Le Mans Ultimate, the official game of the FIA World Endurance Championship and 24 Hours of Le Mans, is completing the 2024 Season with the remaining content when the fifth and final 2024 DLC pack goes on sale on June 10th, bringing 2 new LMGT3 cars and 1 new track to the game on 10th June 2025.
Along with new content, the game will receive a major update focused on multi-driver team races, livery customisation, and team management, opening the experience for longer races and showcasing the endurance spirit.
First Up – Driver Swaps
Le Mans Ultimate will be introducing their first events, where players will hand over the car mid-race during live online endurance races, using the new driver swap feature. Teams will be able to enjoy the strategy and teamwork required to share in a car’s success or failure over multi-hour races.
After registering for the event as part of a team, players and their teammates are able to swap in the pitlane by using the driver field in the multi-function display (or MFD).
Compared to previous titles, Studio 397 have made various core code changes to improve security, performance and functionality.
When anyone now joins a server, the game knows which car you have access to, enabling your teammates to configure your pit stops. This has the additional bonus of allowing any team member to resume from the pit lane in the unfortunate case of a technical issue. A big feature LMU believe will be a game changer.
What’s the state of this feature in the release? Well, whilst they have intensively tested this internally, with the help of some community members, the large-scale performance testing of servers and driver swap information, many hours into a race, is not an easy task for a team of Studio 397’s size.
Therefore, they are releasing it first only in “Special Events” so they can closely monitor performance and make adjustments in their own environment.
Upcoming team-based Special Events will be published across social media and in-game channels, so keep an eye on those to find out when these will be available.
In future, LMU will be expanding these races to create new Team-based Online Championships and later, to leagues via Racecontrol.gg and Sim Grid, as they gain confidence in the feature’s robustness.
New Team Management Feature
Rather than just allowing one-off entries into races, Studio 397 have created a team dynamic for Le Mans Ultimate, powered by RaceControl, that allows players to create a team identity and invite their friends to it.
As a team owner, you will then be able to assign your teammates different roles and attach them to the cars (or “line-ups”).
You’ll find “Teams” available within the new drop down menu in the top right of the screen. From this you can see your invites, accept or reject them, or create your own team directly inside the game itself.
When creating a team, players will be able to upload a logo and also a background page for all your team mates to see and will be used elsewhere in event pages.
Here’s a bit more information about the roles that are available:
Driver – What it says on the tin, drivers drive the car, and that is all they do.
Engineer – This role will allow a player to be on the server, see data from the car and session, whilst also being able to make pitstop changes. As you can see on the new watch screen that they are making available for team races, there’s quite a lot of detail to sink your teeth into. The engineer role, if used correctly, can be an invaluable contributor to your team’s success… or failure.
Manager – This role allows a team member to assign players to different car line-ups, assign liveries and register them for races.
Team Owner – Has all of the aforementioned, but can also change ownership.
Everyone can make a team of up to 6 members with 1 line up. For those players that want to have larger teams the team owner will need to to be a RaceControl Pro or Pro+ subscriber, enabling the ability to have up to 100 members and up to 10 line ups.
You’ve All Been Waiting For It – Custom Liveries
Le Mans Ultimates’ brand new livery system will allow players to upload a livery to apply to a car on a particular team, and then automatically transmit it to all drivers and spectators on a server. For now, this feature is only available for online events, both single-driver and team-based.
Since this feature requires significant backend infrastructure and bandwidth to automatically send the liveries across to all competitors – this feature is only available to RaceControl Pro and Pro+ players but Lite players in a team based race where the Team Owner has a Pro account will also be able to utilise custom liveries in those events.
When a livery is selected for your online event, it will automatically be transferred to all the other players on the grid so they can see your paint scheme in all it’s glory.
One warning however – players will be able to report liveries in the post-race reporting and breaking the terms of use of the service could result in serious and even permanent bans from the online service.
This is something many of you have requested since launch, and LMU are thrilled to make it available in all RaceControl events. In future, they’ll be available for private servers as well, but will require pre-registration of the cars you will be driving. Whether you’re building your dream design or repping your team sponsors, custom liveries let your creativity shine through.
Whilst this feature is only available for online sessions for now, in future, they hope to expand this to single-player Race Weekend as well.
The 2024 Season Completed With The DLC Content
Pack 5, also releasing on 10th June is the final one for the 2024 FIA WEC season. Lusail International Circuit, the opening race of the world championship is making its debut in Le Mans Ultimate.
Utilising the latest laser scan from summer 2024, the circuit has been built with Studio 397’s famed attention to detail. Floodlit and fast, Lusail offers a unique mix of technical corners and long straights — perfect for multiclass racing and offering a unique challenge.
Not only that, but they’ve also added the “short circuit” that is likely to be spicy and full of action as it cuts out the majority of the circuit’s slower sector 2.
Joining the LMGT3 class are two highly anticipated cars. Firstly, the Lamborghini Huracán LMGT3 Evo2 as run by both Iron Lynx and the Iron Dames in 2024, but sadly missing from the 2025 grid.
Additionally, the fan-favourite Lexus RC F LMGT3, offering a distinct look and feel to the GT grid that will no doubt become one of the most popular cars on track.
With this final 2024 pack added, the game now offers a grand total of 11 circuits with 21 layouts, 11 hypercars, 1 LMP2, 4 GTEs and 9 LMGT3s – 25 cars in total, completing the full 2024 World Endurance Championship for you all to enjoy.
Stay tuned for in-depth guides on the two new LMGT3s and an in-depth lap guide of Qatar!
But That’s Not All
The LMGT3 tyre model has had another significant refinement, particularly aimed at reducing the potential abuse of slip angle and increasing low-speed weight, whilst keeping the stability and predictability of the tyre that players have come to expect – as always with plenty of feedback from real-world drivers – they hope it is something players will enjoy.
Race starts have had a bit of a polish, including the class splits being respected. This means that classes are now correctly grouped together, even if they don’t qualify, and the class pole position will also receive the best side of the grid.
LMU has also implemented gaps between classes, as well, meaning that by the time the LMGT3s turn up at turn 1, hopefully, the Hypercars have sorted out their mess!
For fuel-saving aficionados – the clutch pedal has now been disabled above 1st gear, meaning players will have to lift and coast normally like the rest of us!
Additionally, the fuel tab on the multi-function display (or MFD) has been completely revised so that you can access some interesting information about your consumption, allowing you to set lap targets to extend your stint with warnings if your engineer doesn’t think you’ll make it.
LMU also made some significant updates to the game by removing a middleware layer that would often crash but leave no actionable information for the development team. Whilst you won’t see any changes here, this change should enable Studio 397 in future to make more progress with this type of issue.
As always, this is just a small taste of the improvements they are bringing with this update. Make sure to check out the full release notes when they are made available.
