Suspension, tires, and even your drag chute can be customized to your own specifications.

You can select your gearbox, number of gears, and ratio for each. The depth continues on through each component of the car's performance. As you are modifying your engine, a dyno graph showing your horsepower and torque specs is updated, letting you know how the changes you make affect your car's performance. You can completely customize your engine geometry, including the number of cylinders, the bore diameter and stroke length of the cylinder, the number of intake and exhaust valves, the compression ratio, and the air induction, among many other settings. The engine customization goes even deeper. From here you can modify the chassis by adding weights to improve stability, adding wings to provide downforce, or even using wheelie bars if your front wheels just won't stay down when you're racing. You start with any one of the game's basic chassis, from a 1957 Chevy up to a 1998 Camaro, or any number of drag racer designs used in real-world competition. In the game's shop area, you'll build a custom drag racer out of either ready-made parts or your own custom designs.

However, the real heart of the game is a deep and engrossing engine simulation. It might make sense to consider IHRA Drag Racing 2 a driving game, and that wouldn't be entirely incorrect. You won't find car modifications like these in any other game.

However, in this game's case, going too far is its greatest strength, though perhaps its only one. That game has proven to be Bethesda Softworks' IHRA Drag Racing 2 for the Xbox. With racing games putting so much emphasis on letting you modify a car and trick it out with exhaust systems, intakes, turbo kits, suspension upgrades, and race-class braking systems, it seemed that eventually a game might go just a bit too far with it.

Xbox drag racing games