I'd say it's more of a sandbox than a racing game. For me the fun was mostly in exploring, just driving aimlessly and crashing through any yellow gates or red billboards that i could find.
It let itself down on the events though. Aggression is the only one that works because it lets you drive wherever you want and the action follows. Stunts however just plonk you in a random location and tell you to look around for ramps and with races it seems you either get lost or switch to your map every 10 seconds.
Stunt runs and races can be fun, it just seems like they're sticking to the open world thing a bit too much. Games like NFS manage to be open world but still closed off a circuit when you were racing, that works a lot better.