The game marked itself apart from others of the same genre with cel-shaded graphics, which gave them a hand-drawn and cartoon-like appearance. Despite its unique style, the game suffered from poor handling dynamics, and ultimately turned out to be a critical and commercial failure. In 2003, to address the problems cited by the Japanese and European PS2 versions, Capcom reworked the game and added US cars initially for the US market, titled as Auto Modellista: US Tuned. This was Capcom's attempt to sway US players into buying the game, but it still suffered from the same handling dynamics of the first edition. The US Tuned version would be ported as a GameCube and Xbox game, with the latter due for release in Europe on April 2004, but distributors eventually decided not to honour, predicting sales of the game were going to be poor. The game was superseded by Circus Drive (known as Group S Challenge outside Japan), but Capcom has not been involved with driving games since.