it would be nice to have the option to disable the engine animation to save memory resources and let low end pc’s play better(may fix a lot of crashes when scaling or changing block tipe too 
)
i know making the engine animations take a lot of time and they are beautiful but after acouple of hours of play i don’t know if someone still look at them so a static 3d model could be enought for the most (is just a personal opinion)
It a good sugestion,people with slower machines will propably appreciate it and it should lower minimum requirements.
I think that even if you don’t look at engine animations they are important.Since engine parts started slowly spinning even when engine isn’t being tested the game feels much better for me
The 3D animation does take a tiny amount of more CPU calculations, the graphics card is not affected. So overall you would notice no performance impact whatsoever between having them on or off 
They used to be static.
The reason they spin slowly now is because the dev team decided that since your computer has to render the engine in 3D at x frames per second anyway, they may as well render them spinning.
@killrob
on my hardware the game run smooth on standard graphics setting @1980x1024 30+fps when setting the quality to max runs smooth for the first 10-15 minutes always @1980x1024 then starts to slow down to 2-3 fps when enngine animation is displayed(returns normal when switching to body tabs or car setting tabs) or when changing any option on car setup tabs so if it’s not a cpu/gpu usage issue can be a minor memory managing/adressing error in the code i will run a couple of test and i will inform you anyway
tested hardware so far (with same issue different timings):
1)desktop q9650 extreme(4cores) @3.0GHz 2GB ram ddr2
nvidia gtx280 4GB VRam
2)desktop i5(4cores) 3.2GHz 8GB ddr3
nvidia gtx660 4gb
3)laptop i7 @2.2GHZ 4GB Ram
nvidia gt220m 2GB dedicated VRam
i will get results from msi afterburner stats ram vram cpu gpu usages soon i will keep you informed
edit 1:
test results on hardware 1) the game uses 2 cores only core1to max core2 to half (not the cause of the issue) ram/vram usage is average and stable (still ok) gpu seems the weak point ; keeping the window open without modify any engine parameter just keeping the screen and animation on screen (window or full borderless window) the gpu usage slowly grows from a stable 75% in the first 2/3 minutes than starts to request more power without stopping untill it reaches the 100% turns back to 75% usage when changing to non engine tabs then returns to 100% if i turn back on the engine tabs where the animation is
edit 2:
test results on hardware 3) pretty much the same just shorter timings all nominal except gpu usage slowly growing for no reason to 100%
edit 3:
test results on hardware 2) same gpu usage issue just slower growing
all tests ran at @1980x1024 higher graphical settings possible
the same test @1980x1024 with quality bar on half position was different all running smooth no strange gpu usage on all 3 pc’s
thanks for reading