Sorry for TL;DR, just needed to be written
First of all:
I do like the idea behind it, making Singleplayer more exciting and those races especially thrilling. I also like the official leaderboards etc.
However, it is just not fun. It is frustrating. I'm not talking about A08 and anything in that vein, but about the system in general.
I guess Rounds/Cup mode from online served as in inspiration for this, and they are fun and exciting, just as the timer function should be. There are a few fundamental differences however that make online fun and timer mode frustrating.
The fundamental difference between the two is that the online modes are well, online, and each race is only for a limited amount of time with a limited group of players. That makes it always a risk-reward situation- do I drift as close as possible, getting a very good time but risking contact with the sidelines? Do I try noslide here, but risk crashing into the fence? The thing is, 20 people are asking themselves the same question online. I'm competing against them right now. It's a risk/reward situation.
The problem in offline mode is precisely this: You are not competing against 20 people, you are competing against 20 000 people. You are not competing at the same time and with the same amount of attempts, but against as many attempts as your opponents have time. That means in the end, the top times are as good as they always there because somewhere someone had a lot of time on his hands and tried so much that he got that perfect run once. The timer does not make top times more exciting because of risk/reward, it only means they take a lot longer to achieve.
As for making the races more exciting- Sure, that is true. And for some races it does work, though never as good as online, but those are a limited selection of tracks. It works on the easy tracks where you have to make a risk/reward calculation for some drifts/loops/speed etc. I still find it annoying, but I could imagine that people like it somewhere.
But the timer is applied indiscriminately to all tracks, and that is seriously bad. The worst example is obviously A08, which is a track of pure luck anyway. Without the timer, this would be quite fun, trying to get a topscore and laughing about crashing half a second before you'd make your best time.
But there is a reason that this kind of track is never found on a cup or lap server- it is based on pure luck. Official races on this are pure frustration, because the person with the most time wins, because one try will be the one.
That is true to a lesser extent for all the harder or luck based tracks, especially for people like me who don't invest that much time in TM and don't have that much skill. It is just plain frustrating to have one try every 5 minutes on a track you can finish once every 10 races with a passable time.
Singleplayer has become a lot less attractive to me in Canyon, just because the timer irritates me. Sure, I can just race the track and upload my Replay to TMX, but there is an official ladder which I want to climb. And it irks me seeing it there but having this frustrating timer which limits any progress.
Sorry for ranting and TL;DR, I just had to let it out
