Le Mans Ultimate · published
Hello again, hopefully you’re all recovered from another incredible 24 hours of Le Mans!
As always, our team were trackside at Le Mans for the 24 Hours - and thanks to those of you that dropped by the Karting fan zone, it was great for our team to put faces to usernames.
Now, a few weeks on, the dust has settled at La Sarthe, and we get to talk about what comes next.
You may have already seen that we’ve announced a seismic set of new content for the simulation, coming in this release on 28th July...
We’re bringing you 6 US tracks in a season pass with 3 packs - 2 tracks in each pack - starting with 2 icons of American motorsport, two tracks we've wanted to bring you for a long time.
First up - Daytona International Speedway. The home of American endurance racing. The high banks, the infield, the 24 Hours that runs every January. Officially licensed, laser scanned, and lovingly recreated by our content team.
Joining Daytona is WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Shorter, technical, and home to one of the most photographed corners in racing - the Corkscrew. There's nothing else quite like it. Where Daytona rewards commitment and confidence, Laguna Seca rewards precision and patience. The two circuits together give you something we couldn't offer before - a properly representative slice of American road racing inside Le Mans Ultimate.
Both Daytona and Laguna Seca are in Pack 1 of the American Track Pass. There are 3 packs planned with 2 circuits available in each pack. Each pack is individually priced at $19.99 or your local rough currency equivalent and the Season Pass is available for $44.99 - a discount of 25%. Both the pack and season pass will also receive a 10% launch discount of top of this for the first week.
Of course, RaceControl Pro+ subscribers will also get the US content as it releases automatically alongside all the other additional content already available. There will also be a 10% launch discount available for subscriptions and it’s available right now at RaceControl.gg
We know many of you have been waiting for this and we’re sure it will be worth the wait
In V1.2 I told you that the badges and LiveSteward we shipped were a foundation for the future. In 1.3, we started capturing the intentional wrecks in an easy to view format for human admins that allows them to review an incident in seconds rather than minutes. In fact, since 1.3 over 4.5k temporary bans have been issued using that system. Each time someone’s found doing something a bit naughty, the ban gets longer.
That’s a good start but we want to go further.
Firstly, in this release, we’re further refining LiveSteward, reducing false positives and adding some experimental rules which is a great step forward for the system to act live in public. Our plan is to sign off each “rule” LiveSteward governs one-by-one - for example, in this release you’ll now get kicked to the garage if your car hasn’t moved much in a while - no longer is that broken car stuck on the racing line for several laps.
Protest refinements however, are (at the risk of over hyping this update) a “gamechanger”!
Protests have been challenging for our team for a while. Many spurious protests and the speed of review have essentially meant we’ve triaged protests against the worst offenders which hasn’t gone far enough. And for that, we are sorry.
We mentioned in the section before about LiveSteward that we created in 1.3 a review system that allows our admin team to review incidents in seconds. Currently, protests take roughly 5 minutes per protest and we have on average 700 protests per day - that’s not sustainable. Therefore we’ve made some big changes.
Protests now pair with the replay review system. When you want to file a protest, you do it from inside the replay itself - flagging the timestamp, the driver involved, and adding your notes with the video right there as context. Stewards then review the protest with the replay context already attached, which means decisions are faster and better-informed.
We want to remind everybody that only intentional wrecks are protestable as part of racing action for all non-championship events. Non-intentional wrecks will just be immediately discarded. If players do want to have racing incidents looked at, the right place for those is in the online championships.
We’re also removing the cooldown to protest - but players have to submit their protest within 24 hours. However, we are introducing a protest credit system where players get three protests every month - but they’ll get a credit back for every successful protest.
For V1.2 we said that we didn't believe these features would solve everything overnight, that every step in a positive direction was one we wanted to take. That's still true. But this is the biggest step so far.
On the subject of investment back into the product - V1.4 is also the release where we've rebuilt the platform that sits underneath everything online.
Driver swaps, championships, daily races, hosted servers, RaceControl - all of these run on an online services layer, and over the past several months we've spent time replacing a component layer from a 3rd party with one we've built ourselves that we’re calling “RaceOS”. Most of you won't notice this directly - and that's the goal. The new backbone is custom-built for our own eco-system, more specific to our racing genre, and built to scale with us. A word of warning. This will mean that we will have an extended maintenance period when we first release 1.4.
Alongside the platform work, we've also moved the game-to-game online connection over to a new netcode protocol. We're moving from TCP to “reliable UDP”, which should be better suited to wheel-to-wheel racing and should help us resolve some longer term issues we’ve been experiencing. Our industry-leading netcode just took another step forward - and whilst we're testing this internally, there may be some teething issues in the first weeks as we really scale with you all using it.
And while we're on the subject of online integrity - we're also putting an end to one of the more frustrating loopholes some of you have flagged. Players who quit out mid-race to dodge damage or penalties no longer escape the consequences.
Isn’t it frustrating when things don’t go your way? It could be anything - a crash at turn 1, equipment failure, your cat jumped on your lap… and your hard earned rating is obliterated. To combat this, we’re introducing an ‘Event Joker’ for our Pro & Pro+ Members. Every 10 races you earn an Event Joker that can be played from the Event Results screen to wipe the Driver Rank and Safety Rating impact of that particular race. The race will still count as an attempt in championships so you can't farm them for a better result - but the ranking damage is removed. It's a way of giving you a little bit of insurance against the kinds of races we all hate to remember. A maximum of 3 jokers can be held at any one time and can only be used on single driver events - they’re not applicable to team races.
Additionally, we’re introducing new ‘Practice+ servers’ for our Pro and Pro+ members too. They’re a little area with dedicated practice servers that persist longer for those of you that want to practise more than just the next race on the schedule.
We have advanced our brake thermal system to improve correlation to real world brake temperatures by now simulating the surface and the core of the brake disc separately. This change also allows for improved braking consistency and braking performance. It will be most noticeable on LMP3, LMP2 and some Hypercars and the ground work done here will allow us to deliver additional improvements going forward. And we will be monitoring your feedback.
A few smaller things worth mentioning.
Adding the new set of US circuits meant that we also need to focus on the pit lane. A lot of these US circuits, such as Daytona and Laguna Seca, don't have garages that you can drive out from. We've added a feature where your car is placed automatically in the pit lane when you press “start driving”. This is actually more realistic for WEC events as well, as cars are usually dollied out onto the pit lane before driving away.
You will also find that you are asked to move into the fast lane, which is the far side of the pit lane, as soon as possible. Otherwise you'll get a penalty. No more hanging around wherever you like in the pits!
We have also pushed the final 2026 car updates - the Alpine and Cadillac joker upgrades have been modelled and are now available in game.
We're adding Brazilian Portuguese localisation in this release. A huge thank you to the Brazilian LMU community - you've been one of our most engaged audiences from day one, and it's about time you got the game in your own language - we hope you enjoy it.
More season pass packs are to come, we’re expecting late Q3 and late Q4 for these next two packs.
We're continuing to invest in the online experience, building on the new platform foundations we've put in place this release. There's more to come on that front.
Stephen Hood, Motorsport Games - “That's all from us. We hope you enjoy the new circuits and the improvements as we continue to take LMU to the next level. See you on the track!”