Prodrive Announce "THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SIMULATOR IN THE WORLD"

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Working together with legendary car designer Ian Callum, Prodrive announced a new high-class sim rig. You can reserve the package now for £39,000 excluding VAT, duties and shipping.

The Hardware & Software​

Stunningly, the entire rig is encased in a birch wood framing, painted black on the outside.

The Simulator will include a 12 GB VRAM Nvidia Graphics card. This means either a 2060, 3060, 3080 or 3080 Ti will be in the computer. Along that, 16 GB RAM will be available.

The included monitor will be a 49'' Dual QHD with a refresh rate of 165 Hz.

A Simucube 2 PRO powers a Precision Sim Engineering LM-PRO. The pedals are said to be electrically adjustable mechanical pedals. Presumably, those pedals would be designed by Prodrive itself.

The seat is a Cobra Nogaro Street in an upright seating position, allowing for a focus on GT and rally racing.

As an accessory, customers receive a Bowers & Wilkins PX7 headphone.

The PC will already be set up basically and include an Assetto Corsa installation.

If you decide to get one of these rigs, you are going to need a bit of space though. The entire thing is 3.3m long and 1.23m wide.

The Parties Involved​

Prodrive, the manufacturer of this beauty, is known for producing several championship-winning race cars, especially in rallies. Developing many rally cars with Subaru for names like Colin McRae or Petter Solberg, they are used to racing success.

More recently, Prodrive has been developing Dakar rally cars and GTE cars. They even won with Aston Martin Racing in 2017 and 2020 in the GTE Pro class.

Together with Ian Callum, they developed the new Prodrive Racing Simulator. Callum is known for designing cars like the Ford RS200, Aston Martin DB9 and Jaguar F-Type amongst many others.

Impressions​

Overall, the rig looks very well produced and stylish. If I had a good amount of money just lying around, I'd think about getting one myself. There is just one detail that seems off.

keyboard.jpg


The keyboard. It's meant to be in a side pocket. This means you cannot bind any of your keys to the keyboard without having to get it out every time. And given that the only push buttons assignable otherwise are 12 by number and on the wheel, some people might need to bind extra buttons.

I'd expect a nearly 40 grand rig to be at least completely functional and practical. And it just seems like "assigning extra buttons" was an afterthought of the design process. Practicality should still stay above beauty.

What are your thoughts on the Prodrive Racing Simulator? Are you planning on getting it? Let us know in the comments down below!
About author
Julian Strasser
Motorsports and Maker-stuff enthusiast. Part time jack-of-all-trades. Owner of tracc.eu, a sim racing-related service provider and its racing community.

Comments

Premium
"High-class"? Well, to me that says a lot about the mindset of those trying to sell this artsy piece of aerodynamically-bent wood as a simracing rig... 'coz a "simulator" it is not, semantically. Furthermore, good (especially expensive) design shall not fail at functional attributes that are essential to the user experience (like those already mentioned here before). And speaking of UX, if they had thought aesthetics more thoroughly (imho) they could have avoided a perpendicularly protruding oversized monitor and rather offer a top-of-the-line VR set, clad in the same wood of the rig's shell instead of plastic, of course. And to wrap it up, now properly speaking of "simulators", why not a multi-year subscription to iRacing with all content included instead of AC? Don't get me wrong, I love AC but for 40K all of iRacing seems to be the least you should expect to get, as a proper financial investment. And while we are at that, don't forget proper motion of course, like mentioned before as well... but that may break the pretty wood so... this will remain the "most beautiful" show-off piece of overpriced furniture ever been attached to simracing hardware, for the crypto/NFT tycoons I guess. Thonet would have been proud of the craftsmanship though. ;) Seriously, for big money I rather go for a second-hand Force Dynamics 301B. Now that thing was the most fun I ever had on a rig! :D

Oh well, my 39 cents.
 
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You could buy a Ginetta G40 and go club racing or run Assetto on this rig (that isn't even dynamic!). I feel like this rig is more for rich people who don't know what to waste their money on rather than a sim racer.
 
If I had money to burn I would still not waste it on anything like this. £40k is full motion rig money and also NO VR, NO SIM RIG!
 
You could buy a Ginetta G40 and go club racing or run Assetto on this rig (that isn't even dynamic!). I feel like this rig is more for rich people who don't know what to waste their money on rather than a sim racer.
There are a lot of companies entering the sim hardware market at the expensive end. It's clearly a pass time for people with money. I thought Jadier had a really interesting video showing how online racing dropped off every time there was a big race on. So there's a lot of cross over with some very well to do consumer bases.

Sim racers will be the target of marketing companies going forward. We'll see a lot of this kind of thing from companies trying to make a name for themselves. Make some overpriced piece of kit and it will spread like wildfire in the sim community.
 
This is an expensive piece of furniture which if you are an oligarch with a big villa or yacht you can add to one of the rooms. If you are a simracer or a racer in general this is not what you are looking for. Unless you are crazy of course.

Just to demonstrate that this thing has nothing to do with sim racing: the video shows a woman driving the BMW M3 E30 DTM (a manual gearbox "vintage" racecar) on the Highlands fictional road track using the GT3 wheel with paddles... OK.
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With £39,000, I could build a racing rig with 3090, 64GB memory, installed with every racing simulators. Then with the rest build a fully motion simulated system and get a samsung largest curved monitor. I bet there would still be plenty money left.
 
Thats the price tag for my next VW Polo GTI with the new 2.0l engine... I guess I stick with the car.
 
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This cockpit looks incredible and it kind of reminds me of the motion simulator rides from the theme parks.
 
Just an other example that the world we live in as lost all sense of value and more importantly values. It will not end well.
 
I got the quote wrong. RICH Corinthian Leather. Ricardo Montalban was used by Chrysler to sell a car. Ricardo went on to star in the 2nd Star Trek movie and stole a Starship named Reliant, which was the name of another Chrysler product. So I was interning at a Seattle Radio station and Leonard Nimoy called in to do a publicity interview for the movie. I answered the phone and had to stall him til the crew got ready. I asked him if the Captain's chair on the Reliant had Corinthian Leather and he laughed & said he'd ask. My one brush with fame.
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