YOUR MOTORSPORT CAREER IN PROJECT MOTOR RACING

June 24, 2025

Changing Habits

Whenever you’re given a blank slate to design a feature-length mode from scratch, simply looking across the aisle and copying someone else’s homework isn’t going to win you a lot of new fans. Sim racing as a hobby has existed for upwards of 40 years(!), and it’s important to pay attention to how the hobby has evolved over time—and with that, the various playstyles and commitment levels.

A barebones championship in the hope you’ll be satisfied with a “You’re Winner” splash screen at the end isn’t going to cut it anymore. What’s needed is maybe something a little more intense.

Career Mode in Project Motor Racing

Our goal for Career Mode in Project Motor Racing was to figure out how best answer to the question: “How do we make this fun for people who run 3 races, as well as the diehards who can put in 20, 25, even 30 races into a campaign mode?”

Continuity Issues

Obviously, one of the first elements of any good racing game career mode is some sort of financial element. Race cars cost money to buy and operate, and it’s cool when a game mirrors that.

This issue though is that weird continuity stuff that arises across campaign modes. It’s odd, as an experienced sim racer, to go from winning races on ranked online plugins to booting up a new sim and being told you’re a nobody who needs to start in some 75bhp tintop!

You’re the same driver.

However, some people do still prefer that classic climb up the motorsports ladder, so we can’t just assume everyone’s a sim racing veteran.

Our solution?

Budgets To Suit Your Ambition

In Project Motor Racing, you begin by picking from 3 preset starting budgets to craft the narrative that you want from career mode.

Option 1: You can opt to start with around $75,000, which gives you some freedom to choose in which amateur or low-level car you begin your career in.

Option 2: If you want to jump right into GT3 (or other similar classes) in the middle of the ladder, an option exists to start with roughly $600,000 in the bank—enough for a car and to register for your first championship … just be sure to keep the fenders on it.

Option 3: For those who want to chase immediate legacy and glory, you can opt to start out with $2,000,000.

And then there’s a fourth option, the one where you run your historics program with an absurd amount of money to replicate the dentist-turned-amateur racer experience. You do you!

These starting budgets have been carefully determined to ensure there’s no outright surplus of cash. In other words, you will have just enough to get you off the ground and into your first championship at different points on the ladder.

Check Your Balance

Now, anytime you insert a financial element into a racing game career, what often happens is that, if you play your cards right, you wind up with this obscene surplus of cash with nothing left to spend it on.

This is disappointing because the best part about a career is typically the mid-game grind where your cashflow is still a resource you’re required to manage. Those little decisions you make on your way up the ladder, and your performance in races, have this tangible weight to them as a result. Our goal was to capture that in a bottle and make it a constant element of your Project Motor Racing career.

For inspiration, our Game Design Director, Austin Ogonoski, turned to his own family who have been involved in NHRA Drag Racing since the ’60s. One of his cousins is the current E/T record holder in the NHRA’s Nostalgia Funny Car class, and both his uncle and grandpa are in the Canadian Drag Racing Hall of Fame.

When you’re in this kind of family, you hear the financials discussed over dinner and how racing isn’t particularly profitable. Yes, the $10,000 novelty cheque looks cool in photos, but nitromethane, food, and transportation for the weekend was $13,000. Congrats, you won the event, your photo is in National Dragster, and … you lost $3,000.

And that’s the secret sauce. Maybe not as punishing, but in the same ballpark.

So, each championship in Project Motor Racing has an entry fee, and each individual race has an individual travel fee to simulate, at a streamlined level, the fact that your team must physically travel to the event—which may be half a world away. Damage repairs are also something you’ll need to keep in mind. Pro tip? Don’t wreck the car!

Travel

If you’re a race team in North America, flying across the Atlantic to race in Europe is quite the odyssey compared to jumping on the interstate and heading three hours north to Lime Rock Park.

So we’ve brought that into the Career Mode as well. If you set your team’s home region to North America, for example, you’ll receive a discount when signing up for North American championships, travelling to North American races, and buying North American cars.

There’s a catch though. All championships in the game are structured to pay based on their real-world stature. Starting your team in Asia to run the Asian GT3 championship might look affordable at first, but Asia’s not really known for their GT3 scene—they love their silhouette cars. The novelty check at the end of the season might therefore be missing a zero, and you might find yourself opting to try your luck in Germany, travel expenses be damned.

Save up enough, and you can offset this problem by moving to a different region—mimicking, for instance, what some real-world Asian marques have done by setting up their operations in Europe.

Whether you’re trying to find the optimal path through your career, or roleplay with your own backstory, Project Motor Racing gives you the tools to do that.

Sponsorship Is Different Now

It’s no secret that auto racing in 2025 looks quite a bit different than a generation ago. Genuinely turning a profit off race payouts alone isn’t happening. A publicly released document that detailed payouts for the 2023 Daytona 24 Hours tells its own story: Would you believe that that winning the event netted just $25,000? Some of you have built sim rigs worth more than that! Wild stuff. But since our goal is authenticity, our career race payouts will reflect that reality.

Which means that the other half of the spectrum is a sponsorship mechanic. We can’t have you guys running at a loss to prove some point about modern motorsport. And it also doesn’t work the way it did in the 1990s, which is how a lot of games with sponsorship mechanics still work to this day. Newsflash: few brands are offering a lucrative contract with millions showered upon last year’s champion. That’s not how racing works anymore. Hasn’t worked that way since the 2008 financial crisis.

So how does it really work?

As part of the design, we studied professional motorsport sponsorship courses. What was stressed time and time again was the individuality of it all. Each sponsorship deal is something the team, the driver, and the brand all mutually come to an agreement over.

So what we’ve done is replicate the negotiation side of sponsorship that occurs in modern motorsports. You get to pick your sponsorship profile from eight different archetypes, at the beginning of each season. Here is a small sample:

• You can opt for a guaranteed flat fee for every race; a safe bet if you want your financials to remain predictable.
• You can try your hand at something a little spicier, with a higher flat fee if you finish on the podium.
• Your sponsor can exclusively cover damage repairs, or entry fees/operational costs.

The idea is that your sponsorship model is something you carefully pick to ensure you stay in the black.

Because there is a red.

And like a lot of race teams, expect to operate quite close to it if things don’t go your way. In other words, the sponsorship you negotiate may look good on paper—but you need to perform on track, otherwise you may be out of a career.

Survival Of The Fittest

Now here’s the fun part—Authentic mode features no restarts and is toggled on by default because this is the intended mode of play. (You’re welcome to switch to Traditional, and get restarts as well as your own curated AI, of course.)

Your goal isn’t to win a bunch of championships and collect all the cars. It’s to survive financially from weekend to weekend and approach each event the way real race teams do. Think of it as survival horror in the scorching cockpit of a GT3 car.

We want you to fear a wreck in front of you the way real drivers do. We want you to be dejected at a 5th place finish, the way real drivers are. We want that gut-wrenching feeling that happens when the rear end breaks loose and you’re barreling towards the wall, knowing that this is the end of your season. And we want you to be elated when you come out of the final corner to live to fight another day.

Whether you get three races in, or thirty, you will get to experience that thrill of emotion.

We’ve watched your hotlap videos. We’ve seen you stream on Twitch. We’ve downloaded your custom setups pack. We’ve seen you build track guides, racecraft lessons, and setup shops.

You got this.

Discuss this news in our forum or in Discord. Pre-order NOW!