I’ve spent the last half dozen laps slowly closing up to the back of the Corvette in front of me, when suddenly the screen in my car lights up with the words ‘BLUE LMP1’ encased in blue. What comes next is minutes and laps of Hypercar prototypes zooming up to fill the mirrors of my GT3, the rules of World Endurance Championship dictating that I mustn’t hold them up for too long, but equally that they and their much faster vehicles have to choose a time to pass me safely. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff, constantly having to shift my focus back and forth, and hoping that the Corvette loses a bit more time than I do. Once the last of the Hypercars as past, it’s back to the task at hand of closing up and resuming my fight for 14th place in class.
And then I lose concentration, get a bit too greedy on the throttle and spin out.
Endurance racing is a very particular kind of motorsports, and it’s one that I love. Where Formula 1 has to force its teams to make even a single pit stop in the name of minimal racing variety, the various endurance racing championships last anywhere from 3 hours to 24 hours, encompassing multiple pit stops, driver changes and often having multiple categories and classes of vehicle and competitor. We’re decades removed from the most romanticised eras of Le Mans, with modern technology, analytics and (obviously very necessary) safety considerations changing the tone of a 24 hours race – not to mention the increasingly controversial Balance of Performance adjustments adding some artifice to the results – but there’s still that thrill of watching two or three races happening all at once, seeing hours-longs strategies play out, and being able to go to bed and still have the race going on when you get up for breakfast.
Le Mans Ultimate is a fantastic ode to the World Endurance Championship and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in particular. Having been in Steam Early Access since last year, hitting v1.0 is a major milestone that sees the game and the built up collection of free and paid DLC able to fully replicate the current 2025 season, right down to track-specific liveries that some cars ran at the 6 Hours of São Paulo eight days ago.
If viewed as a more focussed successor to rFactor 2, having the full 2025 seasons available makes the v1.0 label feel appropriate, but from a broader gaming audience, it’s also clear that work is far from finished for Le Mans Ultimate. The European Le Mans Series (ELMS) is still in the works with a trio of additional tracks that this competition races at, updated LMP2 liveries, teams and specs, and the introduction of the LMP3 class. But there’s also the fact that a career mode is not expected until early 2026. Right now, Le Mans Ultimate is all about playing individual race weekends, heading online, and the baton-passing co-op mode. There’s not even a basic championship mode.
While you can of course play Le Mans Ultimate with a controller hooked up to a gaming laptop and peer at a 15″ screen, it scales up to full-throated esports set ups with high-end racing wheels and multi-screen views. There’s also full support for VR gaming, and since it’s been a while, I decided to dust off my PSVR 2 and its PC adapter to pretend like I’m one of those billionaire or film star gentlemen drivers.
This took a couple hours out of my life to actually set up. AMD’s drivers have introduced a SteamVR-breaking bug since the start of 2025 which is yet to be fixed, and which took far too long to diagnose through unhelpful error messages before I reverted older drivers. Then there’s the fuss of configuring a racing wheel on PC, and while Le Mans Ultimate recognised the ageing Fanatec CSL Elite I’m using just fine, manually configuring the buttons on the McLaren GT3 wheel was a chore of trial and error to figure out which buttons are numbered what way. It really is high time that everyone comes together to make this better somehow. Oh, and all of this needs me to use a mouse anyway, because the menus don’t recognise the wheel’s directional toggle. Thankfully the racing itself is far, far more immersive.
My first experience, quite foolishly, was to step into one of the Hypercars and join an organised reviewer online lobby just moments after finally getting everything set up and working. After struggling with the Alpine A424 for half a lap of Circuit de la Sarthe, I humbly dipped into the settings and stepped the assists preset down a notch to give myself ABS and other helpers while getting used to the game. It’s as granular as having the game hold brakes and clutch for you until an input is detected, can manage pit lane procedure, and more.
A much, much better way to actually start off (as in real motorsports) is with the LMGT3 class and offline. These cars all come with ABS as part of the spec, immediately making braking and cornering much easier to grasp for newcomers. It’s immediately enjoyable while getting up to speed and getting rid of some rust from not playing racing games for a while, and made stepping back up to Hypercars with the roaring V12 of the Aston Martin Valkyrie feel more manageable. Racing LMGT3 also immerses you within that multi-class racing style by, as mentioned above, having to deal with the full pack of Hypercar class rampaging through your race every few laps – the AI is good on the whole, if a bit too bullish, though that’s true of real drivers too!
There’s plenty to learn and adapt to within Le Mans Ultimate’s recreation of the WEC. Race starts have all the cars lined up at the side of the pit straight and then go on a formation lap, before settling into a grid for a rolling start – you can skip to a few corners before the lights go green. Naturally, this being endurance racing, the game simulates track evolution – branded as RealRoad – weather and changing time of day, tyre wear and temperatures can affect your performance at the start and end of a stint, there’s everything with managing energy usage – in Hypercar, most entrants have a hybrid system that affects braking and deployment.
The HUD is good, but perhaps not quite customisable enough for VR. You have all the expected timing boxes, speedo, a fixed rear view and radar when other cars are nearby, and a multi-function display box to shift through different elements and make pit stop decisions. They’re all toggleable on and off, but you can’t change their position in VR, making them feel a bit too intrusive for my liking. I ended up toggling the full HUD on and off to really situate myself in the car, but would have loved to position just the MFD, radar and penalty warnings, and rely on in-car elements elsewhere.
With a few more races and trying some more cars, I’ll be heading back online where there’s daily races for all-comers, and then the now standard twinned Safety and Driver rankings, branded under RaceControl, which you’ll need to build up to qualify for special and weekly events.
All in all, first impressions of Le Mans Ultimate are a little mixed. It’s certainly disappointing that a 1.0 launch doesn’t come with any kind of championship or career, but the authentic recreation of WEC, the full field of cars (if you’ve got the DLC), and the solid VR support all make this enticing for motorsports fans – it feels destined to become a staple of the genre on PC. I’m certainly keen to strap in and race some more. Maybe I can not spin out on the penultimate lap this time?