History ThatOneLevel / RacingGame

** Think ''Forza Motorsport 2''[='=]s "New York Circuit" is a nightmare, with its long straightaways and extremely sharp turns? You haven't seen the worst of it. In ''Forza Motorsport 3'', they add tire walls to the circuit, in a zig-zagging pattern, which can catch many racers coming from ''Forza Motorsport 2'' off guard. Hell, it catches the ''computer racers'' off guard. Set the difficulty to easy, and [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments watch at least one car run head on into a tire barrier without fail, which is funny]]... [[RantInducingSlight unless they get in your way and make you wreck.]] You'll be glad for the game's [[AntiFrustrationFeatures rewind button.]]

* Isle of Man TT's Mountain Course beats Nürburgring to the punch in terms of this trope; being the longest street circuit in the world (''three times'' the Nordschleife's length), it has the whopping '''219''' bends in a single circuit compared to Nordschleife's 73 turns. Also being composed ''entirely'' of civilian motorways (even worse than the Mulsanne Straight which is just a highway), the track is notoriously cramped and bumpy, taxing the motorcycles and their riders' stability with almost no safety barriers or other safety measures that prevent a rider from being [[RingOut ringed out]], thus causing deaths of multiple riders each year due to them being flipped on the bumps and/or thrown off the track.Until much later, many riders began in a Le Mans start, causing multiple casualties. Despite these problems, the event series has been held for more than a century, with little safety improvement added during the history.

* Formula One's later street circuits have also been considered among the hardest in the championship's history, with tracks like the now retired Valencia Street Circuit, Singapore's Marina Bay circuit, Azerbaijan's Baku City Circuit and Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Corniche Circuit worthy of mention. Valencia packed a whopping 25 corners in barely 5 kilometers and a half of track, and has been heavily criticized by the drivers for its lack of overtaking spots despite it not being as narrow as Monaco. Marina Bay is a very bumpy, highly technical track that puts extreme strain on both the driver ''and'' the car, arguably even more so than Monaco; turn 10 in particular had very high curbs that even caused suspension damage in some cases, and the extreme South Asian heat despite the race being held at night makes things even more grueling. Baku features a mix of long straights - one of which is the longest in the calendar at 2.2 km/1.4 miles, punctuated with tight 90 degree corners. But that's not the worst part: halfway through the track, the drivers have to tackle a chicane that leads them through the Old Town; it already sounds rather bad on paper, but the real kicker is that the track narrows drastically to ''7.6 m''[[note]]For comparison's sake, that is ''25 feet'', and 2017-spec F1 cars are ''78.7 inches wide''[[/note]], making this corner one of the hardest in the entire Formula One calendar and a common crashing spot. Finally we get to Jeddah: even though it only joined the calendar in 2021, it has already gained infamy for being an extremely fast, snaking circuit with tight roads and an impressive ''27'' corners, most of them being really fast kinks where it is incredibly easy to crash; this is coupled with the relative lack of large runoff areas due to the track being built in a very tight space, and as a result the track has been decried even by the drivers as by far the most dangerous track in the calendar in an era where driver safety is paramount.

* Formula One's later street circuits have also been considered among the hardest in the championship's history, with tracks like the now retired Valencia Street Circuit, Singapore's Marina Bay circuit, Azerbaijan's Baku City Circuit and Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Corniche Circuit worthy of mention. Valencia packed a whopping 25 corners in barely 5 kilometers and a half of track, and has been heavily criticized by the drivers for its lack of overtaking spots despite it not being as narrow as Monaco. Marina Bay is a very bumpy, highly technical track that puts extreme strain on both the driver ''and'' the car, arguably even more so than Monaco; turn 10 in particular had very high curbs that even caused suspension damage in some cases, and the extreme South Asian heat despite the race being held at night makes things even more grueling. Baku features a mix of long straights - one of which is the longest in the calendar at 2.2 km/1.4 miles, punctuated with tight 90 degree corners. But that's not the worst part: halfway through the track, the drivers have to tackle a chicane that leads them through the Old Town; it already sounds rather bad on paper, but the real kicker is that the track narrows drastically to ''7.6 m''[[note]]For comparison's sake, that is ''25 feet'', and 2017-spec F1 cars are ''78.7 inches wide''[[/note]], making this corner one of the hardest in the entire Formula One calendar and a common crashing spot. Finally we get to Jeddah: even though it only joined the calendar in 2021, it has already gained infamy for being an extremely fast, snaking circuit with tight roads and an impressive ''27'' corners, most of them being really fast kinks where it is incredibly easy to crash.

