Forza Motorsport 6 was first announced back in January at the 2015 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, in tandem with Ford’s announcement of the return of the Ford GT supercar. In a partnership with Ford, not only will the Ford GT grace the cover of the upcoming racing simulator, but the Turn 10 team was also given direct access to Ford’s design teams during development of the GT.
Apparently the partnership will benefit Ford as well, not only in terms of advertising for the Ford GT and other vehicles like the Ford F-150 Raptor and the Ford Mustang GT350 which will also appear in the game, but also in the form of telemetry data from gamers driving and tuning the Ford GT to their liking. The generated data will be passed back to Ford and they’ll be analysing it and using it to help tune the Ford GT for the Le Mans 24 Hours race in 2016.
“People are going to be putting millions of laps on the Ford GT on Le Mans in lots of conditions on Forza Motorsport 6 long before it ever hits that track,” Turn 10’s Dan Greenawalt explains. “That’s really what a partnership is all about. We can work with Ford to deliver cars, but also use our community to start helping to tune and create the cars.”
“The one thing we’ve got is millions of players who play all the time,” Greenawalt continues. “Just think about that. If you have a professional race car driver as your test driver and you rent out the Nurburgring for a week, or two weeks, or three weeks, how many miles do you do? A lot.
“But you’ve got two million players, playing 24 hours a day all the way around the world. You get a lot of test laps, and it doesn’t matter that one driver is slow and one driver is fast because you just end up with so much data. It’s a different way of looking at how you would design, test and tune a car.”
Of course Ford won’t be relying solely on this data, and will have its5 own simulators but the fact that the Forza series is known for replicating cars right down to weight and the individual components in order to make the cars handle in game just as they would on the street. The addition of night and weather effects in Forza Motorsport 6 should also provide useful information to Ford.
What do you think about this partnership which returns gamers telemetry data in the game back to Ford to use for analysis and tuning for real world Ford GT racing scenarios? Are you looking forward to becoming a test driver of the Ford GT for Ford? Let us know in the comments below, or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button type=”link” link=”http://www.topgear.com/car-news/future-tech/gaming-forza-6-gamers-will-make-fords-gt-le-mans-racer-faster” variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: Top Gear[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
