Codemasters has a bad habit of getting servers up before they are supposed to be. For example at launch the servers were supposed to go up for early access people on a Monday when the rest were supposed to get in next Thursday. In reality the servers went up already the previous Friday evening for those with early access, and Wednesday evening for "normal" access.
I was one of the happy ones who happened to browse their forums on that Friday evening, when suddenly a thread "Servers are up!!!!!!!!!" appeared. Nearly choking on my beer (this is again a proof why it is better to drink beer at home instead of a pub) I launched the game, and indeed, servers were up. Next day there were IIRC many angry posts on the forum from people who had been out on the town instead of sitting home and hitting F5 while browsing the forums