I only played it as a single-player game.
There are three types of cars aggression, stunt and speed. I found the speed class cars to be useless with my sticky fingers - I also thought the boost type in particular had no use unless there's a ton of drag races. Which I didn't find. So I won all the stunt runs and races with stunt cars and takedowns with aggression cars.
It is a bit weird that the game suggests to use shortcuts in order to get a head and yet the computer controlled cars use rubber band (or there's no traffic to slow them down when I'm not around). So shortcuts are okay in the time trials but not in the races. I kind of miss the ragdoll dummy from the FlatOut series.
Keyboard controls are responsive and you rarely get the feeling that this would be a console port. A pretty good racing game.