With the game not always being straight-forward, here are 8 Le Mans Ultimate tips & hidden features to make your time with the WEC game a bit more pleasant.
Le Mans Ultimate’s Early Access launch was the talk of the sim racing town without a shadow of a doubt. The official WEC game has a great basis in place already, but also a long list of rough edges that need to be streamlined. Additionally, the list of features and game modes is relatively short – check out our hands-on impressions to get a better overview over what LMU has to offer at the time of its early access launch.
The title does have numerous ways to improve your experience that are hardly explained – or, in some cases, not at all. To help with this, here are our top Le Mans Ultimate tips and hidden features! Be sure to also check the Le Mans Ultimate forum on RaceDepartment, as well as the brand-new LMU download section – since we figured it will only be a matter of time for the community to come up with custom content for the sim!
1 – Hotkeys
Now, you may know these already if you have played rFactor 2 frequently. For newcomers, however, these hotkeys can help you with numerous small issues or access to certain features.I – AI Takes Control Of Your Car
Driver changes are currently not in Le Mans Ultimate, so doing a full-length endurance race is out of the question for some. Unless you invite a friend or two over, you would have to sit in your rig for at least six hours by yourself, right?Note the little text box over the rev counter to the right – the AI has taken the wheel.
Well, not quite. While proper driver swaps are not there yet, it is possible for the AI to take control of your car at any time. You can simply hit the I key on your keyboard, even when you are in the middle of a turn, and you can immediately hop out of your seat. Want back in? Press I again to start a three-second countdown until the AI hands control back to you.
R – Instant Replay
Sim racers looking for an Instant Replay function in the pause menu will be without luck. That does not mean that the feature is not there, however: Pressing R at any point will start an instant replay. You can even change the length of the replay in the Gameplay Settings menu. Simply scroll down to Instant Replay – there, you can change the number of seconds up to 180, making three-minute replays possible.There is more use to the Instant Replay than just being able to see what just happened – more on that later!
Rear-facing cameras are nice and all, but the good ol’ Virtual Mirror is more helpful for most sim racers.
3 – Toggle Virtual Mirror
Unless you are running a triple screen setup, you will likely be unable to see the wing mirrors of most cars if your FOV is set correctly. Many a sim solves this problem via a virtual mirror that appears at the top of your screen so you know what is going on behind your car.Le Mans Ultimate does this as well. “But why can’t I find it?”, we hear you ask after digging through the menus for an hour. The option is indeed missing from the menus – but you can toggle the Virtual Mirror by simply pressing 3. Pressing it again will disable all mirrors, another press activates in-car mirrors, and one more adds the Virtual Mirror again.
2 – Take Screenshots in Replay Mode
Modern sims usually come with a photo mode these days. No such mode exists in Le Mans Ultimate, but there is another way for screenshot enthusiasts to perfectly frame their cars and scenarios – the Instant Replay is here to help.Simply go to the Controls Menu, then to the Camera tab. There, scroll down until you find the Free Camera entries. There, you can assign buttons to control a drone-like camera. Ideally, you will want to use a gamepad for this, as it provides the most intuitive handling. Make sure to assign a button for entering the Free Camera mode, standard for it is “U”. Similarly, you want to assign replay controls like play/pause, fast forward and rewind, which is possible in the controls menu.
After this, simply enter an Instant Replay, fast forward to the point you want to take a screenshot of, then hit the pause button. Now, you can enter the Free Camera mode and move it around, zoom and tilt the image as you please.
The caveat of this is that you will have the replay HUD on screen as well, which you would need to crop out. However, if you use the Watch option in any session, you can get a completely HUD-free shot – just wait for the “Freemove Enabled” textbox to disappear a few seconds after activating it. The usual photo mode controls like aperture, shutter speed, or focus distance do not come into play this way, but it is possible to create great-looking screenshots using this method. If you want to dig deeper, though, there are the Free Lens settings at the very bottom of the Camera controls menu. There, you can assign keys to change focus, aperture and exposure.
