Project Motor Racing has been officially revealed, and we got to drive it already. How did the upcoming sim by Straight4 Studios and GIANTS Software feel? Here are our first on-track impressions.
A number of Project Motor Racing screenshots showed impressive visuals already, and there were some elements that we also found quite nice to look at when attending the Zürich preview event.
But even the best looks in the world mean little in a racing simulation if its physics are lacking, of course. The build we got to lay our hands on was intended to showcase these physics first and foremost, powered by the Hadron physics engine Straight4 developed for the sim, promising a tick rate of up to 720 Hz.
The studio claims that Hadron “delivers unmatched handling realism and high-fidelity FFB” while also being very detailed – “emergent physical behaviours appear naturally, without needing increasingly complex code or lots of extra settings”.
Now, trying an alpha build like this on a setup that you are not familiar with nor have dialed in yourself is always a bit difficult, simply because you do not really know if some things you experience are due to the settings or the physics engine itself. Also, keep in mind that the time you get behind the wheel is comparatively brief, so a proper deep-dive across all scenarios was not quite possible.
Project Motor Racing Hands-on
However, there were a few elements that were consistent across the board. In low-speed corners, the downforce-heavy GT3 Lambo and the R8 prototype had noticeably little grip, as we soon found out in Mosport’s Moss Corner. With the Lambo in particular, this felt quite overpronounced, as you really had to wrestle the car around there to keep it together.We were not quite sure if that was due to the handling model or the brake on the rigs running the Lambos, as that was set up to be extremely soft and thus made it very difficult to properly trail off the brake. The car did feel a bit better when paying extra attention to this to possibly prevent keeping too much brake input going into the slow stuff. We are looking forward to verifying this once we get to spend some proper time with a preview version.
On the flip side, you could really feel the downforce effect set in the faster you went. Throughout the medium-to-high-speed turns at both Mosport and Lime Rock, the cars felt superb, and trying to maximize your pace through these parts of the tracks was extremely gratifying. It encouraged pushing the car to improve your times, and there quickly was this “okay, just one more lap” feeling that then turns into ten more laps – usually, that’s a good sign.
Then there is the Lola T70, the outlier of the bunch. As an endurance racer of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the car had none of the amenities the other two had on board. No slicks, no big wings, no driver aids, nothing. Unfortunately, the rig the car ran on did not have an H-shifter, but even without this, we got a good impression of what the car felt like.
And it was a positive impression. You could feel the T70 Mk3B GT work its bias-ply tires, never quite planted, but also never sliding too much if you didn’t overdo it. It felt like you would a prototype race car of that era expect to feel like – slightly sideways is the way to go, except when you floor the throttle and let the big V8 do its thing in a straight line. Definitely our favorite of the bunch!
Performance
After a slight hiccup resulting in the preview build running at 30 fps (which was fixed by rebooting), the sim ran rather smooth, even on triple screens. Considering it is in an early state, this was encouraging, and hints at the switch from Unreal Engine to the GIANTS 10 engine being the right call.One of the big reasons for doing so was the performance in VR, which Unreal Engine is not exactly a glowingly positive example for if you think about Assetto Corsa Competizione, for instance. If the triple-screen performance translates to VR as well, chances are that PMR is going to be well worth a close look for VR enthusiasts.
The development team has a good track record in this regard, with the Madness Engine that powered the Project CARS series and Automobilista 2 generally being one of the VR-friendliest engines in sim racing.
Force Feedback
Force Feedback was a tough one to judge, as it did feel nice and detailed on one hand, such as the changing surfaces at Mosport, but also did not feel dialed in perfectly – which, granted, will be hard to do with third-party rig setups. An area that we would like improvement in is the feedback under braking, as it felt a bit flat there, and you could not feel the ABS kick in in the Lambo. Some kerbs were also not very pronounced.There is room for improvement there, and the physics engine Straight4 has built should very much allow for this, as Principal Vehicle Programmer Ben Ponsford told us: “The reason why you can feel everything the car is doing is because we simulated all of the tires, all of the chassis, and all of the steering rack. So in theory, that should be exactly what you feel in the real car.”
As of April 2025, PMR’s Force Fedback is not final, but close to it, according to Ponsford. No extra effects have been added, but could be if needed or requested, Ben told us. And then there is the fine-tuning for different sorts of hardware.
While there are quite a few high-end direct drive wheelbases out there, so are lots of older, more rudimentary wheels like the Logitech G25. “You’ve only got 2 or 2.5 Nm compared to modern direct drives which are 10 or 20. So you might want to do some processing there – you can’t give that wheel the full dynamic range without processing, because it will feel very weak”, explained Ponsford.
“The question then is: Would some of that maybe work nicely on a high-end wheel? And if it did, would it be optional and configurable? We’re working out what we want to do on Force Feedback to let people tailor their experience.”
An important part of this will be that controller racers will not sacrifice any elements of the underlying physics engine - feedback and their inputs will be a subject of translation instead. The goal is to make PMR playable on pads in a way that does not feel like an afterthought, even though the sim is developed with wheel setups in mind first.
What are your thoughts on Project Motor Racing and the philosophy behind it? Let us know in the comments below and join the discussion in our PMR forum!
