Well, at the beginning of the video they say its the Friday and the last demo to be shown, you can tell that it's been a long day and everybody just want's to go home, so it's not surprising that the presentation seems a bit underwhelming.

Plus they are playing against the A.I., and the tracks they have chosen to show the game off with are some of the easy ones.
R8 wanted to spread the track difficulty out so newbies to AG racing won't get frustrated and throw in the towel early, something that happened quite a bit with Wipeout, especially in the USA.
And not having BR's is great, as that was the biggest divider of the WO's that had BR's, either you were amazingly good at doing them or had a lousy success rate, if the latter it was very hard to win.

When you factor in that they are trying to get new, younger gamers AG racing, who don't seem to have the same attention span of say PSone Wipeout gamers, you can understand why the tracks shown have long easy to steer around track sections, it's mainly to break them in on learning the strategy needed in weapons choice, when to use them, when to use your turbo, when to use your shields etc, it's a LOT more complicated than any Wipeout game, you really have to think things through as your racing situation changes.

Then factor in that it looks like they are using the second speed class, there are two more that are a lot faster than that, it doesn't look that challenging.

When you get on the more challenging tracks at the faster speed classes, then it's a challenge for even the most experienced AG pilots [Although nobody has played against the new A.I. yet, so just how challenging they will be remains to be seen]

10 online playing against each other, that's where the challenge will be.

I'm pretty sure they intended to use a rating system, like on a FPS, so you are experience matched online, which will be good, as you won't get rank newbies finding themselves in a room where the other pilots will totally out race them, which is very off putting to a newbie in any game, and why they quickly give up.

I wouldn't really take that video of what the entirety of what Pacer is, that was just a like Bar Snack, you have a entree, main and dessert to come.

When people start posting videos of online games with a full grid, then you might change your mind