I was playing GP4 a lot, and having the occasional foray into GPL. But I'd also just realised how awful MS Flight Sim was, and had migrated to X-Plane. I then wished that someone had done a similar thing with driving (an indi-project). At the time my brother had Broadband, but I didn't, so I asked him to have a browse for something similar the next day.
A few days later he returned with a CD, on which he had burnt Racer, netKar and Live for Speed.
I tried LFS first, but found it a bit unrealistic, so that didn't last long. Then I loaded Racer, and spent a couple of days on that, mainly trying to drive the Stratos I had downloaded for it round some sort of country road style track. After I got bored of Racer I tried nK, and that was lots of fun, because I could drive powerful real wheel drive cars and do silly things with them at the GPL version of the Nurburgring. The F3000 and the Ferrari kept me busy for another 2 days. But the bugs, and the flaws in the physics in both games started to grate, so I had another go at LFS (I'd only given it half an hour, so I felt I should try a bit more to like it). Within a week I was licenced. By the second hour I was loving every aspect of it. Okay, so you had to be smooth because the traction loss was a bit severe, but the way the cars moved and reacted hasn't been beaten yet. nK was used only then by my friend at Uni as it was a lot easier (and had faster cars), and Racer hasn't been touched since (by me or the programmer I suspect).
I bought it days/weeks before I went to uni, so spent most of my time using it offline (unlocking it with a mobile phone acting as a dial up modem). And it was a few months before I discovered RSC (and the LFS section). The rest is history. And/or spam.
Long Live Live For Speed.