NASCAR is possibly the true artist's car sport; a veritable ballet of control and reaction with three dozen metal boxes flowing round a circuit in a stream of movement, tidy, beautiful and masterful. Which is why it's soon apparent that there's something about Stock Car Racing that just doesn't work outside of the real thing, sure it's exciting and difficult in real life, but in a videogame, it's just a lot of accelerating while you occasionally steer left. While NASCAR 09 goes some way to addressing this issue it still never quite manages to get away from the fact that it's just a bad Sport to re-create digitally.