Your times should slip by 20% if the mod is on, to make up for the slower speeds required for breaking effectively. If you want to see if the mod is even working, run some time trials with/without. But yes, you are not wrong to say that it feels more like Dirt2, as the sequel did a lot to make the car handling better (the stages just got shorter, easier and shittier). There is also a better feeling of side-to-side instability, where vanilla had you more of a rocket-like forward trajectory, as well as marked differences between traction on different surfaces.

With the mod I find that I cannot hold the pedal down hard without courting disaster. With the mod, like in RBR, if you’re going too fast you need to plan for a slowdown because otherwise you’re sliding into the trees. The starkest difference was that on vanilla, you could literally stop on a dime when going full speed, to the point where sliding around a corner was difficult because chances are your brakes had already stopped you dead. Oh, and I’m running on Windows 7 with ATI 5850, with no problems, except for that one time when the game refused to start. I don’t see any difference from the mod, but I don’t mind playing through a superlative game like Dirt again anyway. And the fact that your car gets pretty banged up even if you drive it perfectly and don’t have any crashes, just from the wear and tear of driving fast on a track like that. Still, I love all the things that Dirt does that were missing from Dirt 2, like only having 60 minutes to repair your vehicle between stages, and having to use that time effectively to make the most critical repairs. As it is, this seems like the physics from Dirt 2 to me, but I could be wrong. I guess I should have played the vanilla Dirt more than a few minutes if I wanted to get a feel for the old physics. I still go fast on the straights, and slow down to varying degrees for the various corners, and I still destroy my car in a realistic looking way if I have a big crash. It plays, the same as it always did, as far as I can tell. And I played the first UK national rally championship with the starting Clio. I killed the process and tried again, and it started.

I exited and installed the mod (just extracting files into the folder to overwrite older files, nothing fancy).

Only annoying thing is that the game only displays the PC controls in the menus, but that’s a minor thing. Looks and plays just like the Xbox version.

Dirt 2 pc wont launch windows 10