* NASCAR has its share of Scrappy Levels:

** The wet 1996 Monaco GP was notable in that only 4 out of the 21 cars that started were still running by the end of the race, and one of them was a lap down! The winner, Olivier Panis, started from 14th on the grid. By the end of the first lap, 5 drivers had either spun off or crashed, including Michael Schumacher who started from pole position. Andrea Montermini crashed in a hastily-arranged warmup session an hour before the race; he lacked a spare car and so couldn't even start, and three others wiped out in the very first corner.
*** In the most recent games, if you qualify about where Panis did or worse, Jeff the in-game race engineer will request that you don't try anything risky into the track's first corner Sainte Devote.

* Isle of Man TT's Mountain Course beats Nürburgring to the punch in terms of this trope; being the longest street circuit in the world (''three times'' the Nordschleife's length), it has the whopping '''219''' bends in a single circuit compared to Nordschleife's 73 turns. Also being composed ''entirely'' of civilian motorways (even worse than the Mulsanne Straight which is just a highway), the track is notoriously cramped and bumpy, taxing the motorcycles and their riders' stability with almost no safety barriers or other safety measures that prevent a rider from being [[RingOut ringed out]], thus causing deaths of multiple riders each year due to them being flipped on the bumps and/or thrown off the track. Before recently, many riders began in a Le Mans start, causing multiple casualties. Despite these problems, the event series has been held for more than a century, with little safety improvement added during the history.

** The wet 1996 Monaco GP was notable in that only 4 out of the 21 cars that started were still running by the end of the race, and one of them was a lap down! The winner, Olivier Panis, started from 14th on the grid. By the end of the first lap, 5 drivers had either spun off or crashed, including Michael Schumacher who started from pole position. Andrea Montermini crashed in a hastily-arranged warmup session an hour before the race; he lacked a spare car and so couldn't even start.

''VideoGame/GranTurismo'' [[ThatOneLevel/GranTurismo has it's own page.]]

* Baby Park. The layout is very simple; it's seven laps on a simple, small[[note]]the smallest track in the franchise, not counting DK Jungle from ''VideoGame/MarioKartArcadeGP''[[/note]], hazardless oval course. It's so small than an average lap is about 10 seconds. It sounds simple in practice, but due to its tiny size as well as its high abundance of Item Boxes, the entire race essentially becomes a massively chaotic LuckBasedMission. Expect to find yourself commonly caught in the middle of a hectic hailstorm of Shells, Bob-ombs, and everything in between, since it's often you'll lap players in low places and make yourself a target for high-tier items. When the course immediately returned in ''VideoGame/MarioKartDS'', its introduction of the [[GameBreaker Bullet Bill]] didn't help matters. ''VideoGame/MarioKart8's'' remake takes this UpToEleven by making the whole race in anti-gravity, allowing you to boost off other cars by ramming into them (though they will get boosted as well), and the presence of ''twelve'' players at maximum as well as nigh-useless coins in the item rotation greatly thins the line between a legendary victory and a bitter failure.

* Formula One's later street circuits have also been considered among the hardest in the championship's history, with tracks like the now retired Valencia Street Circuit, Singapore's Marina Bay circuit and Azerbaijan's Baku City Circuit worthy of mention. Valencia packed a whopping 25 corners in barely 5 kilometers and a half of track, and has been heavily criticized by the drivers for its lack of overtaking spots despite it not being as narrow as Monaco. Marina Bay is a very bumpy, highly technical track that puts extreme strain on both the driver ''and'' the car, arguably even more so than Monaco; turn 10 in particular had very high curbs that even caused suspension damage in some cases, and the extreme South Asian heat despite the race being held at night makes things even more grueling. Finally, Baku features a mix of long straights - one of which is the longest in the calendar at 2.2 km/1.4 miles, punctuated with tight 90 degree corners. But that's not the worst part: halfway through the track, the drivers have to tackle a chicane that leads them through the Old Town; it already sounds rather bad on paper, but the real kicker is that the track narrows drastically to ''7.6 m''[[note]]For comparison's sake, that is ''25 feet'', and 2017-spec F1 cars are ''78.7 inches wide''[[/note]], making this corner one of the hardest in the entire Formula One calendar and a common crashing spot.

* Its sailing, not auto racing, but the longest leg of the next Volvo Ocean Race (an around-world yacht race) deserves mention. 9,707 nautical miles from Recife, Brazil to Abu Dhabi, UAE. That's about 20 straight days averaging 20 knots in a monohull yacht. The 24-hour distance record for a monohull yacht is 596.6nm (24.85 knots).

* Yoshi Valley is quite hard to navigate, and even harder to stay on the track; if you take a wrong route or fall off, you won't place well at all. What's worse that if you fall off on this course, unlike the other courses where you fall for only a few seconds before Lakota picks you up, in Yoshi Valley, if you fall, you fall for a long time before Lakitu picks you up, this no doubt will severely hurt you and your chances of winning. It doesn't help that since this track is TheMaze, so much so that the developers couldn't figure out how to make the position indicator function properly in the original N64 version of this track, you won't actually know how well/badly you're doing until the race is already over - it's replaced by a "?" instead during gameplay. Thankfully, the ''VideoGame/MarioKart8'' remake of this track does not suffer from this issue.

* ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight''_

** Another feared track in the calendar is Montreal's Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, current home of the Canadian Grand Prix (outside of 2020 and 2021 where it was cancelled due to the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic): its layout doesn't look as threatening as most other circuits in the calendar, but its corners are far more unwieldy than they might look, especially considering there isn't much room for error due to the lack of runoff areas. The final chicane is undoubtedly the most infamous corner in the track, though: in 1999, Damon Hill, Michael Schumacher and Jacques Villeneuve - all of whom were World Champions at some point, crashed in that same chicane. That corner's inner wall became known colloquially since then as the "Wall of Champions", as it continued to claim victims throughout the years like Jenson Button, Juan Pablo Montoya and Sebastian Vettel.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pescara_Circuit Pescara Circuit]] is a track that was only used once in Formula One but has nevertheless entered the collective mind of the fans for its ungodly level of difficulty. It is the longest F1 track ever, clocking in at ''25.8 kilometers'', and traveled up and down the hills of the namesake Italian harbor town with a mixture of extremely narrow country roads and full-throttle blasts all the way to the harborline that were nicknamed "The Flying Kilometer". It was a track so dangerous and so difficult that Enzo Ferrari, a man who was known for his reckless "do or die" attitude, ''refused to send his drivers to race there for their safety.''

* Yoshi Valley is quite hard to navigate, and even harder to stay on the track; if you take a wrong route or fall off, you won't place well at all. It doesn't help that since this track is TheMaze, so much so that the developers couldn't figure out how to make the position indicator function properly in the original N64 version of this track, you won't actually know how well/badly you're doing until the race is already over - it's replaced by a "?" instead during gameplay. Thankfully, the ''VideoGame/MarioKart8'' remake of this track does not suffer from this issue.

* ''VideoGame/SplitSecond''[='s=] Ryback Thunder Challenge can be the bane of many a player's existence. The Ryback Thunder is already a difficult vehicle to control, being a slow, heavy truck which requires you to plan out your turns far in advance (in other words, don't expect to beat this on the first ten tries). Add to that the fact that it's a Detonator challenge, which is a time trial wherein every major disaster on the track is going to occur as you drive by. The gold medal requirement for the challenge is 1:54.00. To say that this is an unfair time limit is akin to putting a gun against your head and lamenting that you won't have enough time to dodge the ''bullet''. Simply knowing which turns to take wide and which turns to cut through and how best to dodge every trap is not enough. Expect to see a lot of times like 1:53.56 taunting you on your many attempts. Once you've perfected the track, it will still come down to luck. It's worth noting that if you haven't patched the game, there is a [[GoodBadBug glitch]] that can be exploited to get a boost of speed at the beginning that can help out immensely.

** ''Mario Kart Super Circuit'' for the GBA, on the other hand, unleashed a Rainbow Road that's something to fear. Rather than going without railings everywhere, the level is almost entirely lined with jump pads, which can be even worse than having no rails at all. But if you know how to use [[NitroBoost Mushrooms]] well and get them often, the track offers many shortcuts to take. However, this is still the only Rainbow Road besides the ones in Super and 64 to include on-road hazards in the form of both randomly falling stars to make you spin out, and thunderclouds that will shrink you if you get struck, drastically slowing you down and leaving you open to getting flattened by other racers.

* Any simple, starting track, like Figure-8 Circuit, Luigi Circuit, or Peach Circuit can function as ThatOneLevel. Not because you fall off the track a great deal or anything, but because the item distribution is absolute murder on a flat basic track which is usually rather short. Basically, long fancy tracks can have the item hits made up for by sheer lead and skill based on the track layout, but if you get hit on Luigi Circuit, you're likely to get hit by every single opponent in the race in short order and fall down a few places regardless.

* Baby Park. The layout is very simple; it's seven laps on a simple, small[[note]]the smallest track in the franchise, not counting DK Jungle from ''VideoGame/MarioKartArcadeGP''[[/note]], hazardless oval course. It's so small than an average lap is about 10 seconds. It sounds simple in practice, but due to its tiny size as well as its high abundance of Item Boxes, the entire race essentially becomes a massively chaotic LuckBasedMission. Expect to find yourself commonly caught in the middle of a hectic hailstorm of Shells, Bob-ombs, and everything in between, since it's often you'll lap players in low places and make yourself a target for high-tier items. When the course immediately returned in ''VideoGame/MarioKartDS'', its introduction of the [[LimitBreak Bullet Bill]] didn't help matters. ''VideoGame/MarioKart8's'' remake takes this UpToEleven by making the whole race in anti-gravity, allowing you to boost off other cars by ramming into them (though they will get boosted as well), and the presence of nigh-useless coins in the item rotation greatly thins the line between a legendary victory and a bitter failure.

