I was worried that would be the case

I'm exited rather than worried. With a new game and the associated marketing  more gamers may be attract, more people to race against  . The current graphics is not exactly industry leading and is costing AC when compared to other titles for the not-yet-serious simracer. The only problem I foresee is the minimum PC requirement would be in excess of my system 

I don't have a good feeling about ACC.  I don't know why, just gut instinct.
I fear something that is targeted more at consoles and will not have the depth of physics that AC has.  The fact they have chosen the Unreal engine indicates to me that graphics are their primary concern.

From a business point of view it makes sense. You have to decide what differentiate you from your competitors and focus on that. For Ac that is the car physics. Wasting time and money on developing a graphics engine which would be inferior to your competitors is stupid. AC developed their own engine for AC 1 and paid for it throughout the game's life-cycle. It limited their options in terms of multiple light sources and rain. And while the car physics were updated regularly we cannot say the same for the graphics. Without unlimited resources you have to pick your fights.

Fun racing, only problem was it was my team mate's rear wing I was looking at the whole night!

Just couldn't get my braking into the slow corners right in the first race, especially into the second last hairpin. Apologies to Russ for nearly taking him out, good awareness Russ! And Freezer for the same mistake a few laps later, cost us a lot of positions.    Race two was better, even managed to make a pass or two on Freezer, unfortunately I kept donating the position back to him.

Looks like the midfield battles are going to be good this season.

I put a positive spin on that by interpreting it to be because they REALLY didn't want to mention iRacing...

and

Ranking system for both skill and safety similar to iRacing (he mentions the latest GranTurismo's one). They hired the guy behind Minorating for this

Had some good racing. Even managed to stay close to Phil and Grat in the first race but they handled the ballast better than me in race 2. The rear tires kept overheated early in race 2 which made the first and last corner particular difficult. It felt as the additional weight messed with my chosen brake bias.  But at least it gave me a fun battle with Russ 

Some laughs before tonight's tragedy 

https://twitter.com/ToroRosso/status/963810334753677312/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.espn.com.au%2Ff1%2F

a setup to test 

https://mega.nz/#!Fk5SUaCB!CTRqQLMmf99OiIAD3JjeLm9Ch-rPJOyCibX4CqqYMBU