Ford tapped gaming community to style virtual racer
May drop in a real racing game next year
Ford has teamed up with the gaming community to design what they call a first-ever collaboration. The result is what it calls the Team Fordzilla P1, a vehicle that’s intended to be the ultimate virtual racer and it’s, well, an odd one.
Team Fordzilla is the automaker’s e-sports team, launched last year and now with more than 40 hand-picked racers on teams in five European countries competing in national events. The teams compete in the Le Mans E-Sports series and others, and have been invited to the new V 10-R League hosted by Gfinity.
Fans and gamers were given polls on Twitter to pick design elements like the seating position, the style of cockpit, and then the drivetrain. Based on those and comments, Ford designers were given a brief to create the new virtual concept.
Two designs were put to a final poll, and this one, designed by Ford exterior designer Arturo Ariño, took 83.3 percent of the nearly 250,000 votes.
The car, revealed at gamescom 2020, has morphing body tech to make it long-tail stable at Le Mans and shorter for a tight course like Monaco. It’s low, wide, and winged, and it definitely looks like a video game car.
Where does the idea go from here? Ford says that it will be building a life-size model of the P1 concept. It’s already underway at the company’s studios in Germany and should be done by the end of the year. More importantly, Ford says that it is in “advanced discussions” with a game developer to put it in a real racing game next year. That could be the next Forza Motorsports, but this would also make a great addition to the Vision Gran Turismo series of concepts found in that game.
