Fresh ELMS content lands in ELMS Pack 2 DLC with another new car and track
Extensive list of feature updates including RealRoad overhaul, rim heating, texture streaming, Anti-cheat implementation and tyre model improvements
Launch of Team Online Championships, Engineer mode and Driver Badges for Online
2025 has been a big year for Le Mans Ultimate and we’re not done yet! Although it might be December and heading into festive season our work isn’t slowing down, we’ve still got time for one more giant update to Le Mans Ultimate.
Lets jump right into what you can expect in version 1.2 coming live on PC on 9th December.
ELMS Pack 2
The second track - Joining the officially licensed Silverstone in pack 2 of the ELMS Season pass is the French labyrinth - Circuit Paul Ricard (or Le Castellet).
Previously hosting F1 races but a permanent feature of the European Le Mans Series since its inception, this circuit is fast and technical, with a mix of corner types to test your skills. Tyre wear will be a key component of racing at this venue as will not being bamboozled by the off track paint.
As with Silverstone, we will be bringing additional layouts in future when we’ve finished the ELMS season pass but for now players can enjoy the ELMS configuration from 2025.
Our second LMP3 car is from British manufacturer Ginetta. The G61-LT-P325-EVO debuted this year in ELMS and was piloted by the DKR Engineering team to 9th overall. The car’s stunning looks are paired with the same Toyota V6 engine as in it’s LMP3 rivals. Handling is tuned to its specific chassis, as is aero and suspension specification.
Both the Ginetta and Paul Ricard are delivered automatically to all ELMS Season Pass holders and RaceControl Pro+ subscribers. It will also be available separately for €9.99 / £8.99 / $11.99.
Physics - RealRoad and Tyres
On the subject of content, we’ve undergone a huge re-evaluation and implementation for a number of key physics features in our simulation engine.
RealRoad is our track simulation - this simulates everything from road surface temperatures to rubber distribution and much more. In this area we analysed the width of the racing line and found the rubber would accumulate centrally to where the vehicle was driven but not necessarily where the tyres were running so we’ve corrected this which may make it feel like the line is a bit wider and give more confidence when venturing offline for a move or through multiclass traffic. The rubber distribution between high and low speed corners has also been normalised which means the high speed braking zones no longer have less grip than low speed ones.
Additionally, we’ve rebalanced the grip offered from rubber across all circuits which should mean players feel more consistency across race tracks when racing on a preset rubbered surface.
In wet weather, we’ve implemented new parameters to properly scale grip on rubbered surfaces - it is now less grippy which makes “wet lines” more realistic when eeking out those extra tenths in trying conditions.
Finally, how the feature works online has been reworked and players should now see a much greater degree of track rubber evolution on a dry circuit over time with multiple cars laying down rubber.
There’s also a huge new feature in this release for the car physics - wheel rim heating. To some, this detail of physics modelling might sound small but this has been a vital missing link in our tyre modelling. The rim now has heat exchange with its surrounding environment resulting in brake disks and tyres having a direct impact on one another. The result is that we have more consistent warming parameters and improved behaviour particularly in colder ambient temperatures. This new feature is now available on all cars other than the hypercar category - we will have an update to this class coming in January.
Texture Streaming
We’re happy to say that in this release we’ve invested a lot of time and effort into performance optimisation. Texture streaming will essentially allow players to run higher quality textures even if they are VRAM limited because the textures will dynamically improve the closer they get to the object.
This improvement will mostly benefit users with lower-to-mid tier graphics cards. players should now be able to run at higher graphics settings but all players are likely to see an increase in frame rate stability.
Not only that, but it means that we can increase the level of detail for your car in driver swap events when taking control and it is no longer determined by your opponent vehicles setting.
This feature is a great example of early console compatibility work being brought back into the PC product to improve performance for all users.
Badges and LiveSteward
As mentioned in our last update video, we have been listening to the communities thoughts, comments and concerns about the state of driving standards and have made it a big focus for this release. Whilst we’re proud of our industry-leading netcode - some players are racing a little bit TOO close together so we’ve pulled together some of our first wave of online features to combat that.
Firstly, we’re adding new badges to all users. This is a measure of a player’s contact ratio over their last 10 races, adjusted for the severity of contact and awards a badge that is shown to other players in your event. Although it uses some of the same inputs, it is a different metric to Safety Rank so allows us to monitor a different method of determining a player’s online conduct simultaneously with our current Safety Rank upon its release.
For players first 10 races they will receive a rookie badge whilst we gather data. After that we’ll give the driver one of three badges:
Good driver
Trusted driver
or Warning
Good and trusted drivers are the kind of people we want to see in our lobbies. Warning on the other hand… we’ll give them a chance to improve their contact ratio before automatically banning them. If a player gets banned, they’ll return to a “probation” state with a unique badge during a re-evaluation period. Automatic bans ratchet up in severity so each time it triggers the ban gets longer - until they get permanently ejected!
One of the main values to badges is that it should give anyone racing online a quick update on the players racing around you and their history. Knowing someone is new to the sim should be useful and we hope players will give them the time and space to learn.
We hope it will also encourage everyone to reach the top levels of good and trusted by being someone that avoids contact and situations that create contact when racing.
We will also be experimenting with matchmaking using badges, particularly in beginner lobbies. Using this badge criteria first then by Driver Rank. We’re looking to help players find better races more consistently.
We have also designed this badge system to add new badges in future that are yet to be determined - they could be for winning races or championships for example. For now, we have created a few badges we manually add to our staff and some recognised “real-world” drivers and content creators. They will be able to select their badges on the profile page - but only if they are at a “good” or “trusted” level.
