Getting Serious

Suggestions Hub Motorsport Features Multiplayer / Online
1

Years ago, Gran Turismo had the GT Academy, wherewith players had a chance at a spot in a racing academy training them to possibly compete in real life motorsport. I know it was originally aired on television and I watched it. Some GT Academy drivers did go on to race in real life, including at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, as I recall.

Now that we have Daytona back in Forza Motorsport, and with the 24 Hours of Daytona coming up, I did my own mini version. I ran a few one-hour stints with time at double speed and with start times of 14:00, 20:00. and 6:00. I was then discussing it with people and looked up YouTube videos, hoping for a preview setting up this year’s actual 24 Hours of Daytona. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find people running it in iRacing, and it was actually 24 full hours. More interesting still was it was handled like it was real, complete with cameras with views like we might see on television and live race commentators discussing it just as if it was the real thing. You could see that it wasn’t real but the presentation was convincing.

Are we ever going to see Forza Motorsport doing stuff like this? I feel like it might get serious players more passionate about their racing and get the franchise taken more seriously. The Gran Turismo movie was so painful that I couldn’t finish watching it, as it was a bunch of exaggerated advertising hype, but its depiction of Gran Turismo and the GT Academy makes it seem like it’s as close as you can get to the real thing and everything else is just kid stuff. I’d like to see Forza Motorsport being this.

2

That event in iRacing was definitely awesome, but the thing is, iRacing was always intended to be the digital counterpart to real life motorsports, so therefore it’s obvious that they replicate the events with the best drivers world wide. I mean iRacing is so well made, even real life drivers like Max Verstappen take it serious. Btw he won the GTD class at this years event.
I’m not sure if Forza can ever meet such a degree of realism when it comes to the various functions it needs to create an event like that, eg. driver swap, but I’m also quite sure that we will have sponsored events at some point.
Porsche is a big supporter in Sim racing so it wouldn’t surprise me if they at some point hosted a FM endurance event. I can also remember the FM7 badscher motorsport ecvent in 2018 (i think) alongside other events. T10 is definitely capable of creating a game that can host awesome events like the daytona 24h, but the question remains → when?

My personal guess is - we’ll probably get the first events as soon as the private multiplayer mode gets more options for customization - and the really big events will probably start in 1,5 years or so. Could also already happen next year around this time, but I wouldn’t say any earlier because there is just sooo much work T10 still has to do.