Let my share my impresions after playing SP demo.
In interviews from May they were saying that they are trying to bring back the car handling from first Driver and as I was expecting, they didn't. Driving model it's completely different. In first Driver car was always "oversteerable" and understeer was almost absent, you could make 90 degree turns without braking, if you will try to do the same in Driver SF you will understeer and crash into something. Also in Driver SF when you start to oversteer your car countersteer by itself, in first Driver, game was never taking control over your front wheels. It's just a diferent driving model. Where is the fancy suspension physics? Where is "burn out" and "fast steer" button?
It's sad to know that all that "back to the roots" talk was bullshit, but the new driving model isn't that bad to be honest. It's cool that FWD and AWD cars act the way you would expect them to, unlike some other arcade games where you can't see the drifference between FWD, RWD and AWD.
Graphics are just good - nothing more. That's probably because of the shift thing. You know you can move from one end of the map to another in few seconds so game have to be able to draw world really fast and that would be hard with Gran Turismo 5 like graphics.
Shift thing is pretty cool but I think it would be better if it would apear only in some missions and be more limited. It makes player focus too much on shifting than actually driving a car and I'm afraid this game will be just a Shifter San Francisco...
Release for X360 and PS3 tomorrow, PC gamers will have to wait till September 27th because they are a bunch of pirates and imbeciles.