Project Motor Racing Review: Full Of Potential, Lacking Polish

It’d ultimately be unhelpful to compare Project Motor Racing to the first two games in the now-dead Project CARS franchise, but it’s kind of hard not to. The name isn’t the only hint that the two IPs are connected. Straight4 Studios, the developer behind the new sim, is headed by Ian Bell, the old boss of Project Cars developer Slightly Mad Studios, and much of the development team jumped over with him when SMS was shuttered.

Boot up the game, and the main menu has a strikingly similar soundtrack to those games (from the same composer, no less) – the same stabs of dramatic orchestral music underscored by ambient racing noises and radio chatter. Even the typeface is similar. We’re sure that if Straight4 had legally been able to, it would have called this game Project CARS 3. And yes, we know there was an actual Project CARS 3, but we can probably all agree that it’s best to pretend there wasn’t.

A love letter to sports car racing

For all the similarities, though, it’s not a direct successor. Where PCARS cherry-picked from all over the world of motorsport, featuring everything from karts to stock cars, F1 machinery to rallycross cars, and even a few road cars, PMR is laser-focused on one thing: sports car racing.

This narrower scope may alienate some people, but for sports car aficionados, the list, 77 strong at launch, contains some delightful deep cuts – name the last time you got to drive a Marcos LM600, a Lotus Elise GT1 or a Panoz LMP-1 Roadster-S in a game.

The same goes for the track roster. Where PCARS 2 had a mighty 61 locations to play with, PMR brings just 16 (17 if you consider the Nürburgring GP Circuit and Nordschleife to be different locations, which I don’t), but they’re a mix of expected inclusions – Spa, Silverstone, the ’Ring – and some hidden gems that deserve more sim racing representation – Mosport Park, Kyalami and Mid-Ohio, for instance.

Evidently, securing licences for certain tracks has proven tricky, because several are included with off-brand names (sorry, when we said Silverstone, we meant Northampton). This is academic from a player's point of view, though – the layouts and scenery are identical to the real things.

Less academic are some of the tracks are not featured. For a start, only three so far – Bathurst, Kyalami and not-Interlagos – are outside of Europe or North America, but more to the point, there’s no Le Mans. Not at launch, anyway. It’s coming as DLC, but not until the fourth quarter of 2026, and when a game is so centred on sports car racing, includes a full day/night cycle for every circuit, and features dozens of cars that have raced at the 24 Hours, it feels like a glaring omission at launch.

Function over form

In fact, in its current state, the whole game feels pretty barebones. There’s none of the slickness to the UI that you got in the PCARS games, and currently just two options are listed under single player: race weekend and career. That means if you just want to hot lap, you have to fiddle about with session and opponent settings rather than simply being able to jump into a dedicated time trial mode.

That career mode is billed as ‘survival style’, meaning you have to manage your budget carefully, although it’s geared to be quite open-ended: you can choose a small starter budget if you want to climb the ladder or a massive one if you immediately want to start racing prototypes. Plenty of different sponsorship models are available, too – I sensibly went for the one that covers all my damage costs.

I haven’t had too much opportunity to plough my way through the career, but while it’s refreshing to finally have a racing sim with a seriously in-depth single-player career, it does feel like the low track count could see things pretty quickly get repetitive. I went for the Northern US MX-5 Cup as my first championship, and two of the three races were at the same track.

There is, of course, multiplayer too, which I’ve had a quick go at with CT editor Ryan Hirons. We found that while the races themselves run smoothly and the crossplay function works nicely, in the space of just three races, both of us separately suffered game crashes while in the lobby, and on totally different platforms, too. Given that the only people online at this point were other journalists and creators with early access, it doesn’t exactly bode well for a larger post-release player base. 

Worth pointing out as well that once you’ve booted up a custom server, there’s no way to change the track or car class, which is a little infuriating.

The important stuff

Really, though, a sim like this will live and die on how it feels, and here, too, there are plenty of signs of potential but a lack of polish in places. I’ve been playing on a controller on PS5, and the good news is that like its spiritual forebears, PMR can be approachable for those with this more casual setup.

In particular, some of the more modern machinery, like the GT3 and GT4 cars, give you a good sense of what the tyres are doing and when you’re on the limit of grip, as do some surprising older cars like the Porsche 911 GT1, Mazda 787B and the IMSA GTO machines.

