Since they pay for it.
No, they're not. Price is paid for the UMD, development, manuals, R&D, testing, in short: man-hours. You do not, however, pay for your experience. That's the beauty of videogames. I don't wanna even think about what would happen, if retailers set prices depending on experience. What would games like Final Fantasy (to name one that's said to offer great experience, although I don't think so), or Rez (to name another) cost? 150$, 200$, 500$? And that's the common misconception "casual" gamer's as part of modern entertainment society suffer from. They feel authorized to demand tailor-made entertainment whenever they see fit, just because they paid for "it", which, however, as mentioned above is not true.
Anyway, now for something completely different:
maybe someone just thought driving a craft in free race was relaxing and enjoyable(...)don't want to or can't devote as much time to master the racing.
That's a contradiction. If you really have that much time at your disposal to just kill it by roaming games, you might as well practice instead. Just a thought.
Finally, to address your question: Games always had an inherent goal, that is an achievement within a game that required practice and repeated play to reach. It's not as if we were good at WO from the beginning you know? It took endless hours of play. And believe me, it was not always fun, more like hard work. But that's ok, because WO always stood for "hard" and the thought of being good at something difficult is always motivating and keeps you on your toes. Finishing a game was a satisfying, rewarding experience, because it took skill. With games hitting the mass-market producers had to adopt to people that would not invest that much time in games, thus don't have the required skill to beat them. The consequences where easier games overall and in particular the advent of difficulty levels. The problem with that is, that now that a wider target-audience should be able to complete a game, the focus was shifted from actually playing and getting better to investing a certain amount of time which ensured one to play through the game. The difference between finishing and giving up vanished and instead became a difference of conditions (easy,normal,hard,...) under which that goal was achieved. Both, the good player and the beginner would reach their goal. It's only, that the beginner feels false accomplishment and the better player feels betrayed, because although he mastered the game there's no reward from the game itself. Pure had concept art for Gold medals, Fusion and XL the almighty Piranha, WO3 prototype tracks and ships. Pulse on the other hand? I finished the grid with all Golds (236) in about 15 hours and got nothing. Not even the feeling of achievement because it was too damn easy. So why would a good player waste time when he might as well finish a game on easy level in a fraction of time, when there's no reward anyway? The crux is, that if there were, casual gamers would whine again about their not being able to see everything from the game, although they paid for it. See, we're I'm going with that? No? I don't any more either. Rant over.