Project Motor Racing Is A Blend Of Project Cars And Farming Simulator (Sort Of)

We were all a bit sad when the Project CARS series was laid to rest, even if the arcadey third instalment was as big a disappointment as finding out Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren’t real in one go. Thankfully, it’s not taken some of the team behind it, including founder of now-defunct developer Slightly Mad Studios, Ian Bell, too long to start from scratch. We've just got our first proper look at the resulting title: Project Motor Racing.

It comes from Bell’s new outfit, Straight4 Studios, and its name pretty explicitly links it to the series that seems to be its spiritual predecessor. Its original working title, though, was GTRevival, which gives us a bit more of a clue to the direction it’ll take.

Before Slightly Mad and Project CARS, Bell’s old team developed the GTR series of racing sims, which were the official titles of the FIA GT Championship. Despite the most recent instalment being 18 years old, they’re still considered shining lights of the sim racing genre, and it appears to be the spirit of those games that Project Motor Racing will seek to recreate.

The game’s set to release in 2025 on PC, Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5, but ahead of that, we’ve just had the first batch of official screenshots. They confirm just one car and track that’ll feature, but it’s a heck of a pairing: the Lister Storm GT, the rarefied Jaguar V12-powered sports car that was a regular underdog competitor in ’90s GT racing; and Lime Rock Park, a short but brilliant and deceptively tricky natural terrain course that blasts its way round a scenic corner of Connecticut. Oof.

One more thing of note is the game engine that underpins PMR – it’s the GIANTS engine, which is best known for powering… the Farming Simulator series. Despite this very literal change of pace for the engine, Straight4 is confident that, with some tweaks, it can handle a V12 racing car just as well as a lumbering John Deere.

We’ll have to wait until next year to find out for sure, but in the meantime, enjoy these very pretty screenshots. We’ll be keeping a close eye on what else we can expect from PMR – if obscure GT racers are its thing, then fingers crossed for a Venturi Atlantique LM.