The fix resolves about 90% of these cases. If you continue to have issues, consider completely uninstalling and reinstalling the game on a fresh Steam instance.

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Few things are as frustrating as gearing up for a race, loading into your favorite track, and being greeted by a black screen followed by the dreaded pop-up:

This is the most frequent culprit. Steam uses a specific file to verify the game is launching correctly. If this file is missing or corrupted, the API initialization fails.