There's still some tuner bs but the game IS a lot more like a real sim than the NFS franchise has seen since Porsche's Unleased.
The game is a bit weird though. With F2, GT and some of the PC sims like GTR2, common tracks all feel very similar one to the other. But with this game it feels like the tracks are SMALLER. Laguna for instance, on the other games it feels like a relatively long track... with corners that often give you a decent amount of setup time. On Shift Laguna feels VERY short to me, could be that it's more challenging (it is, car dynamics are MUCH more active than in the other games), I'll have to check the lap times and see if they correlate.