The usual way to make AI racer easier is to make it slower; cap its speed, cut its grip, drive it on a slower line, or quietly hand it a worse car. It works, and it produces opponents who are strangely good at some things and inexplicably hopeless at others, because nothing about them is a driver. It may be passable on asphalt where there are few variables, but translate that to off-road racing and you lose the sense of competition.
Ours are drivers. Turn the difficulty down and they react later, hold a wobblier line, are less smooth on the throttle, miss their timings, and back off on jumps they aren't sure of. Turn it up and all of that tightens. The car underneath never changes and neither does the physics.
And there's no rubber band. Nothing waits for you round the back of the circuit and nothing gets a boost when you pull away. It doesn't need to - an opponent that genuinely knows how to race the track is competitive without being handed anything, and a win over one means something.
