The ground-scraping spacecraft of a car you’re looking at here is the Team Fordzilla P1, a virtual racer commissioned by Ford and created (in a way) by gamers to mark the start of Gamescom, one of the biggest events on the gaming calendar.
‘Fordzilla’ is the name of the Ford-themed Assetto Corsa racing community, Assetto Corsa being a highly competitive online racing game. It’s currently hosting a Lamborghini Huracan eSports tournament, for instance, run by Lamborghini itself.
Members of the community were asked to vote on various elements of both the design and the drivetrain, with around around 220,000 votes cast by the end. That was all fed back to Ford of Europe’s design team, more than a dozen of whom, we’re told, worked on the thing in their spare time, albeit led by Ford’s Design Director Amko Leenarts.
The P1 won’t remain a rendering, either. Ford is actually going to build this thing. Only a scale model, sure, but it’ll be made and revealed in time to provide PR backing for the car’s inclusion in a future racing title, although what isn’t clear. Gran Turismo 7 though, surely? At some stage we’ll find out what the virtual drivetrain of the thing is too. No doubt it’ll be an electric car with liberal use of the word ‘EcoBoost’, again for PR and marketing purposes.
Speaking at a virtual launch event for the P1, refreshingly honest Ford boss Jim Farley said: “We’re not in a lot of forms of racing now, intentionally, but we invested heavily in the likes of Ken Block, producing media for enthusiasts. And I believe the virtual world is the most important area for us to develop new thinking that applies to our production vehicles.
“I wouldn’t say I’d expect to sell a bunch of vehicles because we’re in virtual racing. I’d turn it around and say that just as we invested in motorsports all those years ago because we wanted to make better vehicles, it’s the same nowadays with virtual. The digital experience in vehicles has become perhaps the most important differentiator these days.
“So we didn’t do this to try to lower our average customer age or create a different attraction to the brand; I think the gaming community would see through that in a nanosecond. It’s more authentic than that. It’s about listening to a group of people who have different criteria for their vehicle selection. And to be a relevant brand in the future, that’s what a 100-year-old company does. It’s constantly reinventing itself. I’m really as excited about the brand coming alive in the virtual world as I am our physical products.”
Keyword: Video game squad designs mad Ford hypercar