As you mentioned Forza earlier - for what it's worth, speaking as someone who has played a LOT of FM7, FM23, FH4, FH5 (and some of FH1-3 FM5/6), Forza is one of the worst driving games in existence if looking for a level playing field. There are so many build/tune options and they have such a massive impact on how fast you are. A huge reason why I'm playing Crew rather than Forza is the fact you can just take any car in the Crew games and make it pretty good with the same changes. The only really big annoyance is that leaderboards have performances done with slipstream and IMO those should have a flag so we can see they used slipstream. I think the nerf to manual with clutch might have been pretty effective as I've done a few grand races and some people who used to be crazy good seemed to now be merely very good.