AJR Motorsport simulation services

The team at AJR Motorsport provide the following services on request:
Livery design and creation
Setup development
Simulation / content development
Driver training
Championship organisation

Our history with simulation racing.

Alexander has been using simulation software, ever since Gran Turismo labelled itself as the first. Sadly, it was more of an arcade game, however this led to the ability to learn racing lines, vehicle control, racecraft and more. Gran Turismo laid the foundation for many current simulation drivers, and the franchise still continues to put out new iterations every few years.

With the development of the connected world, broadband intenet allowed for a new step forward - online racing. It was inevitable that once we could play games together, that simulation developers would find a way to race together, and this was achieved in the very 2000's. Alexander first used Live For Speed while it was at the peak of popularity for the title. Many hundreds of hours of practice followed, learning different lines for attacking and defending, learning to control oversteer, limit understeer while maintaining speed, and how to race side by side, at race pace, for an entire lap. Live for Speed had public servers, with various different groups of people, with various abilities all racing together. To this day, many drivers who have tried the platform still believe it had the best feel of all simulators bar one: netKar Pro.

netKar Pro was developed as a project, by the same people who brought us Assetto Corsa. netKar Pro had no online functionality, though it was supposed to. In the end, the developers never made it work. It never had any AI drivers either, so if you used it, you used it for practice. The platform had the best weather simulation there has ever been, along with the best tyre simulation. While modern platforms seek a fantastic simulation, they still require the content to be enjoyable, and thus, easier than it would be in real life. netKar had no pre-concieved ambition to be loved by everyone, it was a project, and it simulated the car, track and weather, better than everything before it, and everything that has been released after. Alexander used netKar Pro for practice in wet weather, and for practice on green surfaces. This proved paramount at Thruxton Kart Circuit during 2008, when a very wet and cold surface created a very difficult 4 hour race, on slick tyres.

rFactor was next, it quickly established itself as the go-to platform for simulated championship racing, along with an astonishing amount of user developed content. Alexander raced various championships using the platform, notably V8 Supercars and Clio cup, where in the latter, a tea of 4 drivers were entered under the earliest AJR Motorsport brand. This platform did very well with close racing, however the public racing was not very well maintained, and many problems arose, leaving this platform well behind the competition when championships were not active. Alexander still uses rFactor for Harewood Hill practice, as it is the only platform which has the venue.

A few years after the release of rFactor, iRacing was released. It was the first platform to offer a driver saftey rating (something that was not much of an issue before, but is very much an issue currently), which was built in to the way the game was designed. iRacing had the ability to be the most popular title. The developers boasted about each car being the most accurately constructed model, and each track being laser scanned, and the physics being better than everything that came before. The developers put a monthly price-tag on the platform, and then sold you content as an additional cost. All in all, it is a fantastic platform, but the constant investment needed, for a title that is not as good as the developers boasted, does leave many people wondering why any person of sound mind would bother with it. Alexander has used the platform in the past, and does have the safety rank and points needed to progress, but due to lack of content... Yeah you know where this goes.

Following rFactor and iRacing, came Assetto Corsa, Project Cars, and rFactor 2. All of these titles were released at a similar time, in competition with each other. Assetto Corsa having developed netKar Pro, were well aware of what needed to be achieved, multiplayer was the focus of the platform, along with the best visual engine of all "next generation" platforms. Back in 2014, Assetto Corsa had laser scanned tracks, the best visuals, physics in-line with anything else, and a lot of content as standard. To date, it is still one of the best regarded, and it has survived against many newer platforms being released. Alexander uses the platform regularly, preferring the Group A DTM cars, the MX5 ND cup car, and the GT cars, because these allow for the best racing that there can be in your own house.

rFactor 2 was designed to be an upgrade of rFactor, in terms of graphics and physics engines, though it did not do very well at release. rFactor 2 is still around, Alexander has never used it. Project Cars was a similar platform to the previous two, and again Alexander never used the platform. Project Cars had a very public development, where there was a good chance of the title going towards a simulation, unfortunatelty, the money behind the project pointed the game further towards arcade gameplay than Assetto Corsa or rFactor 2, and thus it sits in the realm of current Forza titles, which is good, but not good enough.

Currently there are new platforms available. There have been lots of releases since Assetto Corsa achieved massive commercial success, however none of which are doing what the drivers want. Each title is focused on a specific niche of racing, each new title might have a single thing they do better than the competition, but not on a level like netKar Pro. Assetto Corsa Competizione was a large new platform that was released, though it did represent a single championship on release, and could be more of a step between generations.

The team at AJR Motorsport do expect the new generation to be released in the very near future, as we are clearly overdue. Exciting things are to come!