I’m not sure if anybody else has ever considered the possibilities of a custom grid feature but I personally think it could really take FM7 to a new level over FM6 and FM5 or even Project Cars.
The feature would best work by allowing the player to populate the starting positions of single player races in the menu using vehicles from their own garage or the autoshow. The player could go into each starting position and choose a vehicle from their collection or the autoshow, choose which drivatar would use this vehicle and individually set the difficulty of the drivatar. This would allow the player to create their own racing series’ or recreate their favourite racing series based on vehicles they have designs for (self-made or storefront).
As an example, I have lots of GT cars in my FM6 garage with liveries from the IMSA WeatherTech championship and with custom grids I could use all of the cars from my garage with their correct liveries in the positions they actually qualified in at each track to recreate the races in the game, I could also set each drivatar difficulty relative to the actual driver so that the drivers that finish better in real life finish better in the game (obviously with a degree of variability). The player may change the grid positions before another race to create reverse grid races based on the finishing positions from the last race or reflect differing qualifying performance. I currently get bored of the same running order in FM6 GT races (Bentley/Jaguar/BMW M3 GT2 winning all the time).
With a feature like this, the car list wouldn’t need to be as repetitive with just one of each variant needed to create a racing series with lots of player created liveries. With one of each GT3/GTE spec car available in game players could create WEC, IMSA Sportscar, Blancpain, ELMS, British GT etc. races based off liveries they have created/downloaded.
