It's June and happening this month is the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Many say it's a golden era for prototype endurance racing. And wow there's a lot to be excited about.
If, like me, you're an ignorant F1 fan, here's a quick description of what's going on in the world of endurance prototypes. A recent collaboration between the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) has brought some exciting changes to the scene. The two series have worked together to create a set of regulations that allow LMH (Le Mans Hypercars) and LMDh (Le Mans Daytona Hypercars) cars to compete in both series (with detailed differences and different Balance of Performance figures). This has attracted many car manufacturers to design and make cars in a way and generate the buzz and excitement of a full and competitive grid.
To celebrate, I've joined forces with Meteoro405 to bring you a tribute for this era of endurance racing, with cars from both IMSA, WEC and Le Mans all celebrated in this mod. It was only a few years ago that IMSA had their own rules and there was one manufacturer competing in the top category of WEC, but now there's a great mix of cars, with more being promised in the next year or so. I've also been chatting to people outside of our GP4 community and, with their blessing, have been able to bring some of their work into this mod too.
3 New Mods
There are three variations of mods.
You can choose to run the IMSA GTP cars, based on the 2023 cars and new 2024 teams added. I've added some LMP2 cars just to bulk out the grid. You'll find the Acura, Cadillac, Porsche, BMW and Lamborghini.
You can also choose to run the Le Mans 2023 mod. Here we have Ferrari, Toyota, Glickenhaus, Vanwall, Peugeot and the crossover Porsches. We also have LMP2 represented with the Oreca 07 chassis being used by the entire grid, where the pole sitters and the race winner liveries are selected.
Finally we have a IMSA vs WEC mod, combining the two series together in one mod. You can choose from a range of liveries, including some 2024 liveries, and you'll also find new 2024 cars in the Alpine, BMW and Lamborghini.
The Cars
I've listed full credits for the cars, which have the blessing of the original authors, and I've also included the LMP2, which is all made up of Oreca 07's ran by various race teams.
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Acura ARX-06 Car from RR3 & GM25 Textures by Martin Designs, fongu, Eder Acevedo Converted by fongu |
The Acura comes with two liveries for the Mayer Shank Team and the Wayne Taylor (with Andretti Motorsport). I worked in conjunction with Martin Designs on these cars and he did a great job in perfecting my work and adding lots of great details. Thanks to Eder for the template too.
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Alpine A424 Car by Vencialo Textures by The Racing Rats Converted by fongu |
The Alpine livery was launched with the F1 car where we all wondered where the livery was. In an extreme case of weight saving, we loved what little livery there was on the car, but it is on full display on the new A424. This car made its debut in 2024, with Mick Schumacher as part of the team. This car is made by Vencialo and upgraded liveries by the Racing Rats, a really nice job.
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BMW M Hybrid V8 LMDh Car from RR3 & GM25 Textures by Martin Designs Converted by fongu |
Although the BMW race in IMSA and WEC, and is about to make its return to Le Mans this weekend, and having a year of experience with the car, are looking like they may be able to be contenders for the win. At the moment, we only have the WEC livery, another fantastic job by Martin Designs.
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Cadillac V-Series.R Car by Yezhrod & Akrapovic Converted by Meteoro405 & fongu |
The Cadillac has been competitive in both IMSA and WEC championships. All three liveries are included in the mod along with IMSA and WEC Variants, thanks for Yezhrod for the original car and new quality skins by Akrapovic.
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Ferrari 499P Car from RR3 & GM25 2023 Textures by fongu, Eder Acevedo 2024 Textures by Martin Designs, Adisar Modder, Eder Acevedo Converted by fongu |
I'm please to bring you the 2023 Le Mans winning Ferrari, with help from GM25 and Eder Acevedo. I alos include the 2024 liveries, with the 50 car being done by Martin Designs and the 51 and yellow 83 car (with Kubica at the wheel) done by Adisar Modder.
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Glickenhaus SCG_007 Car from GT Manager, CSR2, GM25 Converted by fongu |
It's a shame that Glickenhaus have now pulled out, but I'm please to bring you this car into GP4. The GT Manager game is one of the logos on the car and features in that game too.
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Lamborghini SC63 Car from CSR2 Converted by fongu |
This is another car where the game it features in is actually on the car, CSR2. Another car that is new to the 2024 grid, it is striking in its looks. With Roman Grosjean being one of the drivers along with Danny Kvyat, I'm sure it won't be a boring race.
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Oreca 07 LMP2 Car from RR3 & GM25 Textures by Martin Designs, Adisar Modder, Eder Acevedo Converted by fongu |
The entire LMP2 grid is formed of Oreca 07 cars and is basically a spec pro/am competition. The liveries of this car are brought to you by Martin Designs (WRT and AO by TF) and Adisar Modder with Eder Acevedo (Inter Europol).
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Peugeot 9x8 Car from GT Manager, Asphalt 9, GM25, Prakha Yadav Converted by fongu |
The Peugeot initially developed its car without a rear wing, although the 2024 version added one back in. I love the variety of styles of cars on display on the grid.
