Ford Motorhome Gets F1 Engine Swap, Races 19 Opponents in the French RV Grand Prix

This mod was created back in 2018 by Gary Paterson, and it has been used by other sim racers before. Even famous YouTuber Jimmy Broadbent has experimented with this chassis as he raced it against other opponents at Brands Hatch.

And if you've been following RV Month here on Autoevolution, you might have noticed the silly yet exciting challenges we've gone through with this mod so far. It was exactly a week ago that we pushed the limits of our virtual Ford RV yet again.

We tried different F1 engine setups on the RV, trying to set a fast lap time around Paul Ricard. While the older V12s didn't have enough grunt for the big motorhome, we found that either a Lotus 98T or Ferrari F2004 swap worked just fine.

On the next day, we decided to live the NASCAR experience, and that was the first official race for our Ford vehicle. Thinking about the Formula 1 French Grand Prix this weekend, we thought we'd give it a go too. A few test laps in, we realized there's a problem with Assetto Corsa's replay system.

It would only record 1 minute and 11 seconds of any given run. But that wasn't going to be something we couldn't solve with the help of Google. The replay file size is limited in its default setting to 26 MB. In your Assetto Corsa CFG folder, there is a file called "replay.ini."

After you double-click it, adjust the max file size to 2,600 MB, and you'll be good to go. We once again tweaked the opponents' strength to 100% and their aggression to 93%. Things can get quite messy right after the start of the race, so you'd better proceed with caution.

But somehow, we managed to overtake all of our 19 competitors by the end of lap 1. Flying past them is quite fun, especially if you're doing it on a narrow section of the track. But once you're in the lead, there's no more competition. So we needed to find a solution to make things more exciting.

As we were trying to find out why the AI is so slow, most people just recommended going up against real players online. Seeing that it's not so easy to find 19 people who want to drive a Ford RV on a Formula 1 track, we needed a different solution.

Using Assetto Corsa's Content Manager, the Grid Type option will let you choose between "Same Car," "Random Car," and "Custom Car." So we thought it could be a cool idea to race against other Formula 1 cars. This would be quite a challenging endeavor, so we took some pre-race precautions.

And no, we didn't fiddle with the setup of the RV any further. But we added a wide variety of F1 cars to give us a fighting chance. We chose two or more cars from each era:

• 1954 12-cylinder Maserati 250F (310 hp and 1,477 lbs/670 kg)
• 1967 Ferrari 312 (390 hp and 1,208 lbs/548 kg)
• Lotus 72D from 1970 (440 hp and 1,212 lbs/550 kg)
• 1975 Ferrari 312T (495 hp and 1,336 lbs/606 kg)
• 1988 McLaren MP4/4 (675 hp, 1,190 lbs/540 kg)
• 1997 Williams FW19 (755 hp and 1,157 lbs/525 kg)
• Ferrari F2004 (865 hp and 1,333 lbs/605 kg)
• 2013 Ferrari F138 (763 hp and 1,415 lbs/642 kg)

We were down three opponents at this point, so we chose to throw in the mix one more F1-powered RV and the ludicrous Renault Espace F1 too. With mechanical damage set at 50%, we would need to fight these opponents for a total of three short but intense laps starting from the back of the grid.

Right off the bat, we were shocked to see that even the Espace F1 was much faster. We finished the race in P17, ahead of the other RV and the two Maserati cars from 1954. It looks like virtual Jacques Villeneuve won the race in the Williams FW19, while virtual Michael Schumacher was fourth overall. Somehow, we needed to make our RV go faster so that we could at least outrun the Renaults.

The most basic idea we could put into play was to select to input the same final drive value as the one on the F2004. Furthermore, we took the weight down to 1,333 lbs (605 kg). If that doesn't do the trick, we don't know what will. If anything, it was now worse than it was before.

Let's switch to AWD, go back to the original weight, and increase torque by 50%. The RV seems a lot faster, but a flat tire got the better of us. One more run reveals the cruel truth: this RV is going to need a lot more tweaking before it can keep up with a virtual F1 car!