‘Our Team Lives And Breathes Motorsport’, Says Project Motor Racing COO

Project Motor Racing is one of the most intriguing titles to emerge in the racing genre in some time. In a world that’s increasingly dominated by either pick-up-and-play open-world arcade racers or esports-focused sims revolving around a select few racing categories, PMR – developed by nascent developer Straight4 Studios – is promising something genuinely different.

There’s a hardcore sim focus, yes, but one with a greater breadth of cars and tracks than many of its competitors, an emphasis on approachability for those at all ends of the market and – something sorely lacking in plenty of modern sims – a properly fleshed-out career mode.

To find out a bit more about how Straight4 has set out to achieve this, we chatted to the studio’s chief operating officer, Ryan Hoey, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where a work-in-progress version of PMR was playable for punters.

By far the most attention-grabbing aspects of PMR so far are its car and track roster, even if what we’ve actually seen of both at this point is quite limited. In terms of cars, there’s the modern GT3 and prototype machinery you’d expect from any self-respecting sim these days, but also a real focus on turn-of-the-millennium sports car racing, an often underrepresented area in the genre. Among better-known cars of the era, like the Aston Martin DBR9 and original Audi R8 LMP car, deep cuts like the Lister Storm and Marcos LM600 can be found among the confirmed list so far.

This was Straight4’s goal from day one, explains Hoey. “Our game designer, Austin Ogonoski, came with a list of cars that he thought were the pinnacle of motorsports, especially in the GT side. Our team are geeks – that’s the best way of putting it. They live and breathe motor racing and gaming, so they then put their two pence in, and we came up with a roster that goes from the 1970s right through to the pinnacle of motorsports today.”

Everything we have seen so far, though, leans into sports car racing. There’s a huge breadth, from the entry-level Mazda MX-5 Cup car to Lamborghini’s top-flight SC63 Le Mans Hypercar, but so far, the game’s car list hasn’t deviated from that theme. That will change, though.

PMR was first announced with the working title GTRevival, a nod to the GTR games that many of the team that now makes up Straight4 worked on in the noughties. “We changed that because it pigeonholed us into just GT cars,” says Hoey. “Project Motor Racing has a wider scope, so while we are GT-oriented at the minute, there’s room for expansion. There are long-term plans [for other disciplines].”

Those long-term plans also encompass road cars, although don’t expect PMR to go full Gran Turismo 7 and start throwing in family crossovers. “There are some cars here at Goodwood that are technically road cars, but they’re road-legal track cars really. We want to see those cars in the game.”

The track list has gone down a similar route to the car roster, with lesser-spotted venues in sim racing like Canada’s Mosport Park and South Africa’s Kyalami already confirmed for inclusion.

It does raise a question about the better-known venues, though, the ones that everyone expects to see in a racing sim these days. Some pre-release footage has shown a track very clearly inspired by Silverstone, but with generic ‘Northampton’ branding. We’d been unsure if this was a temporary thing while licensing issues were cleared up, but Hoey confirms that a licensed Silverstone won’t feature in the final game.

“Northampton will be in the game,” says Hoey. “We’ve tried with every track to license it. It wasn’t that we went out on our own and decided we weren’t going to license Silverstone; we tried, we entered into talks, but the talks didn’t come to fruition.”

PMR will, of course, feature online play, and Hoey sees it eventually being used as an esports platform, but much of the early promo has focused heavily on the single-player career mode. This is something Straight4’s poured a huge amount of effort into, and should allow players the freedom to either dive into the top flights with a huge budget or grind their way up from the lower levels, all while dealing with the financial burden of real motorsport (albeit not literally, thankfully – PMR will be a one-time purchase deal backed up by a blend of free and paid DLC).

“Austin, the game designer, and the team have put a lot of thought into [career mode]. Austin is an amateur racer himself, so he knows the ins and outs of the financial difficulties of having a race team,” explains Hoey.

With PMR set to get a current-gen console release alongside PC availability, it should open itself up to a much broader audience. This, says Hoey, is something made ever more possible by rapid improvements in the console field: “In terms of performance, the hardware for consoles in the last few years has come on leaps and bounds, so the gap in that market between PC and console has really shortened.”

This will be welcome news to those not prepared to pour hundreds of pounds into PC hardware and sim racing gear, as will the fact that Straight4 is actively working to ensure PMR is approachable to those playing on a controller.

It all bodes well, then, although you’d be forgiven for thinking lots of it sounds a little familiar: the emphasis on lesser-seen cars and tracks, the in-depth career mode, the spread of platforms and approachability levels.

Straight4, as you’re likely aware, was formed from the ashes of Slightly Mad Studios, developers of the Project Cars franchise. It was founded by former SMS CEO Ian Bell, and plenty of the team have come across to Straight4 with him.

Hoey doesn’t shy away from the fact that the Project Cars franchise has influenced PMR (the first two games, anyway – the less said about Project Cars 3, the better), but stops short of calling it a straight-up, or even spiritual, successor. “It’s its own beast. There’s a lot of the same team, and a lot of that same passion that runs through, but it’s definitely its own entity,” he says.

Nevertheless, if it can refine what made the first two Project Cars titles so good, and bring them over into a new generation, then Project Motor Racing could very well be a winner. We briefly sampled the WIP version and found a game that neatly balances challenge and approachability (although this was in a comparatively tame Lamborghini Huracan GT3). If that can be brought across to a wide audience, then PMR should handily fill a very vacant space in the racing game market when it launches on 25 November.