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Porsche 963 LMDh Car from RR3 & GM25 Textures by Martin Designs, Franx D'Aloia Converted by fongu |
The Porsche was the first car I worked on and is already available in Metero405's IMSA 2.0 Random mod. I've made a few tweaks, but in this mod you get all the 2023 liveries, from IMSA to WEC to Le Mans variants, thanks to Martin Designs and Franx D'Aloia.
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Toyota GR010 Car by The Racing Rats Converted by fongu |
This is another Racing Rats conversion, as many of the other cars are locked and paid for content, but I'm grateful for their permission in allowing me to bring a Toyota into GP4.
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Vanwall Vandervell 680
Car by The Racing Rats
Converted by fongu
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Last in the list is this Vanwall Vandervell 680, which had Jacques Villeneuve behind the wheel. Another team to not make it into 2024, the car certainly stuck out on the grid. As they only ran one car, as did Lamborghini in IMSA and WEC this season, they share a garage together in my mod. Again, thanks to the Racing Rats for permission to bring this to GP4.
There's no shortage of F1 alumni in 2024's Le Mans race, with 18 drivers competeting in the hypercar field. There's Bourdais, Nasr, Lotterer, Kobayashi, de Vries, Buemi, Hartley, Will Stevens, Grosjean, Mick Schumacher, Button, Giovinazzi, Kvyat, Kubica, Vergne, Vandoorne, di Resta and Jack Aitken. There's also plenty of Indycar, Formula E crossovers, as well as Valentino Rossi racing in the GT3 Category.
The cars come with their own individual rims, they're not really designed to be interchangeable other than the treads. I've also customised the working brake lights, and worked in GP4 Tweaker to add various glow options, included glow size and intensity (areas I've not explored before). It would have been nice to have more options available and extend this to the front lights, but this is GP4 and it's designed for F1. Some cars have working side lights too. With all the variations of rear lights, I've not included any backfire options.
I couldn't have done this alone, so I want to thank all the contributors for this fantastic looking mod, I hope you enjoy it. Thanks to Jvinu for his Bell helmet and template as always.
CSM Menu
Gameplay Options
This part of the menu is pretty standard across most CSM mods. There is, however, one notable item, the car physics.
I've been trying to get to grips with Carl_gpgames and prblanco's Physics and Performance calculator. Unfortunately, the further away from 2001 F1 you get, the weirder the results. In short, you can either choose to use the physics or not.
The realistic physics will update the geometry, car weight, RPM and BHP values, a good estimate of the downforce levels based and an accurate power and torque curve thanks to it being tightly defined in the regulations. Whilst I'm not aiming for perfection, an onboard comparison at tracks like Spa, Monza and Imola showed pretty good results, considering there is no hybrid element in GP4. I found the car a good challenge to drive, you have to be very alert and not be too aggressive.
It does cause a few AI accidents naturally. Realistic RPM causes cars to be stuck when they go off track more often than not, meaning there's a high rate of attrition in races. So you can choose whether to bear with the quirks and have a good time driving, or just stick with out the box standard GP4 physics, with only BHP and grip adjusted from the performance files.
Onto performances, and I wasn't exactly looking for accuracy, but I did want to reflect the relative performances. So I took race data from Le Mans 23, Daytona 24 Hours in 2023 and 2024 and the latest WEC race at Spa, noting down qualifying times and I used fastest race lap instead of total race time. Because Le Mans is so power orientated, I tried to find accurate BHP figures, and tried to factor out the straights from my calculations. The remaining time is then a worked into the grip value. I did the same with the other races, using the Porsches as my constant. Because of the Balance of Performance rules in WEC and similar equivalent in IMSA, the cars are pretty competitive with each other and the running order does swing from race to race, so the variance in grip can throw up fairly mixed up grids.
To go with the new physics, are a new set of sounds based on the Ferrari 499P. Thanks to Mitsuro_Sano for his helpful guide. These sounds are designed specifically for the physics in this mod, so if you wish to turn the physics off, you will get the sounds from Meteoro405's IMSA mod instead.
Liveries
Here's where you can choose some of the livery variants. These will also update the performance files too. Most the liveries are self explantory or mentioned above, but there's some bonus liveries for the Oreca LMP2 car.
TV Style
The 'Top Panel', other wise known as the Def Panel by btone and Ruboy is also pretty standard across most mods, and you have the option to turn it on or off here.
Most of the rest of the graphics are done by Meteoro405 and are simply lifted from the IMSA mod.
The new addition is the fantastic HUD created by Augustogibim, which comes with WEC and Le Mans variants. I personally love it, and it adds to the realism, feel and atmosphere of these hypercars.
IA (or AI Extras)
Meteoro405 introduced a whole new world of possibilities with his ground-breaking IMSA 2.0 Random mod, such a massive work. Basically, it allows random values to be input into various parameters in GP4. I've cut the list of possibilities down to a few choice ones, where every time you run the mod, the stated values will change. I've included variances in driver error chance, braking range and performance variance range.
