There are standing starts in Prologue, online at least, every race I do online has been standing start. You can tell the guys who sacrifice tyre grip for power, when they blast down the straight from last place and overtake everyone
That's one of the beauties of the PP system, you can trade in tyre and aero grip for more power when the track dictates. Though you do lose low end torque and vice versa, reducing power increases low end torque
The reason why I said head tracking might be on is, that they did have PS Eye doing tracking, setup at the show, and while you can look left/right in GT, you can see his view move around a fair bit when going down the straights