When we first heard about Endurance Motorsport Series back in February 2024, the trailer and initial information left quite a few questions. We’ve now learned more, courtesy of a hands-on experience with the title and an interview with Alain Jarniou, creative director at developer KT Racing, during Big Ben Week in Paris.
EMS made its debut with the tagline “race as a driver, win as a team,” teasing the ability to not just drive the car but also manage the race from the pit wall. As it turns out, this didn’t quite do the game’s underlying principle justice, as this functionality is available as an on-the-fly switch in both single-player and multiplayer game modes.
“With our team, we used to go to the 24 Hours of Le Mans every year,” explains Jarniou. “We see that there is no game, in fact, that really captures this feeling of endurance.”
“It’s not like in Formula One, where it’s one driver, the hero of the team. In endurance, it’s three drivers and engineers, and it’s also about long races. If we want to create this feeling for the players, it’s different from what we’re used to seeing in racing games.”
“The idea is to work on the notion of team. We want people who go to the 24 Hours of Le Mans or watch it on TV to feel they are truly in a team, to feel that they are genuinely participating in this kind of competition.”
Accordingly, there are different roles in EMS — in fact, three, though one is still under wraps for a couple of months — with players able to participate in races as a Driver or Engineer, or indeed both, at any time during the race.
The driving role should be pretty familiar if you’re reading GTPlanet. You’ll take the wheel of cars in a range of endurance-racing classes, from the GT3 category to P2 prototypes and Hypercars at the top of the tree. However, there is a notable change from the standard form here, as you’ll be driving with very little information.
“What we did is, when you are in the car, it’s not like other games; it’s like what a real driver sees in the car,” says Jarniou. “So, for example, you don’t have your position; you have to ask your engineer to tell you your position, like in real life. We want the driver to feel that they need their team: you need the team behind you.”
While you’re in the hot seat, the engineer is essentially a bot. You can request information from it by selecting from standard communications options, and it will also inform you of vital details like flags, the weather situation, and your pit strategy.
You can switch roles at literally any time with a single button hold. That takes you out of the driver’s seat, replacing you with an AI driver, and onto the pit wall with a dizzying array of screens. At the presentation event, this was replicated with a six-screen setup, mirroring the six screens you can jump in and out of as the engineer.
There’s a screen for instructing your AI team how to drive — by way of aggression, pace, and so on — as well as a weather map, live race cameras (for which you can select angles as you wish), pit selections for swapping tires and setups or enacting repairs, a leaderboard, and a live course map showing positions of all the cars. Of course, the driver now also communicates with you as an engineer, letting you know when they see spots of rain, and so on.
As you can have up to three cars in your team (made up of any combination of classes), there’s an Engineer for each of them, and any slot not currently filled by a human as driver or engineer is an AI.
We were curious how the AI performs when replacing you as a driver particularly — whether it can meet your standards — and our host described it as “competitive”. During the presentation we did spot that the drivers seem to have different abilities, with one listed as “nocturnal” that we assume is better at night, as well as ratings, but there’s more to come on this aspect in the near future.
That takes on an even more interesting dimension when multiplayer is brought into the mix, turning the game into an up-to-three-player co-op where any player can drive any of the team’s three cars and/or be a race engineer all at the same time.
“It means you can be up to three players, and everyone comes with their car, and you can do the race together. You can talk with your friends and say, ‘Okay, it’s going to rain, so guys just come back in the pit and we will change the tires,’” says Jarniou.
“And people will execute this strategy in real time, speak together, and win together. I think it’s quite new in the genre.”
“The idea is also, for example, I’m not a good driver. I make racing games for KT Racing, but I’m still not a good driver. Today, I can’t really play with one of my friends who is a very good driver.”
“It would be possible to play… with me mainly as an engineer. Sometimes I can take a drive, but mainly with two of my friends who are very good drivers, I will be the team manager and check everything and give good advice to my friends. We can play together and we can win together.”
That bridges the gap between players who really prefer management games and those who like to take the wheel for themselves, giving them the opportunity to participate in the same race together all at once, and stands to be a fascinating aspect of EMS.
You can, of course, stick with the single-player aspect, and there is a career mode involved, though more details will follow. There is, however, a progression system that will see you establish your HQ and build through challenges, races, and championships to unlock tracks, higher-tier car classes, and the ability to expand your team to a two- or three-car outfit. Even this is only as solitary as you want it to be.
“At any time, you can be joined by one of your friends and get a group of up to three players,” says Jarniou. “So you’re just playing and you can see that your friends are also playing, and if one of the players in the group launches a track, you can ask your friends to come with you.”
“They will play with you; it will help you progress, and they can also gain some points and some money.”
The driving itself is aimed more as a sim-lite experience, with Jarniou noting that while it’s not a pure simulation, there are detailed car setups. You can get a fun experience if you’re a cockpit-and-wheel player, turning all of the aids off, but it’s just as easy to play on a controller with the aids turned on.
We had a short test in both environments, and the BMW M4 GT3 was a little more tricky in the former than sitting on a stool with a (NACON Revolution) gamepad. While we’d need a bit more time with it — and it was a pre-alpha build — to get a proper impression.
As for cars, KT is planning to have 15 vehicles from different brands at launch. We’ve already seen the Alpine, BMW, Lamborghini, and Porsche hypercars, and Aston Martin, BMW, and Porsche GT3 cars. With the team staying pretty faithful to current top-tier endurance racing and noting the exciting time we’re in for the sport, we’re likely to see the remaining cars coming from expected quarters.
In circuit terms, there are planned to be 10 tracks coming at launch, interestingly made up of a 6:4 ratio of real tracks — we’ve seen Spa during the Big Ben Week build, with Monza and Le Mans also noted — to original circuits. “Some tracks are made by our team, but we try to be very, I would say, realistic.”
It all seems like an interesting proposition, and we’re going to hear plenty more about the title over the coming months. Endurance Motorsport Series will launch on PC and ninth-gen consoles in Q4 2025, and we’re going to be watching it pretty closely.
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