I enjoy this update. PD is moving towards the correct direction with 2.10. Gone are the days when a type R NSX, Evora, Elise, would be a fast car on the straights, being faster over 00 Camaro SS, Commodore SS and other v8s built for straight line speed at 450-500pp. Those small cars before 2.10, not only had a speed advantage, but also superior in corners with outright superior handling. Those micro cars should be superior in handling, but not brute top end speed.
PD is working towards something like this. An Australian V8 supercar is blowing past a micro Lotus on the straights while the Lotus gains ground with corners.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFpTC2JZdfg&list=PL6A54F78B0F85A044
Quit pretending before 2.10 it was balanced. It certainly wasn't with a handful of cars ruling low PP rooms no matter the track. I see a variety of cars being used now at low PP. The high HP US cars will never be a plague like the above try hard cars before 2.10 simply because they have a weakness.
The basic concept of this is sound, and that's what I think most people want. High-power and straight-line speed cars that don't handle as well as others
should have an advantage on the straights. It should be enough that if you are right behind and get a good corner exit and a bit of slipstream that you can have a reasonable chance of completing the pass with your straightline advantage.
It shouldn't be so much however that if you are several car-lengths behind and get a lousy exit that your massive advantage on the straight lets you blow past them half-way down the straight, which is the situation with some cars now. That is not an example of two cars that make their speed in different portions of the track, that's two cars which don't belong in the same class as one another, and so theoretically shouldn't have the same PP. You can see it from the standing start: if one car hooks up much better than the others and gains 25 feet right away, the others might be able to close the gap down after a medium-long run into the first corner and a couple might get past, but the entire field shouldn't be able to streak past that car in 500 feet.
The handling difference usually isn't enough to make up for that, as a good driver with a good tune will find a way to be at least decent in the corners. It sometimes can work for people who aren't experts and have trouble putting the power down smoothly and accurately. But for people good at getting what the car gives them to come out, it means those straight-line cars will dominate every time, even on twisty tracks.
And some of those formerly advantaged cars, such as the Elises, DID originally have a slight disadvantage in at least acceleration if not ultimate speed, however it was more than made up for by their massive handling advantage They would seem to be faster in a straight line because they started so much faster at the start of the straight. Others such as the NSXes tended to be very good at both. As most people seem to recognize, things weren't quite right before and they tried to do some of the right things with this update, but they overdid it in a great many cases. The problem here is not so much with the idea, it's with the execution. A small amount of testing should have shown that something about it was amiss and probably needed to be refined and and the whole thing implemented in a later patch - when it was ready.
The other issue is how they chose which cars to give help to and which not to. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Some FR cars that underperformed before got a moderate boost, some got a huge boost. Some FR cars that weren't too bad before got a big boost, some were untouched. Some underperforming cars were untouched. The old "ringer" cars didn't change very much as compared to most of the other non-FR-driven cars that they were also outperforming. And then there's some cars like the 3400S that were already very good(and not necessarily FR), yet still got a boost.
Since you mentioned the '00 Camaro SS... Why is it that the '00 SS which is more powerful but otherwise highly similar to the '97 Z28 Camaro, went from being higher in PP(which you'd expect) to being a full 20 points lower at stock? Both cars get a boost from this update, but the SS is now roughly 10mph faster in a straight line than the Z28 at the same PP and yet handles just as well. Some of the other Camaros were given boosts, and the 2010(which by no means ran away with every race it was in) was not. The Camaro LM race car was already a competent car in it's class, yet it was given a substantial deduction in it's PP as well.
People will always complain about a change, and performance balancing can never be perfect. Things also aren't always as bad as they seem at first. But sometimes there is a reason to complain, just as sometimes the wrong change can be made. I'd like some of my underperforming cars to be brought into line with the majority. But I don't want some of them chosen seemingly at random to suddenly gain so much performance that gaining positions isn't even an achievement anymore, while many others thus become even worse underperformers and average performing cars turn into hopeless backmarkers.
Ah, well... at least the Ford Falcon race car isn't 630ish PP anymore.