Okay.. having messed around a few good hours with this I can speak of my "first" quick impressions on this alpha/beta/whatever it currently is. I had tried some older build version briefly at my friends place some months ago, but that doesn't really count.
Graphics: With one word, wow. I think these guys have some of the most talented artists out there right now. It does really look bloody fantastic. The effects aren't overdone like in some racing games in the past couple years, they are just the right mix of eye candy and realism. Photorealistic would be a term I think would fit this game. It's a shame the SLI support seems to be very bugged out at the moment, the moment I turned it on the game turned in to a complete slideshow instead of increasing the framerate. One GTX 680 was still enough to run it smoothly with everything except the anti-aliasing cranked up to ultra/max.
Sounds: So-so. Some cars sound pretty good at certain revs (Gumpert, Nascar-thingie, Zonda etc.) but some of them sound very generic and the modern formulas nearly made my ears bleed. There doesn't seem to be any dynamic engine load based sounds though, it's just RPM based samples.
Physics: Sadly this is where things start to fall apart. I wasn't really expecting much in this area, considering the devs are the same guys who made the rubbish "simulator" NFS games, but I was still very underwhelmed. The oversteer effect seems to be completely canned and sometimes the car just behaves totally illogically related to your inputs. It felt a lot like NFS Shift that someone has tried to mod and tweak to be more realistic, but the core game engine just isn't set up for realism. I know it will all be developed further, but I honestly believe this game engine to be completely unfit for this kind of task that they are trying to put it through.
FFB: I first tried driving with my G25 and after spending an hour I finally managed to make the control settings somewhat drivable. There was still quite a nasty input lag (just like in NFS shifts..) and it never really felt like any of the controls were directly connected to the car. It felt more like I was trying to influence the car to do what I wanted it to do, not the instant input you get in LFS or iRacing where you feel like you are one with the car. The actual steering feedback in most cars was also very numb even with all the force settings cranked up to the max, which made the laggy inputs even harder to control. The numbness reminded me a lot from GT5, but pCars is even worse in this regard. In GT5 you can atleast catch and control a simple slide the way you expect, in this game that is a very hard task even for a seasoned drifter. With a 360 gamepad the driving was much more enjoyable, as the numb feedback was no longer a factor and the game became much more like a semi-sim.
Tracks: I figured this needed its own category, because the devs have gone for quite a strange approach here I think. Some of the unlicensed tracks that are obvious copies of real world tracks are kind of a strange hybrid between fantasy and real tracks. They remind you of the real deal, but some of the proportions and corner radiuses are just completely wrong. The licensed tracks seem to be fairly well modeled, but driving the "unofficial" real tracks just made me really confused having learned them in other sims where they are modeled properly. I honestly think they just should keep the properly modeled official tracks completely separated from the unofficial ones by simply replacing the unofficial tracks with fantasy tracks if they can't get a proper license for them.
Overall: I don't regret spending 25€ on this, I think the graphics artists deserve it. As an actual racing game, I don't think they will achieve very much with this game engine if they keep trying to go for the simulator approach. The physics and FFB needs to be started from scratch and completely rewritten, trying to tweak the NFS Shift engine for realism simply doesn't work.