In lots of stuff, though, there’s a real feeling of disconnect between your inputs and what the tyres are doing, and I wish you the best if you get a slide going, because they’re near-impossible to recover. I thought this might be a combination of controller limitations and good old-fashioned skill issues, but I’ve seen seasoned sim racers reporting that it’s a similar story on a wheel. And if you are playing on a pad, you’re going to need assists on.

Unfortunately, one of the game’s flagship categories, the Le Mans Hypercars, seem to be pretty much undrivable at launch. The issue varies from car to car, but all the ones I’ve tried seem to pull randomly to the left or right down straights like a 2004 Vauxhall Vectra that’s not had an alignment in 17 years. Now, spoiler alert: I’ve never driven a real Le Mans Hypercar, so I don’t know if this is what they’re like, but it feels more like a fundamental issue with their physics more than a reflection of real-life traits. Hopefully it’s something that patches will fix.

Meanwhile, on a wheel, Ryan has reported hit-and-miss force feedback through his Moza R25 Ultra. Earlier cars have a lot of feel to them, like the brilliant-to-drive Porsche 964, but it seems to be a trend that the newer the car, the worse it is to drive. Dialling things in is not an easy task either, with a lot of complicated FFB settings without much guidance as to what does what.

Artificial intelligence… ish

The other thing a game with a strong emphasis on its single-player career mode needs is good AI, and once again, this is a bit of a mixed bag in PMR. They can be aggressive and racy, especially if you crank up the difficulty – sometimes arguably too aggressive, refusing to give you any quarter if you get alongside them in a corner.

Other times, though, it’s like they’ve been lifted straight from Gran Turismo 4. They just proceed in a line, reluctant to try and overtake each other or you. They can also have a habit of bunching up into tight corners and not accelerating out of bends quickly enough, leaving you liable to smack into the back of them – and doing so uncovers some unpredictable collision physics, where seemingly small bumps will send you veering into one of those unrecoverable skids. They can, in the right circumstances, provide good racing, but it’s not consistent.

It’s also worth noting that while certain tracks on PC allow for up to 32 cars on track, the absolute maximum you can have on console is 16 in single-player (although weirdly, multiplayer allows for the full 32 regardless). This is to preserve performance, but frankly, it’s not really enough, especially for a title that’s supposed to emphasise intense, close-quarters, often multi-class sports car racing.

Sights and sounds

‘Bring earplugs’ is a phrase that’s popped up in a lot of PMR’s pre-release marketing, as it promises to crank up the raw, visceral sounds of the many legendary race cars it features. It largely does this well. The majority of cars sound not only distinct and believable, but exactly as brutal as you’d hope a race car would.

Some of the standouts from the cars I’ve played around with are the rotary shriek of the Mazda 787B, the choppy V8 of the C5-R Corvette, and the truly ridiculous wastegate chatter of the Porsche 911 GT1. Even here, though, there are odd misses – drive either of the game's Dodge Vipers and tell me if they really sound like they have massive 8.0-litre V10s.

In some cases, it can be a little too realistic. Drive one of the open-cockpit prototypes in anything other than chase cam, and as you get faster, the wind noise is gradually turned up to the point where it largely drowns out the engine. True-to-life? Yes. Annoying? Also yes.

It also makes it all the stranger when things go wrong, and you hit a barrier, only to be met with a muted thunk rather than the brutal bending of metal and shattering of carbon you’d expect. The cars do at least pick up visual damage in a more convincing (albeit still seemingly pre-set) way than lots of other sims these days.

On a high-end PC, and on some of the most basic hardware you can possibly play it on – a PS5 Digital Edition – the car models still look nice and crisp, with realistic reflections and dirt-build up. The scenery, though, takes a bit of a hit on console, with trackside furniture looking fuzzy and not particularly convincing raindrops and particle effects.

Verdict

Project Motor Racing seems to want to offer something genuinely different to the usual crop of racing sims, emphasising the diverse history of sports car racing and the single-player experience in an era when most just include the usual crop of GT3 machines and focus on multiplayer.

There’s plenty of appeal in that alone, and with the right car and track combo, it can be a properly engrossing title. But at this point in its life, the sparse track roster, barebones structure, and sometimes iffy physics hold it back from being something truly great. Various paid DLC and plans for officially-approved third-party mods will go some way to rectifying some of that, but for now, its appeal is a little stunted compared to the more established sim titles – or indeed, the now eight-year-old Project CARS 2, which also did the in-depth career mode thing superbly and with far more car and track variety.

If Straight4 can build on it, though, and rectify some of these teething issues, Project Motor Racing has the potential to flourish into something properly special. And if nothing else, it’s better than Rennsport.