After a long wait, Codemasters have released the new update for DiRT Rally today, containing two new cars, 12 stages in Finland and lots of new and enhanced features.
Not too far off a full release, DiRT Rally has been updated to v0.8, with the 2001 Subaru Impreza WRC, and 2001 Ford Focus WRC included, the cars represents the two most recent British world champions, from a year they both fought hard for the world title.
The new stuff includes
- A new, reworked handling model is also included for the 60's, 70's, 80's RWD and 2010-classes, with a major engine and downforce re-work, to make the cars more dynamic.
- Custom Championships, to tweak the number of stages, AI difficulty and number of events, to set up a championship that suits you and the time you have to play
- New engine sound for the 1995 Subaru Impreza
- Mouse Support!
- Invite Friend option for PvP events.
- The audio FX levels for the surfaces and kick up have been brought back so that you can hear all that gravely goodness.
- We sent our Rallycross AI drivers to the opticians so that they can now see when they need to avoid other cars when they are approaching the joker entrance.
- Now that they can see better they are also setting faster laps.
- We’ve fixed the camera clipping in certain camera angles when you changed the Field of View.
- We’ve made some Hyper threading fixes that should now prevent those annoying stuttering issues that some of you were having.
- We’ve stopped the Engineer contract lengths and costs from being affected when competing in league events.
- Toggling Push to Talk or enabling/disabling voice communications through the pause menu is now actually working.
- The Reset Timer has now been increased to 15 seconds when attempting to get back on track. I know we said that before but this time it is actually in.
- Cars will no longer roll over on the start in PVP races, ROFL.
- We’ve made sure that the cars are visible on the start line even when collisions are turned off in PVP – they will still ghost during the race though.
- Your PVP opponents won’t be showboating and driving around with the handbrake on anymore.
- The gear setup will no longer be changing between stages without a service area.
- We’ve fixed those odd camera angles that were being used in spectate mode.
- The miles driven using owned vehicles in PVP now accrue towards unlocking upgrades for that vehicle.
- When viewing a replay using an interior camera, the speedometers now show the correct speed for all vehicles.
- We’ve fixed a whole host of other stuff too but they were too boring to call out in this list.
- I admit that I am addicted 
