Project Petrolhead

As much as I’d like to spend my days driving a Ferrari Enzo around a deserted mountain pass, I’m not a billionaire, and as such, the only way I am usually able to experience something even close to that is by staring at a screen with a controller in my hands.

I grew up playing racing games. Two games specifically: Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (sorry if that’s just made anyone feel extremely old), and I loved them both for different reasons. In Colin McRae, hours would be spent flying through the forests of Finland in a Ford Focus RS while Colin’s co-driver Nicky Grist threw accurate pace-notes your way. Feeling the grip level of the car change on different surfaces, deciding what parts of your car to repair between stages and setting up your car with different suspension and gearing to optimise your times was catnip to an engineering nerd like me. It was realistically difficult as well, so if you nailed a stage (represented by the simple green/red timing chart at the top of the screen) you genuinely felt like a driving god.

Gran Turismo, on the other hand, was all about being seduced by the allure of big power and wish fulfilment. Being given a fictional garage where you could buy, store and modify cars before racing them in championships around the globe was a dream come true for a child of the Fast and Furious/Max Power generation. I can still remember the first time I upgraded my first rear-wheel-drive car (a Toyota Trueno) with a turbocharger and watched it launch down the straights to the backing track of Feeder’s Buck Rogers. Ah, Childhood memories. I never managed to actually unlock many of the fastest cars in the game, mostly because it was so damn difficult that I was never able to complete the infamous Licence Tests, but I was perfectly happy with the cars I could drive, including, in a slightly prophetic twist, the 1999 Jaguar XK.

I still like to play the odd racing game from time to time. Either dipping into the quickfire open-world fun of a Forza Horizon (4 clearly being the best one, no arguments) or the more in-depth simulation of Assetto Corsa depending entirely on how much time I’ve got to waste, and whether or not I can be bothered to set up my steering wheel and pedals. Forza Horizon is a pure billionaire daydream, tasking the player with planning and running a sort of car-show-come-music-festival in which a fleet of supercars descend on a helpless part of the world to completely disregard all their traffic laws and cause several multi-million-pound insurance claims. Not that it matters though, because once you’ve sent a Porsche 918 blasting through Edinburgh’s Royal Mile or catapulted a Hennessey Venom GT into the ocean off Australia’s Gold Coast, you’ll be hooked for life.

Assetto Corsa on the other hand, is not interested in EDM, neon and playing dress-up. Assetto Corsa is interested in providing you with the most accurate simulation of any given car and circuit, outside of driving the real thing. Where Forza has paint shops and drift zones, AC has realistic tyre wear and pitstop strategies, allowing you and your friends to host virtual track days and competitive events at whatever real-life track takes your fancy. The best thing that the developers of AC (Italian company Kunos Simulazioni) did, however, was open the game to the modding community, allowing talented volunteers to create and upload all kinds of cars and tracks that weren’t included in the game at launch, keeping the game up-to-date and relevant for the eleven years it’s been on sale and there’s still no signs of it shutting down.

Will I keep playing these games then? Most definitely yes. Since I’ve grown up, I may have started to invest in larger, petrol-powered toys, but as it stands, I still can’t afford a real Bugatti Veyron, so pixels and polygons will have to do for now!