New difficulty layer required

In the Career and Championship modes, you can limit the number of restarts for each event, and enable hardcore damage. Enabling hardcore damage and setting restarts to none will definitely make crashing have more consequences, especially if you have the events set up with more stages.

Solo quickplay lets you enable hardcore damage, but I'm not sure why they force unlimited restarts without any choice there. Not sure what it's like for Clubs as I haven't messed with those yet, but I would hope they don't have any restarts, or at least the option for the Club runners to choose zero restarts.

Hardcore damage could probably be amped up a bit, too.

Absolutely. It's like a whole new game when/if that is possible.

I would also like the damage to the car to be increased. If you hit a rock from the side, you could break the mirror, or if you hit the front, the engine would overheat or cause problems with the gearbox.

Current hardcore mode should really be "Reduced" damage mode. Agree with everyone here advocating for a more realistic Hardcore setting that dishes out more mechanical failures. Not interested in more physical body damage - this is understandably limited by manufacturers... Maybe this is also why mech. damage is limited, who knows?

Agreed. Hardcore damage is not hardcore here. We are not interested on visual simulation of damage (that is expensive to elaborate), we want technical simulation of failure and crash. EA, please, i drove 2 stages with no radiator, and all was fine. really ? It feels like kids android game.

For example, In richard Burns Rally, the fear of not crash or brake the car, limits driving speed and at the end make the game more rewarded. 

Toca 2 touring Cars & Toca 3 Race Driver , have a professional mode or sim mode, that really was challenging and fun. Please contact that people from codemasters again.

Also .... "E     A       Sports, .... it´s in the game" is a respectfull brand that you must to preserve for the 30+ years players.

hug to all

Yes, missing true hardcore damage I deliberately tried to destroy the radiator by crashing into power poles and bridge ends to see if it could be damaged and overheat. But it would not brake and would not overheat! No steam! The engine did not even suffer and happily carried on. Not very simulator like, starting to feel very arcade. They may have the physics right for driving on sealed roads, but some other aspects of the game feel like a step backwards from DiRT Rally 2.0.