One of the few new things in the new Grand Turismo 4 game is B-Spec mode. In B-Spec mode instead of driving your car you instead give the computer driver instructions. The instructions are consist of 5 speed or aggressiveness settings whether or not to pass other cars and to tell the driver to make a pit stop. You can either watch the computer drive from one of three camera angles, front, back, and cinematic or from an informational screen, on the informational screen you can speed up the race to 3 times speed.
On first glance the B-Spec mode is pretty lame. I tried it once on one of the beginner races a two lap race on a short course. This is a race that you can get from sixth place to first about 2 seconds after the race starts because the car I was using out classes the competition very badly. In B-Spec mode the computer took most of the race to get around all of the cars.
Then I was looking at the 1000! miles series of races, a series consisting of 5 tracks where you race around 300 kilometers on each track. To do the series you are looking at around 3 hours for each race or 15 hours to complete the entire series. Which takes some of the fun out of the game, the longest race I had completed before was a 500 mile race in GT:2 which lost most of it's fun shortly into it.
Enter B-Spec mode, at three times speed, each race can be completed in an hour and the entire series in about 5, and you can do it while you read a book. You can't completely leave the computer on its own as you need to tell it what to do on a pit stop, tires to change to, whether to put gas in or not and switch it back to 3x speed once the pit stop is finished.
Still it would take 5 hours real time to finish the entire series, you can exit between races but you have to resume the series next time you play. I have much more fun running short races in over powered cars where I can run the competition off the track. :)
Next time I will talk about another new feature, nitrous.
Update: The tire selection dialog that come up when you pit does go away on its own if you are in B-Spec mode. It goes away a few second after your car pulls into its stall in the pit, I was not waiting long enough before. This does increase the time you spend in a pit stop but does make it possible to let the game go over night for the longer races.