The best racing games like Dirt Rally 2.0 are EA Sports WRC, Richard Burns Rally and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to racing costs you.
Filtering to racing means you want the vehicle to be the subject. It is the right filter when what you liked was speed, or handling, or a road worth driving.
What you get: A short session that is complete in itself. A race is over in five minutes and you can always take the corner better.
What made Dirt Rally 2.0 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the racing part of that answer, and only the racing part.
By the same studio, with the official licence and far more stages.
Twenty years old and still the benchmark for rally physics.
The same seriousness applied to circuit racing.
The opposite approach — top-down, stylised, and about the drive.
Surface-change handling from the arcade, and still a joy.
If you want the simulation with a collection attached.
For competition — the most serious online racing there is.
Contact racing with a proper damage model and none of the discipline.
For the obsession with one perfect run, free and endless.
Everything outside the vehicle. Racing games rarely have a story, and the ones that try usually should not have.
The full list is on games like Dirt Rally 2.0 — 9 picks, no genre filter.
EA Sports WRC. By the same studio, with the official licence and far more stages.
No. Dirt Rally 2.0 released on the PlayStation 4, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Simulation models tyre temperature, fuel and weight transfer and punishes you for ignoring them. Arcade gives you grip, boost and a rewind, and is about flow. Buying the wrong one is where most disappointment comes from.
For the simulation picks it changes the game completely. For anything arcade it makes almost no difference.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Dirt Rally 2.0 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is racing — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the racing guide for where to start in the genre generally.