If you want to go this way though, tabletop RPGs (and pretty much all RPGs) provide some story and structure around the player. If you're playing D&D, you're not thrown into a random town at a random time and you just do whatever. You're there because the DM or scenario writer has something interesting put together, and it's your job as a player to go and interact with that. Your story has the chance to become interesting specifically because you're in an environment where there are interesting things to do.
Many, many moons ago, a lot of video game RPGs took this to mean that simple grinding to increase your character's power was enough for "good" gameplay. You kill rabbits on the plains, you kill coyotes in the desert, you kill bears in the forest, you get stronger, you go fight BBEG, job done. That's roughly where GT was in 1997, you do race, you get better car, you do more race until you do the final race. You win, good job.
RPGs have progressed, with the understanding that they're usually primarily a vehicle for story. Even the RPGs from the 90s that have held up have primarily done so because of the story elements. There are people who get deep into the mechanics of combat or whatever else and that's fine, but it's turned out that RPGs seem to work the best when they have a strong story as the backbone. That doesn't mean that you have to dictate absolutely what the player does, you can allow staggering amounts of freedom and have it work very well. But you do need to be giving the player situations in which there is the opportunity for them to make interesting decisions and feel like they're partaking in something that is greater than themselves. That's the role of the developer or DM, to provide the players the tools to enable them to tell their own story and a world in which to play it out.
This is where Gran Turismo has not done as well historically. A list of races is not something that is terribly engaging, just as a list of animals to go kill in an RPG isn't terribly engaging. It doesn't feel like a world that you're interacting with, it feels like a list of challenges to tick off.
But it doesn't take much.
You grew up in the plains a starving waif because the rabbit plague ate all your crops. As a teenager you choose to put together a party of your friends to kill rabbits and build rabbit fencing. Along the way you discover that the rabbits had been forced out of their natural habitat by the coyotes so you choose to go to investigate. The coyotes attack you and you have to defend yourself, but it turns out that the coyotes had been encouraged to attack the rabbits by some mysterious third power. You choose to direct the coyotes to open land where they're not in conflict with the rabbits, and this weird evil guy turns up to try and stop you. You fend him off but take a beating. You choose to go home, but then you hear that the coyotes were wiped out and that the rabbits are under attack too. You choose to go to find out if you're next, and have to fight your way through the evil sorcerors army of bears to find out that he's an evil guy that's evil because his mommy hit him with a spoon. You choose to fight him because you're strong enough after taking on the bear army, you win, you saved the day. Congratulations.
Same as before, but now because there's structure around killing rabbits and coyotes and bears it's far more engaging. Something was happening in the world, you made choices, stuff happened, you felt involved. And that's me not being a professional game designer or story teller and knocking out a basic thing in five minutes around the task of killing three types of animals. Look at real modern RPGs for how they take what is basically menial tasks and make them feel like engaging parts of a narrative. GT could put stuff in to make it's career mode more than just a list of races if they wanted to. They don't even have to change any of the actual races, they just need to put something in so that the player isn't having to do all the work of trying to intuit some zero-to-hero story out of thin air. Let the player create their own story, but give them something to work with.
