My last console was a Sega Genesis, so no Gran Turismo for me. I came from LFS from Papyrus sims, Indycar Racing 2 (ICR2) being the first and NR2002/3 being the last. I also dabbled a bit with Porsche Unleashed for fun. rFactor, GTR, NetKar, and First Racing was all hype and demos. I had tried the various demos, but could never get anything to run beyond 5 FPS. My brother-in-law is a PS2/3 fan and we would play GT3 anytime I visited. I could never get into it because of the gamepad control. I have been using a wheel since clear back in 1996 with ICR2.
I liked the idea of GT3 with road cars and stuff, so I was hunting around Blackhole Motorsports for something for the PC. I saw LFS S1 and downloaded to try the demo. It was my first online experience. The online was fantastic, the sim was cool, but I wasn't completely impressed to quit running with NR2003. I played around for 2 months or so, and when the novelty of online was starting to wear off with a sim I wasn't completely satisfied with, and BANG! the S2 demo was released. Now the servers were flooded with all the S1 licensed users, the racing level raised 10 fold, and the updates for S2 completely blew away the S1 demo.
S2 demo release is when it all fell together for me. Haven't touched anything since.