I’ve had Le Mans Ultimate on my radar of things that let you drive around in realistic circles for the past couple of years, but I’d never dived into its early access. Part of that was being utterly spoilt for choice in terms of existing options when it came to getting my GT racing on, with the likes of Automobilista 2, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and even slightly older sims like Raceroom competing for pole position in the racing bit of my Steam library. Add in the behind-the-scenes turmoil that’s frequently surrounded publisher Motorsport Games over the past half-decade, and you get ample reason to take a wait-and-see approach with their latest offering.
With Le Mans Ultimate finally emerging from the early access practice session it’s been pounding around in since February 2024 this week, I decided now was the time to strap in and give it a go. I’ve played seven hours so far and driven just over 500 miles, so we’ll call this my Proclaimers-approved impressions of version 1.0.
My first trip out of the garage came to an end rather anticlimatically after just a few yards. Having sat stuck in place for a few minutes, I then realised that I needed to enable the auto-clutch setting in order to be able to go anywhere, something the game apparently hadn’t done automatically when I’d selected my Logitech G29 wheel setup. Once I was out on track in a Ferrari 499P, I quickly found myself having to make one more setting tweak.
I’d opted for the professional difficulty option, which knocks off all of the driver aids, and quickly found that without any training wheels the 499P was very much free to render its displeasure at my driving style. I kept instantly spinning out the moment I touched the brake pedal heading into a corner, and it kept happening even as I adjusted to be as gentle as I could in starting the slowing down process well before the corner. Eventually I opted to flick the stability control onto low, and that solved the issue, while still keeping the cars challenging enough to drive that any mistakes were properly punished.
The good news is that since making that change, I’ve only even been back into Le Mans Ultimate’s settings to tune AI driver difficulty so it matched my performance at different tracks. The core racing experience the game offers right now is generally very good, especially once you’ve warmed up to the smooth, flowing approach required to get the best out of its fleet of fire-spitting monsters.
As someone with hundreds of hours in Assetto Corsa Competizione, another racer that opts to focus very specifically on simulating GT cars, I found the two to feel very similar in terms of the depth and uber-tactile sensation they deliver in their versions of virtual motoring. Their in-race user interfaces are also quite similar, which seems to be a nice instance of adopting an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach to learning from the best for Le Mans Ultimate.
While more generalist sims that offer a much wider range of car types understandably usually end up sacrificing a bit of that intensity in how well they mimic one particular series, Le Mans Ultimate and Assetto Corsa Competizione are hyper-focused on being the best when it comes to one thing. They’re built like drag racers: as specialised as you’ll get, but if you’re after that single area they’re designed to excel at, you’re in for thousands of hours of fun.
This year’s World Endurance Championship (the sim’s official real world tie-in series) features eight hypercar prototypes. Having given them all a go, I’m glad to report you can feel and hear the difference jumping from one to the next, with the Cadillac V-Series.R having taken an early lead as my favourite. Look, I’m a sucker for a big, bassy V8 that sounds like a mechanical bear roaring in approval as you stamp on the power.
Meanwhile, the GT3 machines that make up the rest of the field feel suitably bulkier to haul around than those prototypes that whiz past them with ease, but not to the point where it gets in the way of them being a more easily accessible break from balancing a hypercar on the knife edge. Plus, they all look fantastic inside and out, with plenty of detail to help convince you that you’re really blasting down the Mulsanne straight at midnight.
There are some teething troubles developers Studio 397 will have to take care of as they continue to refine their game. It’s incredibly light on tutorials, meaning that it’s a case of learning by trial and error on the fly if you’re not a hardened sim racer who instantly realises where all the stuff you’re used to is. One particularly hard-to-grasp bit is the formation lap that the game gives you the option to drive as you gear up for a rolling race start.
It’s the kind of simple follow-the-leader stuff most racing games automate by default, and while I dig it as a bit of extra immersive goodness, it’s got a set of tightly policed rules that are very easy to violate. Exceed the speed limit you’re tasked with sticking to right before the start by a single mile per hour, and you get an instant drive-through. Do anything the game classes as ‘erratic driving’, which seems to include any sort of braking or weaving to warm your tyres in a similar fashion to your AI opponents, and the same happens. It’s generally a fair-ish cop at the end of the day, but if things are going to have to be as tightly controlled, I’m not sure this is a feature that really adds much to the experience.
Once you’re racing, I found the game’s AI drivers to generally be among the more pleasant to battle with that you’ll find. There are plenty of options to tune them to suit your liking, and I’m yet to be taken out in a fashion that wasn’t my fault. Well, aside from one instance in very wet conditions that saw my Caddy be suddenly rear-ended by a sliding GT3 car. That might have been the only time I was caught out by it, but the AI drivers do seem to lose the plot once the road gets really wet. In the couple of races when I turned the deluge up close to max, I was passing spun out GT cars nearly every corner, and at one point during a race at COTA, I came across half the field strewn across the track at the end of the back straight. These sorts of things do happen in wet races, but Le Mans Ultimate feels a bit on the sillier end of the scale right now.
I’ve not had a chance to try the online or co-op modes that currently serve as the only alternatives to the game’s standalone single-player weekends, but I’d say that the amount of stuff on offer in Le Mans Ultimate is close to where I’d want it to be at full release. Where you stand on that will likely depend on how you feel about Motorsport Games choosing to release some additions to it as paid DLC throughout the early access period, having already charged just under £30 for the base game. Not having a single-player championship or career mode (the latter is set to arrive in early 2026) in for 1.0 is disappointing, especially since online championships are locked behind a yearly paid “RaceControl Pro” subscription.
As is, there are plenty of cars and tracks from the past three World Endurance Championship seasons (plus more from the European Le Mans Series to arrive soon) and the core of a satisfyingly in-depth racing sim that’s at least on the tail of the best the most hardcore corner of the racing genre has to offer. It’s a solid start, but there’s still plenty to improve and add before Le Mans Ultimate is at peak performance.
