When I play Championship mode, I get a message in the middle of the screen, right when I am about to start the 4th track. It says ILLEGAL VERSION. The race starts but I cannot accelerate my bike.

What it's going on?
(using win 7)

and yes, I am talking about the version I bought from GOG.com


EDIT: I redownloaded the game with the fix and it works perfectly.

It's not just you - other people have also had this problem.

Open a support ticket with GOG :

http://www.gog.com/en/support/contact/technical_issues_with_games

At this moment, this time nothing cant surprise me, it weird if comes from gog, they
should verify their version, they can have the rights but if the game said its
illegal i guess the game still remain any kind of DRM, serial, or something like that.

Dont forget time agoo a company sell on Steam (max payne) the game and was funny
because someone found in the .exe a ascii logo from MYTH, they team who crack this
game and the company uses their crack to sell his game instead include a DRM
free executable.

It´s funny because at 1997my father bought me my second PC, the man who sold the computer installed on it some funny games (pirate); motoracer, ignition, Quake and its expansions, Scourge of Armageddon and dissolution of eternity. I´ve never seen that message on my pirate copy of that time (i finished it and open all circuits), and now thirteen years later i can´t play on my legally purchased GOG game because there´s a message that say i have an "illegal version". They should ask pirates for advice :-)

Funny but very unsafe. what if it contained a keylogger?... cracks are never 100% safe.

Ohhh.. No, this is no good! I'm not paying, even as little as $6, for an "illegal" version. They need to fix this!

Sorry but you are wrong, because i dont know much but i have heard and i understand
not only 1 group work on the cracks, its something like a competence between
groups, and if the competence group who make cracks check and found something
weird in the initial crack they nuke the game/crack and release a PROPER crack.
I know and by a good source (a friend of mine work in a antivirus company)
Sometimes developers and companys have deals with antivirus (free like avast)
to make warns false positives in keygens and cracks to avoid piracy and spread
the panic.

GOG has been known to do similar things in the past, except they have been better about removing any "signatures" from the code. There's really nothing wrong with that legally speaking, the cracked code still belongs to the original rights holder, regardless of who did the actual cracking. Its very possible the same thing has happened here, only this time the crack used was not a very well coded one.

Wow, i'm - shocked! If this was true i'd completely loose my trust in that company. I mean, i pay for that!

DRM-lessness is THE prominent feature about GOG. I'd expect formerly DRM-protected games to be properly recoded, and not just cracked.

I really hope GOG would give a statement on this issue, or i'll resettle to abandonia...

If gog solved this issue please let us know because i want buy but i wil not until gog
solve this.

I sent a support ticket with GOG. I am still waiting for a response.

GOG closes over the weekend so you might get a response this week

Is there any *easy* way to provoke the error, short of actually playing through the championship?

When the source code is available, they do actually do that, but sometimes original source code is no longer available, especially in the case of really old games that have very likely changed ownership several times over the years. In those cases, the only way to deal with the DRM is to either crack the code themselves or resort to using existing cracks. Why re-invent the wheel? Many existing cracks are very professionally done and are proven effective, so they just use them. This is completely done with the original rights holder's permission and knowledge (in at least one case, GOG stated the cracked version was provided to them by the rights holder) so there is no shady dealing going on here at all. Some people have a problem with GOG not "crediting" the crackers, but quite frankly, no one should really expect that considering the act of cracking the game without the rights holder's permission is illegal in most countries. In relation to the discovery of cracked code in Arcanum:
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/gog_arcanum_release_uses_warez_scene_crack/post170

EDIT - Hmmm. You probably meant an official statement about this particular game, not a statement about the use of cracks in general, didn't you?