yeah, it was in, but nobody used it.
if I remember correctly the problems were twofold:
the safety car was a joke, there was at least one point on every track where you were liable to hit it because it came to a standstill all of a sudden,figuring out what to do;
the parking was very difficult, too, if I remember correctly you either waited for ages because the AI for waiting for you to hit the exact right spot or you got a stopngo because you overshot by half an inch.
I ran in a German league where we did a rolling start manually with a very exact drivers' briefing before every race and a draconic set of penalties if you messed up. That was perfect, the warm up lap felt very "real" indeed, just like a sim should.