRA devotee who has been waiting years for any official drag racing game and will take what you can get, the career mode offers a modest loop worth a few sessions. For everyone else, including the Saturday night tournament crowd I usually write for, this one does not have the legs. There is no meaningful co-op mode, the physics undermine the tension that makes drag racing gripping in real life, and the PC version in particular shipped in a rough state that underserved even its own small audience.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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