I have a structural suggestion about the progression in a future horizon game. Currently in FH5 new street racing events are being unlocked through the street scene festival outpost. So instead of that why not unlock races through accessing different car meets on the map? That would be a nice way to re-introduce the car meets feature into the game in a way that feels organic and belivable.
And that last one is important because the last 2 horizon games have been a bit out of touch and not very grounded to reality when it comes to how its all being presented and explained within the fictional game world. Some authenticity can go a long way into making the player more immersed into the game.
And as far as licencing cars might be invovled i am sure you could find ways around it to not make it seem harmful as to make some manufacturers not wanting to be in the game (cough cough toyota)
You could introduce something like a “reputation xp” which players can earn through each (3 or 4) car meets locations. And as we unlock more reputation, we get more street racing events. Simple as that.
Need for Speed Unbound tried to pull car meets and the feature itself turned out very barebones, almost pointless. Unlike that game, Horizon has experience with car meets since they were part of Horizon 2 and 3 ( to a degree ). And horizons car meets were much much more robust than what Need for speed did.
You can think of them as little street scene outposts. But they’re going to be million times more believable than those. And it would make for a great and rewarding progression system.