When you stop to think about it, one racing simulator should feel interchangeable with another. The end goal of Project Motor Racing, like its contemporaries Rennsport, EA SPORTS WRC, and so on, is to recreate the experience of driving a performance vehicle so closely that it behaves exactly like the real thing. In the most reductive terms, a racing sim is a calculator. It crunches numbers, like velocity, weight transfer, tire degradation and fuel consumption. And you don’t tend to hear people express a preference for the way a particular calculator solves an equation. 

But when a release like Project Motor Racing comes around, it’s a reminder that an element of authorship and subjectivity is inevitable. That’s what makes the game—and the genre—so fascinating. 

“This is a first principles physics engine,” says Straight4 Studios Chief Development Officer Kevin Boland. “There's very little in there that's done by assumption, right? Even in the hypercars, you can actually model what the engine’s doing.”

In other words, Project Motor Racing isn’t a game that’s making up numbers to make the journey feel good. Even the tiniest details are grounded in the fundamental laws of physics. And yet, as Boland explains, the personal touch still comes through. 

“It still has what we call our artistic strokes. Let’s say a painter comes along and he paints two different paintings, but you know they were both done by that painter because his certain styles are there. And for us, you're gonna see some good things that you like, that you like from the past…but then you'll see things that are new, and bold, and a little different.” 

Sim racing rarely looks backwards, but the past is a pertinent subject for this particular project. Project Motor Racing was once called GTRevival, and both its current and former names reference the former glories of its developers, from Slightly Mad Studios' trailblazing Project CARS series in the 2010s to SimBin Studios' older GTR games. Project Motor Racing combines developers from both of those teams in a kind of sim racing supergroup, pooling their decades of collective expertise into a new project.

That coming together, Boland explains, began with EA’s cancellation of the Project CARS series after the release of the third game in 2020. “ What was originally there in my headspace was unfinished business. We had to kind of sit down and go, ‘What do we want to do? What do we really want to do? And it was Ian [Bell, Straight4 Studios CEO] who picked up the phone and basically got the band back together.”

Naturally, what they really wanted to do was the same thing they had always done: make the most realistic driving sim possible, taking advantage of modern hardware's higher computational headroom. 

Bell—who had worked on the venerable GTR and GT Legends titles of the noughties before helming Project CARS—formed a new team with Boland and other sim racing alumni, aiming to make a game that nodded at past successes, but which treaded new ground enabled by advances in technology. 

For example, Project CARS featured a system called LiveTrack which modeled the car's grip level in real-time according to temperature and weather conditions. Project Motor Racing includes an evolved system called True2Track that does the same job with far greater fidelity, modeling everything from water dispersal and movement to the creation of tire marbles. It’s a case of using 2025’s compute power to double down on the quality of simulation.

“We obviously have that [LiveTrack] heritage,” says Boland. “We understand the technology, but we actually went a completely different way with it [for Project Motor Racing]. We actually put it on the GPU.

“We’ve leaned in on certain things which we actually really feel that our audience wants," Boland continues. "They want good simulation, so we dedicate more power to our simulation. And if someone says the UI isn't that good, we’ll say, ‘Well, that's because we were focused on the driving experience.’ They might say ‘It's not Unreal [Engine]-level graphics.’ We know. Because having beautiful TXAA and lovely image quality, when you're traveling at 200 miles an hour—what’s really important to you?”

This isn’t the standard press release language for a game developer. The team's transparency is testament to how singular Project Motor Racing’s focus is, and how committed its creators are to achieving a new high bar for realism. 

It’s also testament to Project Motor Racing’s potential as a platform for the community to build on. Project Motor Racing was built with user generated content in mind from the onset—not quite open-source, but constructed to be as easy to mod and add to as possible, whether you’re a veteran sim racing content creator or a total newcomer. 

“Something that our community brings is passion. Real passion,” says Boland, “and what we want to do is foster that passion. We’re going to have things that people won’t like, that they’ll want to change…But that means you can make your own content. It’s really easy. There’ll be a tutorial. We've got a whole series of tutorials that are coming out for how to actually build stuff.”

Once you’ve created something—whether it’s a race event, a new car with bespoke handling physics, a car setup, or even individual force feedback settings per vehicle—you can upload it to the Mod Hub for others to download and use. 

That gives Project Motor Racing the capacity to grow and evolve in exactly the direction its community wants. And so it stands to reason that Straight4 Studios’ job is to get the fundamentals in place. The car list will inevitably grow in time, via both planned paid expansions which will add new vehicle categories and the subsequent wave of UGC which builds on those newly added categories. But what’s there from the start is a physics engine which gets racing right, to a degree that only a team of veterans with this much passion and expertise can achieve. 

Project Motor Racing is available on the Epic Games Store.