BPR Endurance Racing Game - Fantastic - F40 LM, McLaren F1

[sameerrao]

I installed a great game this week on my PC.

It is called BPR Endurance GT Project and is an custom mod to the EA Sports F1 2002 game that was released about 4 years back.

Cars
The BPR game borrow the tracks and gaming infrastructure from the Formula One game and supplies the cars that participated in the 1996 FIA GT Sportcars series featuring fantastic cars like:
--> McLaren F1 GTR
--> Ferrari F40 GTE/LM
--> Lotus Esprit V8
--> Venturi 600 LM/LM-S

Boy, this game is fun. The cars are not excessively fast (at least compared to the open wheel cars) and so you have time to do fun things like correct a slide. Lot of scope to play around and enjoy the car's handling.

With the F1 cars, basically everything happens too fast - you make a mistake and you are off the course in a jiffy. You need to get it right the first time

Driving impressions:
I tested out the F40 and the McLaren today.

The F40 accelerates well and you can hear the turbo whistling when it comes on boost and when you brake and downshift you can hear the wastegates popping audibly. And the car setup offered as default is really fun. Basically the car rotates a lot when braking into a corner. Huge, huge fun! Try taking the Suzuka turns 1 and 2 with a touch of brakes to begin with and then downshift when off the throttle and use as little brakes as possible. The car rotates beautifully thru that corner - rear wheel steering all the way. The basic problem with the F40 is the gearing - it has 5 gears only and coupled with about 50-100kg extra weight over the McLaren, makes it a bit slower than the Mac.

The McLaren is a lot more stable under braking and drives as if it has more grip. It seems faster than the Ferrari pretty much everywhere. And the sound of the engine at max revs and also while downshifting is simply amazing.

I havent driven the other cars yet - am not excited about them anyway.

Caveats
Not too much actually. As the original game came out in 2002, your computer if procured relatively recently should be more than capable of handling the game from a graphics standpoint.

The visuals are not as sharp as perhaps the GTR game that came out last year or was it 2004? That's because this is a mod to an old game and not a fresh effort that takes advantage of increase in today's computing horsepower.

Dont worry about this though - You will have fun. No question. And how often can you drive an F40 LM and McLaren GTR

Tracks:
All the F1 tracks from the 2002 season are there - Spa, Monaco, Monza and Suzuka are particularly fun.

How do I get it?
You first need an installed copy of the EA Sports F1 2002 game - a used game should be available pretty cheap (under $10) at your nearest game store. Or try buy.com or ebay.

Then go here: http://bprgt.rsdg.net/cars.html for downloading the BPR mod.

Some screenshots follow: (Note- the washed out colors are due to me copying the screenshot to MS Paint - this screwed it up a bit)