The best simulation games like Dirt Rally 2.0 are EA Sports WRC, Richard Burns Rally and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to simulation costs you.
Filtering to simulation means you want a system to run or a routine to inhabit. It is the right filter when what you liked was being somewhere rather than beating something.
What you get: A game that does not need you to be good at it, and that rewards paying attention over reacting quickly.
What made Dirt Rally 2.0 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the simulation part of that answer, and only the simulation 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.
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.
Urgency. Simulations are deliberately slow, and the ones with no fail state give you nothing to push against.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Dirt Rally 2.0 that are not simulation games, so they are not on this page:
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.
A simulation with no fail state and no time pressure. The label describes how it feels to play rather than what genre it is in.
No — one is about running a system well, the other about inhabiting a routine. Recommending across that line is where most simulation recommendations go wrong.
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 simulation — 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 simulation guide for where to start in the genre generally.