Heads up - we have already started tracking this metric in RaceControl for a few weeks now, so some players will already be given appropriate badges when logging in on 9th December.
LiveSteward is a new pioneering method we’re using to automatically assess incidents in races. Starting only with what we believe to be intentional wrecks with a very high degree of confidence, this system will monitor races and deal with players that break the rules. For now we are just going to be recording them on our backend systems in RaceControl for monitoring and training before allowing it to take action in a live race.
In future, we are intending to bring more authority for the LiveSteward to deal with incidents, such as penalties for unsafe rejoin and penalties for contacts between cars but we will do that only when we’re ready.
We hope that these new features underline our commitment to a safe online racing environment - we’ll be constantly monitoring and reviewing this area over the coming months. We don’t believe either of these new features will solve everything overnight but every step in a positive direction is one we want to take.
Anti-Cheat
One of the sad realities of modern gaming, especially once your game gets some traction, is it attracts people that don’t respect the rules and spirit of racing. We have noticed and banned some players but need better, more scalable, tools in the next phase of the product.
To this end, we are adding “Easy Anti-Cheat” in this release, a tool that is used in other racing simulations. It will make attacking the game for nefarious purposes much more challenging.
What does this change? The high-level answer is it blocks access to write to memory locations and will crash the game if players start interfering. Everyone will also be unable to join servers without the anti-cheat service running.
To achieve this we had to rewrite some of our plugin system and whilst we have tested with the most popular plugins we have seen, we want our community to report issues seen via support tickets. We’ve completed a lot of automated testing in this area and found it to introduce no stability or performance issues.
Easy Anti-Cheat will install automatically with the update but if anyone ever needs to reinstall it, there’s a copy of the installer in the “support” folder.
One additional point for players is, at least for now, they must launch the game through Steam rather than just opening the Le Mans Ultimate executable - don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Team Online Championships
Online Championships has been with us for a year now and it’s a really great format for those players that want to take their racing more seriously. With points given based on results versus the strength of opposition and human-reviewed protests for racing incidents - it’s a great place to race for RaceControl Pro and Pro+ subscribers.
We’re taking it to the next level with Team Championships coming online in this release so players can now battle for supremacy over multiple races to crown the champions.
This system will be used in the upcoming Le Mans Virtual qualifiers - you’ll have to stay tuned in January to find out more but for now players can jump in from this update to get a head start on learning this process.
Engineer Mode
We know everyone has been waiting for some time and we’re sincerely sorry for the delay but we’re happy to share that Engineer Mode will be available in this release! We took this time to write a more complete data sharing system that will also be able to solve some other long standing data sync issues when joining a server that is already in progress.
For those players that weren’t aware - engineer mode allows drivers to configure their team mate’s pit stops - the tyres, fuel, energy and who should be driving next for team races. This should allow a player’s teammate to concentrate on what they do best - driving and as consistently and as fast as possible.
Not only that, but we’ve added in the ability to invite steam friends that own LMU to be your engineer for single driver Special Events and Online Championships.
Additional Improvements
What else can we tell you… we’ve made changes to the visual damage to make it more realistic - more of a trading paint effect that more accurately portrays the type of effect players will likely to see in hard racing.
Tyres have been revisited once again - this time for LMP2, LMP3 and all GT3 cars. It essentially makes temperature peaks less aggressive, so there will be a slightly smoother drop off in grip. This will allow for more control and less on/off behaviour that was often felt before - especially if the overall tyre was already running quite hot.
Time penalties have been added - these now add more nuance to our penalty system. Time penalties can be added to the next stop or to the end of the race automatically rather than the much larger penalty of a drive through being the minimum. Players will see these used in various places such as with illegal passes or the race start procedure.
There’s also a brand new telemetry system under the hood. Designed for use internally to validate our physics direction, we’re releasing it publicly because we’re nice like that… Players will be able to record natively in game which exports to “duckdb” - this can be converted to other formats as they wish. We’ll be providing full documentation on guide.lemansultimate.com
Whilst LMU includes wonderful Japanese cars from Toyota and Lexus as well as Fuji Speedway we’ve not yet been able to support the native Japanese language in game until now, coming in version 1.2.
For custom liveries, we’ve added new material presets and also changed the ordering of the car select screen to showcase the custom liveries players have access to first so no need to dig them out from the bottom of the pile.
Finally we’ve made some quite large changes to the End of Race procedure to refine the experience. In offline mode, no longer does the simulation immediately stop, drivers can continue as they wish before returning to the garage. For online, escaping back to the pitlane immediately after crossing the start/finish line in a race session is still an option but players will no longer get automatically returned after 30s - it will be up to anyone when they return (within reason).
As always we’ve barely touched the surface of the myriad of improvements and fixes we’ve brought to this release for everyone to enjoy over the holiday season - so do make sure to read the full release notes when made available.
What’s next?
As everyone knows we’re still hard at work on a career mode. We’ve dedicated some of this release period to work on the simulation when your teammate is driving to make that feel dynamic and interesting - keep an eye on our Christmas holiday communications… we might have some presents for you...
For the next release we have Circuit de Barcelona Catalunya and the Duquiene D09 LMP3 coming to complete the ELMS Season Pass… we’ll let the speculation begin after that.
Message from the studio
Stephen Hood, CEO of Motorsport Games & Head of Studio 397 said - “We’re extremely proud to have a strong end to the year with this release delivering exciting new content and feature updates. We hope everyone enjoys this update and enjoy the holiday season.”