Race Driver Create and Race is a good attempt at giving DS fans a racing game they can enjoy.
The real strength of this game is its breadth of content. The track editor is an excellent addition that gives the game that extra replay value. The track editor is actually very well done and I was thoroughly impressed. Is it perfect? No, but you can make near anything you want and you can even make the backgrounds the way you want it. One grip I have is that I haven't seen any banked corners in the map editor. It could be that I just haven't unlocked them yet but being a NASCAR buff I wouldn't mind creating some ovals of my own. It was nice to see Indianapolis, Nazareth, and Dover in the game.
To add to this there's Nintendo Wifi, plenty of races and championships to complete and an impressive host of different types of automobiles to race with. The game even uses the Rumble Pak which hasn't been used by even Nintendo lately (for example I was shocked to find that LOZ Phantom Hourglass didn't use the Rumble Pak).
All this sounds great but we haven't even talked about the actual gameplay; the racing. It's in the racing where the game because a little more mediocre. The graphics are good for a DS game in full 3-D but there's some little issues here and there that detracts from the experience. One of the first issues I always noticed was the CPU opponents bouncing off of each like pinballs. It's also not uncommon for cars to strangely merge and then bounce apart. Further the CPU always seems to brake later than you but pick up the throttle later leaving the corner. I can't fault this too much because I go through the same thing in NASCAR 08 on the Xbox360. It's really annoying to get your rump shoved going into every corner only to blast by the CPU coming off of the corner. Now, some of this may be my own doing because this same thing happens when I play online with real people but I don't get ran-over every corner. I am an early braker so maybe its more me than the CPU but still.
An area that can be particularly frustrating is running up on a corner and never being able to gauge how much you need to slow down until after you have raced the track several times. This isn't all that bad but there can be a bit of a learning curve. Braking is hard to "feel" in this game and can make it difficult to be conservative. However, when I popped in the Rumble Pak this changed and I felt the game was much more enjoyable because the Rumble Pak gives you feedback when braking. This is more a mental thing but it did help me quite a bit.
Ultimately the cars drive in an arcade style pitched in a simulation universe. The cars are based off of real vehicles, and the tracks are modeled after real tracks, but everything drives like an arcade game and for a handheld that makes perfect sense. I couldn't imagine trying to tackle cars on the DS the same way that you would have to tackle cars on Forza 2. You would never finish a lap. I believe Codemasters made a good compromise and the end result is a racing game that, while not perfect, is an enjoyable handheld experience to behold.