The thing with the safety cars, and the formation laps and all the rest of it, is that there are examples of past releases that contained all of these features. Nobody ever uses them – Studio Liverpool have had a crack at those features in the past and not had any great success in making them a worthwhile exercise – and they don’t add that much to the experience, even for someone like me.

Having said that, if they were there I’d be thrilled. Until, that is, I’d used them a couple of times and switched them off. The one thing I would like to do, and I think Codies are implementing some kind of halfway house solution to this, is control the car in and out of the pits, hitting the limiter at the right time and then driving into the pit box. That’s a part of the race, a useful skill to pick up, and from my PC sim racing I feel it does make it that bit more immersive.

My suspicion is that they’re at a more advanced stage than they’ve yet shown us. Perhaps that’s more of a hope than a suspicion – I’ve had my pre-order in for quite some time now – but everything I’ve read and heard to date suggests that they have an understanding of what the real enthusiast wants, which excites me. I know from DiRT and GRID (a game I recently re-purchased – I was horribly harsh on it first time around, and frankly very wrong too) that they’ll get the more accessible side down OK, but to hear them talking of tracks rubbering in, second-guessing the weather, looking after your tyres and your engine allocation…

If they do louse it up, I’ll be quite disappointed, but I’ve got more faith than I expected to have in Codemasters delivering a very playable console sim.