* In general, most tracks become this when playing in [[HarderThanHard 200cc]], as that class's incredibly high speeds give very little reaction time. However, the tracks that become the most difficult in this class are those that have lots of sharp corners in quick succession, such as Bone-Dry Dunes, Rainbow Road, GCN Yoshi Circuit, Dragon Driftway, GBA Cheese Land, and [=3DS=] Neo Bowser City.

* ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight'' is a highway racing game...until you get to the Hakone course, which is a mountain pass. Thanks to ''Maximum Tune''[='=]s super-drifty physics, you will be hitting guardrails ''a lot'' the first few times on this course. Ironically, the two Story Mode stages set on Hakone are ''[[BreatherLevel the easiest in the entire game]]'', due to the AI being extremely weak on this course.

** Two factors here. One, remember that an "easy" course is easy for ''everybody'', meaning that even a slight slipup can be incredibly costly and there is NO margin of error for making passes. Two, Daytona and Talladega are the two courses where the cars are required to have restrictor plates to limit their speed. Trouble is, this limits acceleration as well, making it easy for a driver to get caught in a wreck he'd otherwise be able to speed away from... and it just snowballs from there.

** Pocono Raceway is called "The Tricky Triangle" as it is unlike any other tri-oval circuit on the calendar; like Darlington, each corner is unique and you have three different turns to practice for making car setup difficult once again. The straightaways also let the cars reach incredible speeds, increasing the difficulty of braking for the turns.. This difficulty crosses over into Indycar as well. Not helping was an incident where Robert Wickens was infamously and badly injured when his car was touched causing loss of control. The car took flight and spun violently after colliding a section of the perimeter fence.

** Pocono Raceway is called "The Tricky Triangle" as it is unlike any other tri-oval circuit on the calendar with high-speed straightaways; like Darlington, each corner is unique and you have three different turns to practice for making car setup difficult once again. This difficulty crosses over into Indycar as well. Not helping was an incident where Robert Wickens was infamously and badly injured when his car was touched causing loss of control. The car took flight and spun violently after colliding a section of the perimeter fence.

** Pocono Raceway is called "The Tricky Triangle" as it is unlike any other tri-oval circuit on the calendar. Like Darlington, each corner is unique and you have three different turns to practice for making car setup difficult as well. This difficulty crosses over into Indycar as well. Robert Wickens was infamously and badly injured when his car was touched causing loss of control. The car took flight and spun violently after colliding a section of the perimeter fence.

** Pocono Raceway is called "The Tricky Triangle" as it is unlike any other tri-oval circuit on the calendar. Like Darlington, each corner is unique and you have three different turns to practice for making car setup difficult as well. This difficulty crosses over into Indycar as well, where Robert Wickens was infamously and badly injured when his car was touch causing loss of control. The car took flight and spun violently after colliding a section of the perimeter fence.

* The two Scrappy Levels in NASCAR are Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway. Don't let the long oval layouts fool you into thinking it's easy. Nine times out of ten, races at the two aforementioned tracks WILL have a big wreck taking out at least 10-15 cars, usually more...

** ''UsefulNotes/NASCAR Thunder 2004'' has the Lightning Challenge #27, "It's About Time". In it, you drive as NASCAR underdog Johnny Benson recreating his first Cup Series win in 2002 at Rockingham (North Carolina) Speedway with severely worn tires and nearly empty fuel, the condition he had when he won the actual race. Under these situations, the player is not only required to be pressured to watch their rivals, but also their tire and fuel to make it to the victory lane.

* ''NASCAR Arcade'' by Sega is already hard enough, being a simulation game where the time limit can only be extended by gaining positions (crossing the start/checkpoint/finish line won't do it), on the two (plus one secret) oval courses. Then there's Watkins Glen, a technical road course where that rule still applies. If you crash even once -- and you will the first time you play the course -- you ''will'' fall into last place, at which point you may as well be ordered by arcade staff to get off the machine because you simply will not make the next time extension.
* ''UsefulNotes/NASCAR Thunder 2004'' has the Lightning Challenge #27, "It's About Time". In it, you drive as NASCAR underdog Johnny Benson recreating his first Cup Series win in 2002 at Rockingham (North Carolina) Speedway with severely worn tires and nearly empty fuel, the condition he had when he won the actual race. Under these situations, the player is not only required to be pressured to watch their rivals, but also their tire and fuel to make it to the victory lane.