Thus... I'm not sure if you could pull that off via an indie racer. No indie dev could afford the kind of licenses required to do this kind of thing. And trying to pull off the same sort of hype with fictional cars would be hard. I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible, but... it wouldn't be the same.

And in the AAA space? Fucking forget it. No big company would want to just license a small handful of cars and wank off to them HARD like the old NFSs. Every AAA racing game has to have massive car lists that appeal to everyone to maximize potential profits. There's no space for intimacy.