Now that I was convinced that a driving game could be fun, I was unhappy with the controls and very rudimentary “physics” that the car had. It just didn’t feel very real or compelling; there wasn’t enough depth to the control scheme.
So I used Marco Monster’s Car Physics article (and looked at source code for various implementations of his technique) to implement more realistic car physics including drifting and skid marks. This was a bit of a watershed moment: this was the game I wanted to spend all my time on.