If people don't fancy longer races then they can do what many other devs do now, let people choose the race length themselves. 100% down to 10%, with prize money reduced to match of course.
That's what it's all about these days, choice. If people want to run through career mode with no races more than 5 laps and no wear, give them the option. If other people want their races to be 10 laps / 20 minutes minimum, up to several hours long, with fuel and tyre wear, let them as well.
One of the best things about FM7 was the race length option.
Standard was about 5 minutes, your standard GT 3-lap sprint.
Long was about 20 minutes, 7-13 laps on most tracks and a good length for a casual race where you don't have to be passing multiple cars per lap to fight your way through the field.
Extra long was like an hour.
I ran most of my races on Long, because that was the best fit for how I like to race. But the option to just change it whenever was amazing too. Races that I didn't like and just wanted to power through I could put on standard. Sometimes I'd make the finale of a championship extra long just for the drama. And the rewards seemed to scale pretty accurately for time spent.
GT7 should absolutely steal this feature. It's great.
While a choice option is really nice and I do enjoy it. I know some events would lose quite a bit of identity if their Lap count is just the same as everyone else based on players choice.
Take GT4s, European, American and Japanese Championships. What separates Europeans from the other 2 aside from requiring a higher license is that the races are that of a longer distance. Its more than just races in Europe with European cars. It leads to a ground where 1 will be sacrificed for the others. Sometimes things can be too consistent. If you make them too samey you risk career being a boring predictable check-list like GRID Autosport (which while I love, Career was such a drag I only beat it on the Switch due to portability), Forza 6 and GRID 2019
I like the idea of a lot of variety in the events in Multiple ways, Cars restricted, Tyre restriction, Distance and would like it expanded upon with higher races requiring Pit Stops or going beyond and Pit Strategy with multiple Tyres being used and I don't sacrificing a bit of realism by upping the F & T wear to make interesting races happen without having to make them endurance races.
Hell if we get NOS back a NOS only series would be fun to do
I think you can have variety in championships while still giving players freedom to influence race lengths. For example, EU/US/JP championships might be 5/3/3 laps on Standard race length, but 60/36/36 on Extra Long. That's still fine, the championships get to keep an identity and the player gets to keep some control over how much time they want to invest in an individual race. This even works with endurance races, Standard/Long/Extra Long races could be 1/2/4 hours depending on player choice.
Race length should be one of the factors that gets used to make races distinct, but as long as you're also using other factors as well I don't think you need to lock down race length to the point that the player loses all choice. It's not that the game wouldn't work with fixed race lengths, it's just that I think it adds almost as much in terms of player freedom as adjustable AI. Adapting the AI to suit the player's needs is a critical part of making racing fun, and I think adapting the race length to something that suits the player's available time, skill and desires is almost as important even though it's relatively uncommon in racing games.
