Enthusiastically, I started the first endurance race, took about 2 hours to complete.
$56,000 for 2 hours of driving????? are you serious?
I haven't got there yet, but if true then that is indeed a cruel joke.
Now, I don't know quite what happened to the thread here, as I read the first page of replies and then jumped to page six where posts were completely unrelated to the original topic post.
You seem to enjoy complaining about about it
If there's a problem, people have the right and perhaps even the obligation to be vocal about it. Just keeping it to themselves and pretending it isn't there doesn't fix it, but perhaps if enough people in the community are vocal about problems then Polyphony may catch wind of it and fix it. You can't expect things to get fixed if everyone pretends they aren't broken.
And if the figures I read in the topic post are accurate, then it is indeed broken. Now, people like to defend faults and shortcomings with "Look over there, a deer!" arguments that divert attention but don't actually address the issue at hand. They'll post arguments about how the game is supposed to be about the joy of buying cars, tuning them, and driving them, and those things are true, but they don't make problems go away.
Payouts for winning events are supposed to be rewards for your time and effort. If you put more time and effort into them, you should get higher rewards from them. Now, someone might argue that this logic is flawed because they didn't put more time into events later into the game or that events on higher difficulty tiers didn't feel any more challenging to them, but there's still a logical progression as you advance through the game and increased payouts conforms to this progression even if the races don't really get much longer.
A proper means of rewarding players would be to award more credits for much longer events. No arguments here; no ifs, ands, or buts. This is simple logic here. If someone spends 120 minutes winning a race, logic would suggest that they should win far more rewards than what they would get from 5 minutes. That's just common sense and just plain fair. It really doesn't matter if someone's philosophy is that it's just about the cars or the racing or if they want to argue that arbitrary numbers of experience or credits shouldn't matter. There's no logical explanation for choosing to hand such laughable rewards for major events.
Nobody can say, "Yeah, 56,000 CR is the right amount of reward for winning a two-hour event. A two-hour race should be worth just as much as a five-minute race." Nobody can say that and back it up with any sort of real logic. It would be like saying that if somebody goes to work and earns $12 for just one hour, and then the next day they work the same job for ten hours they should still only get paid $12 for that day; that the important thing is that they got paid and it doesn't matter how much time went into earning it.