This is the most fun I've had in a racing sim since gt4. I've been playing NFS:Shift a lot lately, so at first the controls felt horrible, but once I turned off some of the assists and got acclimated I've come to realise just how much better the driving physics are than Shift. It still feels a bit like you're floating along the track on a cloud but it's much better than in other games (e.g. Grid). The AI is decent and not suicidal like Shift so I can actually feel comfortable putting the difficulty to hard and come out in first.
The performance rating system seems odd to me. Adding a front and rear wing on my mk4 R32 actually lowered the performance rating due to the increased weight, so I was able to add other parts and stay below the next class. I figured the rating would take downforce into consideration, but I guess not. Also, adding adjustable anti-roll bars has no effect on the rating either, which seems weird.
<tantrum>
WHY NO MKV R32!??!?? STUCK WITH MKIV RAAWWRRR!!!
</tantrum>
Actually, it's a great starter car and the engine noise is spot on to the real car, and after adding huge wings and adjustable tranny/suspension it drives like a dream. It seems like upgrading to the adjustable tranny and suspension is the golden ticket for winning most races. I'm actually having fun fiddling with setups for different tracks. It's nice that you can fail miserably on a race, restart, change your tuning, and try it again without getting a negative mark on the race results. I wish you were able to change parts at the same time as changing the tuning.
I feel bad for everybody who paid for the game and hasn't gotten it yet. As for LCE vs regular edition, I can't really say since I wouldn't spend $60 on a game let alone $80, but it does seem weird that transferring all the cars/tracks from the second disc totals less than 2 gigs of data.