There are few crashers (I've counted 4 intentional, malicious ones). You will find though that not everyone even on the licensed servers is a professional race driver, so accidents and somewhat unexpected behaviour does still take place.
If you want 100% wrecker free racing, join a league once you get the license.
There are pretty much NO deliberate crashers, infact I have probably only seen one or two since the day I got a license. Licensed people actually have put some money into this software, so they care much much more about it. Besides that, like Jakg said, the banning (which rarely happens anyway) is very powerful on S2 servers, because the ban is associated with your license name and not with the IP, which you could quickly change.
There are fewer servers on S2 than in demo, but people are much better. I haven't seen a crasher in the two weeks that I have owned S2. The class of drivers is definately better, altho there are many beginners so you won't feel completely outclassed.
FEWER SERVERS? Boy, did you just fall on your head? Demo has about 130 Servers each day, S2 peaks at 450 servers. Check your settings when seraching for servers.
As you can see here, the daily S2 licensed player count fluctuates between 40 and 500, with the peak at about 20:00 UTC. The server count is pretty steady at 450+, with the only exception being seldom spikes where the master server went down for a brief time.
The demo servers have a pretty comparable player count, varying between 100 and 500 players. Though the demo has much less servers, at a daily rate of 120-160.
Not many people mind getting crashed by a newbie (so long as they have SOME control of the car - otherwise they should practise a bit more before entering the online fray).
Before I reached Chris Kerry's post, I moved to reread Bob's post and thought the same, what spelling mistake. Doh!
On topic - I also have only witnessed, I think 3 deliberate crashers in licensed S2 as opposed to only 1 deliberate crasher in demo..................per every half hour that is.
Many of these folks stating this, including myself, have been licensed since the beginning of S2 (June/July 2005) and earlier.
I've seen only one real wrecker since I got S2. People were quite confused about it actually. Good thing I as a seasoned demo player was there to show them where to vote for a ban.
In the licenced S2 the general mentality of racers is different. Here people gave money for the game and want to race. Also the average racer age is higher then in the demo.
True wreckers, yes, or alteast very long lasting ones. Then the replay gets sent to wrecker barricade, so he's also banned on a multitude of other servers, too, without him ever acutally being on that server.