I love the game no doubt, but I haven't ever bothered with the online. I am just not good enough. I don't get enough time to play.I haven't played in ages, but I know when I played the matchmaking would put me in lobbies with people very far away (like 5000+ miles away). That extra lag made racing nearly impossible. I was regularly getting put into lobbies with people from Brazil (I'm in the extreme northern US, almost to Canada).
Trying to race clean with a car that the netcode maybe didn't have quite in the right spot was nearly impossible.