Silver 1989 Mercedes-Benz #63 Sauber-Mercedes C 9 racing in the rain at Silverstone alongside a purple and white 1988 Jaguar #1 Jaguar Racing XJR-9.

Hear from Turn 10’s Chris Esaki on Forza Monthly

26 January 2023- Alan Walsh
In celebration of Forza Motorsport at Developer_Direct, we were joined by Chris Esaki on Forza Monthly to dive deeper into our cars and tracks, as well as some of our goals around the player experience.

Let’s start with cars! Forza Motorsport features the most modern race cars we’ve ever had in the series, and to showcase some of these newer spec models in action, we debuted a small snippet of footage we had saved just for our Forza Monthly viewers.

This included the 2021 Porsche Mission R, a car that is pioneering the incredibly exciting future of electrified Porsche GT4 race cars with over 1,000 horsepower and a top speed of 186mph!

Night race at Suzuka featuring a variety of muscle cars in different colors from AMC, Buick, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge and others.

As for the tracks you’ll be driving these racecars on, here’s a closer look at some of the locations available in Forza Motorsport:

Hakone is an original GP circuit in Japan built for high-speed racing action. It isn’t a technical track, which leads to great drafting and passing opportunities, as well as trail braking and mid corner throttle management. Hakone will have multiple layouts to choose from and is overall a fun circuit for driving several types of cars, including GT and touring championship cars!

Kyalami combines a high-speed front straight and sweepers with technical challenges, massive elevation changes, hairpins, and as you saw in our Developer_Direct video, spectacular views. Kyalami is a fun, challenging track to master with unique passing opportunities and a considerable amount of elbow room for tight racing. It’s also a great showcase of the physics improvements we’ve made to the tire model and suspension with its approachable curbs.

Laguna Seca will feature both its modern and historic layout in Forza Motorsport. Today, the track looks like a monster with its mouth open, but that mouth portion wasn’t always there. While that classic layout can’t be raced in the real world anymore, it’ll be available to drive in Forza Motorsport. Pair this iconic layout with early race cars so you can relive a bygone era of motorsport.

Lastly, we also touched on how we rebuilt different areas of Forza Motorsport to focus on the player experience. This included incorporating new engine rendering features to support ray tracing, dynamic time-of-day with weather, track temperatures, pressure, rubbering in and dry lines – all of which are core to both gameplay and visuals.

We’ve also overhauled our vehicle dynamics including the tire model with soft, medium and hard compounds, realistic suspension, braking and weight modeling that includes fuel and supports ballast adjustments. These improvements add more depth to driving and encourage new players to find and exceed their limits. Finally, there are massive improvements to our AI so it can keep up with the fastest drivers in our community. We’ll have more to share on that later!

We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek under the hood of what’s to come in Forza Motorsport. Thanks to Chris Esaki for sharing these details on Forza Monthly and be sure to check out the entire segment if you haven’t already.

In the coming months we’ll be sharing more info on our career mode, multiplayer, car and track lists, and much more. We’re taking the time to get this right for you and we’re grateful to everyone in our Forza community for their incredible support on this journey. We can’t wait for you all to experience Forza Motorsport!

Editor’s Note (March 2, 2023): We’ve updated this blog to remove mentions of some cars that will not be available in the base Forza Motorsport game. We’ll share more in the future when those vehicles will be coming to Forza Motorsport and how they can be obtained. We apologize for any confusion.