2022 BTCC Liveries, BOP Updates Coming Before Xmas, TOCA Hybrid Coming 2023 To rFactor 2

Studio 397 today announced that the 2022 British Touring Car Championship liveries will be coming to the simulation alongside the already-released 2021 set. Not only that, but they’ll be updating the balance of performance among the manufacturers and updating the tire parameters with new information fresh from their recently announced partnership with Goodyear tires. These items are expected before Christmas, on December 21, 2022, in what the studio are calling a ‘2022 Q4 Bonus Pack’.

Announced for Q1 2023 is TOCA Hybrid, a system that the real-life series uses. Until now the simulation has used existing ‘push to pass’ features, but will properly simulate the system with this future release.

Full text of the announcement:

Hello sim racers,

With our (almost) complete field of British Touring Car Championship vehicles now in your virtual racing garages, it’s time to give the cars a fresh lick of paint, and bring our expanding grid right up to date and into the most recent season of racing. With this new release scheduled for just a few short days time, we will add the full 2022 BTCC liveries to the simulation alongside the already available 2021 set, as well as a brand-new Balance of Performance and updates to the existing Goodyear touring car tyres.

2022 Liveries

This is, of course, the most visually noticeable part of the new update. In motorsport, the livery of a team is one of the most important aspects of the overall branding experience, the way that each team and car can differentiate themselves on the grid, in front of the fans, and the TV coverage beamed into thousands of households around the world. In the British Touring Car Championship, unlike in series such as Formula One for example, the liveries of the various teams are even more important, as often you find very different designs and sponsors on the cars each year, sometimes even between each event!

For this update, we have brought the full collection of the most recent designs into the simulation, separating the 2021 and 22 seasons in the main UI, so our players have the opportunity to recreate whichever season they desire within the rFactor 2.

Working closely with the teams to ensure maximum visual proximity to the real world, each car has been fully recreated to represent how it looked during the season that has just passed, including specific driver variations (of which they were a lot!), to really help bring to life the beautiful look and feel of the 2022 British Touring Car Championship year. From the all new West Surrey Racing design at BMW, to the stunning NAPA Racing UK livery of reigning champion Ash Sutton, the grid looks outstanding – and soon you can drive them all yourselves!

Balance of Performance (BOP)

As we continue to expand our BTCC offering in rFactor 2, this end of year bonus drop provides us with the opportunity to perform a detailed Balance of Performance across the 2021 and 2022 grid. Working just like in real life, the BOP has been developed in order to present a certain amount of parity between the various different types of BTCC car in rFactor 2. This doesn’t mean the cars carry the same characteristics, far from it, however it does mean that, just like in real life, no matter the model picked, drivers should still have a reasonable chance to score top results in any given race.

Now of course the cars of the BTCC differ greatly throughout the grid, so some circuits will certainly favour a particular model or drive type, however with this new update and refreshed tyre model, the difference between choices has been vastly reduced, leaving it up to the driver to extract the ultimate pace of the car.

Of course, as always with things like a Balance of Performance, we wouldn’t be surprised if further tweaks are required in the future as more people get to experience these new cars, but for now at least, things such be much closer between the front rear-wheel drive cars of the series.

TOCA Hybrid – Coming Q1 2023

2022 was a big year for the British Touring Car Championship, with the introduction of hybrid proving to be one of the most significant rule changes of the NGTC specification regulation era. Unlike in other forms of racing, Hybrid in the BTCC acts as more of a traditional boost button type of power deployment, something that both decreases the overall lap time of the cars, and introduces an interesting strategic dynamic for attacking and defending within a race.

For the initial launch of the BTCC cars, Studio 397 utilized the existing ‘Push to Pass’ feature within the sim, however, as we now get very close to realizing the full 2021/22 BTCC field, 2023 will see us take the opportunity to develop a fully fleshed out hybrid functionality for these cars – adding another important aspect of immersion and simulation to this already outstanding set of vehicles. The TOCA Hybrid system is something many of you have been looking forward to seeing, and trust us when we say, we can’t wait to get Hybrid in its many forms introduced into the sim as well! We anticipate the TOCA Hybrid system, as well as the remaining BTCC cars will be introduced as part of the Q1 2023 content drop and update, so not long left to wait now…