I've beaten this several times over the 30 or so years I've owned it.
Took me 12 hrs to get 1st in every F1 race. It probably would have been closer to 10 hrs to win the championship without going for 1st in every race -- doing so gets you absolutely nothing as the same ending plays, whether or not you take 1st in every race.
If you like Gran Turismo and similar games, I highly recommend this game. It's the same idea, where you run races to win money to upgrade various parts, as well as getting higher licenses to race more races, eventually gaining an F1 license so you can run the F1 season. Of course, being an NES game, it's going to be much lighter on options. There are only 4 cars available throughout the game, for example. There are 30 tracks spread across the US and 16 tracks on the F1 circuit. I'd consider this pretty impressive for being an NES game, especially since almost every track has its own unique scenery.
For the most part, the game is pretty easy, with the only real challenges being the final few races to attain the F1 license and the final 4 or 5 races of the F1 season, but only if you're trying to win every F1 race. By around the 10th stop on the F1 season, the top competitors' top speed is higher than yours, so you can only catch them by using Nitro and then repeatedly ramming them in order to maintain your lead. It also doesn't help that they can go through the drones (the non-competitors) which constantly try to block you -- there were several times when I was passing a drone and watched as a competitor came up from behind the drone and drove right through it, or there was a competitor and a drone ahead of it in the same lane directly in front of me and the drone braked to go through the competitor in order to have me rear-end it.
