Project Motor Racing Shouldn’t Have Left the Paddock

Back in 2020, Slightly Mad Studios, led by veteran sim racing developer Ian Bell, launched Project CARS 3. The title was a marked shift toward a more forgiving, arcade-style experience that, to put it lightly, didn’t go down very well with fans. A few years later, Slightly Mad was shuttered by its new corporate parent, Electronic Arts, and Bell vowed to return with a new sim—one with a renewed focus on real motorsport, and an uncompromisingly realistic physics engine. That game is Project Motor Racing, and it was released this week. You shouldn’t buy it.

At least, not yet. I get no satisfaction from writing about a bad racing game, but, in its current state, Project Motor Racing is offensive. Had it been launched in Steam Early Access, I’d be inclined to give it some leeway, much as I wouldn’t want to; too many publishers are pressing that button these days. But at least in that scenario, PMR would cost less than $60 or, heaven forbid, $90 for those buying the first year of DLC included. There might’ve been a roadmap, and less content—albeit, content confirmed to work.

Because, right now, PMR barely works. I received my Steam PC code last Thursday, and straight away, the simple act of selecting a car foreshadowed a world of hurt. The game would temporarily freeze on every scroll down the list, and when it resumed, the car models literally loaded in piecemeal, several body panels at a time. I then made the mistake of launching a 32-car race at Lime Rock Park, where mostly high settings on my PC (Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, RX 9070 GPU) resulted in no better than 20 frames per second, interspersed with extreme stuttering.

After that, I didn’t touch the game on PC all weekend. I was supplied a PS5 copy in the interim and, to be fair, that version does play much more smoothly, even if it looks very poor comparatively. Meanwhile, some Xbox players have had trouble so much as booting the game.

When I returned to my computer on Monday, there was an update, and I picked up a few pointers from other reviewers on how to make my experience more stable. Apparently, turning on V-sync, using the frame limiter, and running in fullscreen mode (rather than borderless) gums up the works. After making those changes, PMR was operating at four times the framerate—with a temporal upscaling bug that made my car look like I was dragging it around my desktop as Windows was actively crashing.

That, I eventually determined, was down to having FSR 4 upscaling turned on in AMD’s GPU driver; once I switched that off, I could finally complete a race in peace. Now, after another patch, the game hovers around 90 fps on my machine, which is great, though the errant frame spike definitely still occurs, especially when switching views. And cycling through cars in the menu is still weirdly frustrating. While they’ve stopped loading in panel-by-panel at some point in the last week, now they fizzle in with a red haze, and the freezing is no better.

Still, this was a considerable improvement. PMR was playable, meaning I could finally start evaluating the physics and racing. Now, look—if you want the opinion of someone who has driven every sim and participated in some real-life motorsport for good measure, Jimmy Broadbent’s review is right there. I was playing on an Xbox Series pad, which will probably invalidate what I’m about to say to a chunk of the audience, and that’s fine.

I never expect simulators pledging to be as serious as PMR to fare well on a controller. But now and then, they surprise you. Take Assetto Corsa Rally, for example. That title is very much geared toward wheel players, just as PMR is, and I still had loads of fun with it. I’ll put my neck on the line and say that, despite Project CARS 3’s inaccurate marketing, that game controlled sublimely on a pad; it was the finest tuning for analog-stick steering this side of Gran Turismo Sport last generation.

The problem is, you can’t make a sim handle too well on controller, or else—at least in the eyes of the hardest core—it’s not a “real” sim. Wheel players need to have some kind of an advantage. And look, I won’t argue with that, honestly. I’d rather a developer leave out pad support, as iRacing has always done, than treat pad players as second-class citizens.

This was the paradigm through which I evaluated PMR’s sort of dull, “sticky” handling—that a good experience on controller was simply not high on the list of priorities. “Sticky” is my way of describing how the vehicles in this game feel like they retain steering angle a beat or two after your inputs have ceased. It’s something that’s most noticeable on corner exit, and initially, I kind of chalked it up to me not finessing the throttle well. It happens whether you use traction control or not, and I can’t wrangle these cars in on a pad without TCS. It’s a hopeless endeavor.

Then I watched Jimmy’s video, and was frankly surprised to learn that the phenomenon he was describing—specifically, that the tires have no slip and you either have grip or don’t in PMR—very much applied to my experience, too. And some cars will fare better than others. The Porsche 964 honestly felt like piloting a free camera; the Toyota Supra GT4 was somewhat fun, until a minor correction on corner exit at Kyalami led to a tank-slapper for the ages that ruined my race lead on the final lap; and the Aston Martin Valkyrie LMH was, frankly, a herky-jerky pile of misery that less resembled driving a car and was more akin to one of those Flash games where you try to independently control every single one of a runner’s joints.

But, supposing you have found a car you enjoy driving, what is racing like in PMR? Computer-controlled competitors don’t really race you, or even each other—they stick more or less to a rigid line, and if you impede that path, they will strike you with zero instinct for self-preservation. They’re almost immovable objects, too. After my race-ending implosion at Kyalami, I set about exacting my frustration on a random AI driver in the same gratifying way I did when I was a kid: torpedoing full-throttle into the track’s tightest hairpin. I swear they didn’t move an inch.

What else? Well, the penalty system won’t hesitate to ding you for grazing the grass with two tires; I once started a practice session at Daytona only to find a competitor doing donuts in the pit exit; sometimes there just aren’t any crash impact sounds; I attempted a single-car practice session at the Nordschleife, but each time I got to Adenauer Forst the framerate became so unstable that I had to quit; and one time, when I restarted a race after watching a replay, my Mustang GT3 was missing its rear bumper on the grid—and then the game fully crashed and closed itself.

That’s all damning enough, but even if those issues were fixed tomorrow, I just can’t understand why, in this ever-crowded space of racing simulators, someone would ever choose PMR. If it’s supposed to be a front end for hot-lapping and nothing more, the game doesn’t even currently offer a way to jump straight into solo practice without setting up a race weekend. And, if it is intended to be more than that, I know sim racers don’t tend to care much about atmosphere or off-track production values, but PMR has none.

Even when the menus work, they look thrown together without care (and use Google’s free, default Android font all over the place). The career mode splash screen greets you with a wall of size-8 font on a 4K display. Speaking of the career, think long and hard about where you want the difficulty and race length set, because it’s not changeable after you begin. And be careful when you complete a race, because the “Restart Session” button is very close to the “Finish” one, and there is no confirmation for whichever you choose!

I could go on, but I think it’s clear: Project Motor Racing isn’t ready for launch, even post-day-one patch. It’s a beta at best. Anyone who played this game internally would’ve known that, and yet it came out anyway, for $60. How? More importantly, why? What required it to be released in this state? Was Giants Software, the publisher, hell-bent on making the holidays at all costs? Did GTA VI’s multiple delays mess up their plans? Maybe someday we’ll get an answer. All I know is, PMR’s left me checking the market value for Project CARS 2 Steam keys, and it ain’t pretty.

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