British motorsport company Prodrive has revealed its new, exclusive driving rig which will become available to customers later this year.
Officially known as the “Prodrive Racing Simulator”, the rig is a collaboration between Prodrive and design and engineering brand Callum. That’s quite the heritage for any product.
Prodrive is probably best known as the team behind Subaru’s World Rally Championship campaigns — winning six team and driver titles — but also ran the British American Racing team in F1, Lewis Hamilton’s X44 Extreme E team, developed the Le Mans-winning Aston Martin Vantage GTE car, and prepared the Isle of Man lap record-holding Impreza.
Callum is a design studio created by Ian Callum, formerly the design lead at Jaguar Land Rover. Callum has been responsible for a number of iconic designs, working on the Aston Martin Vanquish and DB9, the Jaguar F-Type and I-Pace, and the original Ford Puma and RS200 Group B rally car.
The Prodrive Racing Simulator was designed to be part driving rig, part sculpture. Prodrive chairman David Richards commented that the idea was to have “something you would be proud to have on display in your home like a grand piano, rather than tucked out of the way”.
As a result, the rig consists of a birch external structure, comprising 16 layers of wood and finished with a gloss black lacquer — very much like a grand piano, although tipped on one end.
Inside this is a carbon monocoque which looks to be suspended in the middle of the birch shell by what we hope are pretty substantial fixings front and rear. That’ll likely be excellent for sound isolation, although it may result in a weight limit for occupants of the Cobra Nogaro Street seat.
As for hardware, the PRS comes with a custom PC which combines an unspecified 12GB GeForce RTX graphics card and 16GB of DDRAM, preloaded with Assetto Corsa. The output is displayed on a curved, 49-inch AOC AG493UCX2 monitor, with 5K resolution and 165Hz refresh/1ms response time.
You’ll drive the rig with a Prodrive-branded Precision Sim LM-Pro wheel, attached to a Simucube 2 Pro direct drive base. There’s also an electrically adjustable mechanical pedal box of unstated origin, and a set of Bowers & Wilkins PX7 headphones.
Naturally the rig comes at quite a price, listed at £39,000 before local taxes and delivery — in the region of $58,000. However as part of that outlay, customers will be invited to Prodrive’s headquarters in Banbury, Oxfordshire, for a tour of the facilities and a test-drive of the rig. Prodrive will also install the simulator in the customer’s own home.
You can register your interest on the official site, and first deliveries are scheduled for later this year.
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