In testing, it is noted that anti-virus can disable the bat file from running, but you can execute it manually in the mod itself, or from the context menu (right click on the mod in the selection main page).
There's some more detailed and customisable tweaks available in the fuel, air setup and pitstop menus.
The non race sessions menu allows Meteoro405's randomizer for the number of cars out on track and starting fuel in each session.
Then there's a group of other options.
There are two DirectX options, the version 8.0 is amended by gplaps who amended the Z buffer to stop most of the flickering in GP4. You can read more about this here: info. The second option is to run Direct X 9, thanks for crosire, and gives better stability and potentially better performance with modern day graphics cards. There is also the Sound Hardware Acceleration available, this enables the 3D EAX effects, thanks to gp4wonder/DOSOAL for this tweak.
Meteoro405 did such a thorough job in exploring every possible area to mod in GP4 and many customisable options are available here.
There are also some great GP4Tweaker options available, it's pretty standard actually in GP4 mods through the decades, but I've included something I've not seen in other mods and it's found the Head View Movement. In this mod, you can enable the head movement (as you steer the car) not just in the internal cockpit, but also in the traditional T-Cam view. So I've brought the t-cam into Driver's eye view, and the tweak also disables the helmet from being shown to avoid any clipping issues. Now it's not really recommended for keyboard players, but it's an awesome mod for steering wheel and analog input users. Even if you have head movement switched off, in T-cam view, you can now also use the look left and look right keys just as if you were using the internal cockpit camera.
The internal cockpit (the Ferrari 499P) was a little rushed, the positioning isn't quite right, and I've not created external textures, but the external cockpit view allows for a better experience, and it's my preferred driving view. However, the internal view features my new Ferrari 499P steering wheel. It's not got quite as many features as my Formula E wheel, but the dash text is better integrated. The top left light (to the left of the revs) is your damage indicator, it will go red if there's any damage to the car. And the middle light on the right (next to the pit dial) is your pit indicator. Green for pit call, and red for pit busy. The wheel has your usual rev limiter and warning lights, and some key displays on the wheel. The water temperature is on the screen next to the rear view mirror. On the external option, I've tried to include mirrors on the screens where possible, as the wing mirrors are not easy to see, especially with the WEC HUD.
The F1 Graphics customisation is something you'll find in all my mods and allows you to customise the mod for different spec machines. At the moment, there are no lower lods and no lower resolution textures, but where possible I've tried to keep car textures at 2K rather than push for 4K variants.
In the IMSA vs WEC hypercar mod variant, there is an additional menu for livery selection. Here, you can mix and match your liveries, and also run some 2024 liveries not available in the other variants. The Oreca also comes with an option to run the Valentino Rossi LMP2 test car (not raced) and the upcoming 2024 AO by TF 'Spike the Dragon' livery (which took pole for LMP2 at Le Mans), both by Martin Designs.
Tracks
There is no track pack with this, but we have a great selection of tracks already available in GP4, many of them you can find on
this site. If you've not had a look around, there's a massive database of tracks to explore.
On the IMSA side:
Whilst we don't have Daytona, the
Lausitzring is a nice alternative, with drt01 doing a nice update not too long ago.
Another great track that drt01 has released in the past year is
Sebring.
Whilst the current layout being used for
Long Beach isn't in GP4, there are a couple of layouts
from the past to choose from.
There's a few historic streets of Detroit available, but there was the
Belle Isle track used in Indycar until recently that is also great fun to drive on.
A great version of
Road America exists, fantastic track by drt01 and Jcaranti.
Indianapolis has also seen tweaks to its layout, but the original 2001 layout still does the job nicely.
Road Atlanta has a working layout by Atticus, and deserves some 3D work adding to it.
Over to WEC and the calendar for 2024 includes:
Losail in Qatar, Imola Spa, Interlagos, COTA, Fuji and Bahrain. You'll find many F1 variants on this site. Whilst the
Circuit de la Sarthe (Le Mans) itself exceeds GP4 track building limits, there is a 'petite' Le Sarthe available, or you can go for the 'Bugatti' version of the track.
Of course, you can race these cars anywhere, but we have a great selection and variety available in GP4.
Other credits
I've tried to list as many credits as possible above.
There are many 'hidden' tweaks by prblanco (various GP4 patches, performance and physics calculator), Oggo (Blender plug in for pit props, Collision editor, Individual tyres and helmets tweak and others), Carl_gpgames (testing, GP4 Tweaker help, performance and physics calculator, CSM template and knowledge base, pitprops), 32bobo32 (pitcrew templates) and KerleyF1 (CSM work and some graphics).
I've actually learnt a lot in compiling this mod together. As detailed above, the head-view move in t-cam, and brakeglow settings have been available for 20 years and it's only now I'm exploring their capabilities more fully.
Finally, I want to dedicate this mod to Meteoro405, Ariel, and his family who are going through a really tough time. A lot of the fruits of this mod is thanks to him. He did the base mod, some of the work on the cars and although we would have worked well together, he has more important responsibilities. So with much love and hugs, this mod is for you, my friend.