3 – Adjust In-Car Camera Movement
Since everyone’s preferences are different, some sim racers may want to adjust or completely disable the camera movement in cockpit camera. For some, a car bouncing up and down on screen while everything else – rig, seat, wheel – is stationary around them can cause a feeling of being disconnected from the car. Looking for adjustment sliders in the camera menu will not get you far, though.But hold on just a minute before you proceed to pull your hair out and dive into the process of editing config files. The option is there – just not where you would expect it to be. It is in the entirely logical Calibrate tab of the Controls settings under the Steering Settings headline. Obviously.
4 – Triple Screen Setup
While VR is not in Le Mans Ultimate yet, Ultrawide Monitors and Triple Screens are supported. There were no options to adjust the game to your Triple setup, at launch, however. Interestingly, the rFactor 2 Triple Screen Widget still popped up if you pressed CTRL and ‘ – it did not work in the release version, though.However, the hotfix released the day after launch included the multi-view tool, accessible by pressing CRTL+Shift+=. If you do not have the "=" key on its own (on a German keyboard layout, for instance), the key is "`"instead.
There is another way to adjust LMU to your Triple Screen setup. You can edit the config_dx11.ini file – or you can simply copy and paste the same file from your rFactor 2 installation, should you have one. Your rF2 Triple Screen settings will carry over to LMU without a problem this way.
5 – Set Sliders & Values Quicker
Le Mans Ultimate’s menus hold many adjustable values and sliders. By clicking on them, they are usually only changed in increments of 1 – which means adjusting things can take a long time. There is a way to speed things up, though.Instead of left-clicking, use a right click to increase or decrease the values by increments of 10. This can come in very helpful when adding or removing larger amounts of fuel in your car’s setup, for instance.
6 – Set Up Private Test Sessions
With LMU’s limited scope of Game Modes, a Time Trial or Free Practice mode are amiss. This means that you will always hit the track with AI opponents on it, potentially ruining your laps or being in the way of trying certain things. Or does it?A simple, unassuming option may be your best friend here. Once you are at the Event Settings screen of a Race Weekend, click Advanced Options. A list of options for all three session greets you, and both Practice and Qualifying can be switched to Private sessions. That way, you get all of the nice racing circuit that you paid for to yourself.
This method can serve as a workaround or replacement for the missing Free Practice or Time Trial modes. Should you not feel like doing a race, simply set up a very long, private practice session, and you are good to go.
7 – Shift To Neutral Immediately
All cars in Le Mans Ultimate feature sequential gearboxes, meaning you go up and down through the gears using shifter paddles on the wheel. Shifting down from first gear usually engages neutral, eliminating the need to keep the clutch in when stationary.But say you spin off the track and want to get going or engage reverse gear as quickly as possible. Would it not be neat not having to go down to neutral all the way from seventh gear in the most extreme case? LMU has you covered.
There are two ways to immediately jump to neutral from any gear. The most obvious one is that you can simply assign a key to do this, completely eliminating the need to click your paddles multiple times before having the desired gear.
If you do not have any more buttons to assign functions to, there is another way, however. Enabling the “Use Simultaneous Shift Up & Down Neutral Activation” setting in Wheel Settings (Settings – Controls – Calibrate, then scroll down) as well as the “Stop Sequential Shift To Neutral if Neutral Configured” option allows you to simply pull on both shifter paddles at the same time to go to neutral. Very handy, we think!
Also note the “smile” instruction below the camera facing the driver.
8 – Track Maps In Certain Cars
Ideally, you know the track you are racing on by heart. But even then, it can sometimes be helpful to have a track map handy – and some Le Mans Ultimate cars help you out with that. For instance, the Oreca 07 LMP2 car has a prominent track map clearly visible near the top of the cockpit. This even changes with the circuit you are racing at, so it is not just decoration.Do you know any more useful Le Mans Ultimate tips or hidden features? Let us know on Twitter @OverTake_gg or in the comments below!
