Experience the Heart of Maranello with the Ferrari Essentials Pack for Project CARS 2
The Ferrari Essentials Pack completes a unique and emotional journey into the heartbeat of Ferrari in Project CARS 2. Enriching the 10 Ferrari cars already in-game with eight more from Maranello, and enhanced further by two Ferrari circuits, this pack brings together decades of Ferrari’s sporting success, performance, design, and racing-bred passion.
That passion for all things Ferrari is something we all share here at Slightly Mad Studios, and it’s been a thrill to create the content for this pack—content that begins with three of Maranello’s best supercars. As any tifoso (Ferrari fan) will tell you, selecting three from Ferrari’s recent line-up is a delightfully complicated affair! In the end we settled on the Ferrari FXX K, the track-spec’ LaFerrari with over 1,000hp and enough downforce to induce whiplash; the irresistible Ferrari 458 Speciale A, a masterpiece of power, handling, and design; and my favorite, the snarling, impudent, and menacing Ferrari F12tdf, created by Maranello’s engineers with one simple goal in mind—to excite the bejesus out of you.
The F12tdf is just absurdly good fun when you take it out on either of the two Ferrari tracks that come with the pack: The Pista di Fiorano and Mugello Circuit. “It’s incredibly fast, but it’s the way it feels through turn seven [at Fiorano] that is so mind-blowing,” is how Sebastian Vettel described the F12tdf for “Top Gear.”
Mugello is perhaps the better-known of these two circuits. Set in the gorgeous hills and valleys of Tuscany whose beauty in all four seasons (both in real life and in-game) is deeply evocative, Mugello is widely recognized as Italy’s most challenging circuit, those demanding high-speed bends an idyllic location on which to get to grips with the new Ferraris in the pack that includes the F355 Challenge, the hero car of the Ferrari-only Challenge Series from the mid-to-late ’90s, and the last word in pure spec’-racing fun.
Of course, if you’re a die-hard tifoso, the Pista di Fiorano is probably going to be the track you load first, and understandably so. This is Ferrari’s very own test track, located but a short stroll from the main factory in Maranello, and it’s where every Ferrari since 1972 has been tested and developed. Here is where legendary test-drivers flog Ferrari’s new cars around a 14-turn track for weeks and months on end, verifying every facet of the cars on this tight, tough, rousing circuit that feels a lot like a country-road, and where each turn is designed to make obvious any weakness in a car… or driver. One particular turn — the ultra-fast and difficult Turn 7 — is revered amongst the tifosi. It was here, they say, where Enzo himself would sit and assess both his cars and drivers from behind inscrutable sunglasses. Only one driver has ever gone under 56 seconds around Fiorano: Michael Schumacher, in a 55.999s, and it’s a challenge I know our drivers are excited to try and best!
Fiorano is also where Enzo Ferrari’s office was located from ’72 until his death in ’88 and it was from there that he oversaw the development of his final road-car, the Ferrari F40, which is also coming to the Ferrari Essentials Pack. With Enzo approaching his 90th year and having instructed his team to build “the best car in the world,” Ferrari’s engineers had precious little time to get the car into production (just 13 months). To achieve that, they had to rely heavily on chief test driver Dario Benuzzi’s courage around Fiorano. The final F40 pays tribute to Enzo’s dream, a car with no compromises, it is an essential part of Ferrari lore. No ABS, no power-assisted brakes, no traction control, no power steering, no door-handles (you use a wire), and a raw turbocharged 2.9L V8, all of it makes the F40 the final pure supercar of a bygone era.
But while the F40, now 30-years old, just keeps getting more loved (and valuable) with every passing year, the Ferrari 512 BB LM (also in the pack) is very much a forgotten classic whose time for a serious reappraisal has surely come.
This Group 5 Ferrari-prepped racing-only GT monster is a punishing, unyielding machine that graced yet another chapter in Ferrari’s prodigious rivalries from the late ’70s—a time when bell-bottom pants were big, but flared arches, engine-sizes, and massive aero-details on IMSA and LM-spec Group 5 runners were a lot bigger—and a lot sexier!
We’re talking a massive 5-litre V12 whose sonic thunder needs to be heard to be believed. Group 5 was a truly inimitable era, and the Ferrari 512 BB LM now joins a handful of other Group 5 masterpieces in-game to bring Project CARS 2 drivers the pure joy of racing some of the most exotic, muscle-bound, crazy-aero, fat-engine racing cars ever built. Put all these jewels together on a cold, misty day at Mugello and you’ll quickly realize there are few things more awesome than a field-full of Group 5 racers as experienced from behind the wheel of a Ferrari 512 BB LM and its definitive Ferrari cockpit (yes, Veglia dials!).
The 512 BB LM was the first true Ferrari-factory-prepped racing GT in a decade, produced to echo the kind of GT-racing success Ferrari had achieved back in the late-’50s and early-’60s with the all-conquering Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta, a GT-runner that won hundreds of races around the world and dominated GT racing like few cars before or since. That, too, is coming to the pack, as its sister car, the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa (you’ll recognize it on sight) that won Le Mans three times in four years, losing only once to a rival that is already waiting in Project CARS 2.
These eight new Ferrari essentials combine to create a final DLC for Project CARS 2 that will both inspire with all the passion that drives Ferrari, and reward with decades of competition captured from motorsport’s peak eras. This is your ultimate Ferrari journey. Enjoy!