I haven't seen anyone defending the online portion of Driveclub. It's still touch and go and the (club) challenges are still absent. It's slowly getting better, but they still have a lot to clean up. My tour mode times are lost in online statistics and leaderboards. The leaderboards have impossible entries like a fastest time of 4 seconds for the first race (with a car you can't even use in that event), and a slowest time of 146 minutes. I've gotten speed face offs where I'm asked to beat 746 km/h and 3200 km/h averages.
It's just a shame that the online mess is overshadowing a truly great racer with a very polished offline mode. There was a time when online was optional, now it seems a game with both offline and online play is completely broken when the online functionality doesn't work? The basics are there, handling and tracks are awesome. Online is broken. At least that can be fixed.