Lockdown brought out many strange habits in us all. Frenzied walking around parks. Giving ourselves haircuts. All the endless bloody baking. And for me and my mates, a renewed enthusiasm for Slightly Mad Studios’ 2017 racing sim, Project CARS 2. While the world was laugh-crying at the hilarious antics of those colourful little beans in Fall Guys and shouting at Phasmophobia’s ghosts, we whiled away what for all we knew was the apocalypse by adjusting radiator cooling ducts and rake angles.
I’m exaggerating for effect. Obviously we was the one that stuck. It was so malleable, so sandboxy for a racing sim. I created 100-lap Indycar oval races in the snow with x60 day-night cycles. I made us all race Monaco in karts in the dead of night. Every night there was some new, intensely gruelling and unintentionally hilarious combination of car, track and conditions to explore. And every night, in every single one of those scenarios, the same person crossed the line in P1: the only one of us who was using a wheel.
