That's all that is required? Geez. I think I'm already qualified then lol
Not exactly. You get told the racing line and braking points in the initial laps, then you have assessed laps when the instructor becomes a silent passenger. I did mine at Silverstone in an Exige; some extended ARDS courses include more tuition in a selection of cars, but I presume the test format is standard. The way it was put to me was that there wasn't a fixed test duration or number of laps. You'd get a pass on the practical assessment when the instructor was happy that, if you and he were in a race together, you wouldn't pose any danger. You need to maintain a good pace and any loss of control or departure from the track is an immediate fail (getting any questions wrong on the safety bit of the theory test is also a fail). One of the guys on my course was told by the instructor that he didn't like the way he approached corners, so he had a little longer in the car until he demonstrated he could be smoother.
The issue with the FIA Sport trophy is that it will obviously be won by the person who puts it a huge amount of time to become the best (as it should be), so the huge majority of people who play casually, will only ever be also-rans. That's fine with something like the old GT Academy, where you could sign up, have a bash, see how you compared to the best-of-the-best, maybe even try to get into the top 10, top 100, top 1000, whatever. After that, you could go back to the full GT game and do whatever online/offline/missions/FoS hillclimbs/lunar Rover activities floated your boat.
To keep the average player engaged for a longer period with a product that is only out to find the best is a difficult ask. It's like having a school sports day, where kids, adults and Olympic champions are all running against each other for one prize. Obviously, in real life, these competitions are grouped, ranked, put into divisions, and you enter at your age group or skill level to play for that prize with the hope of working your way up if you have the time or determination.
How could you do something in GT where an entrant would be potentially able to win a competition in a particular division against similarly ranked players, but not have the system gamed by much faster players just entering low, looking for an easy victory?
If there's no possible way of doing that, a commercial game like GT needs waaay more depth to ensure you maintain a customerbase outside of the elite players. You need accessible online races and you need offline events like a bigger GT League and all of the things that mean, actually the FIA competition is little more than a GT Academy replacement and definitely not the primary focus of a game with an incredible heritage and a a userbase who's loyalty should perhaps not be tested too hard.
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