One of the things I love about video games, particularly racing games, is how they can serve as records of things: products, culture, industry, people, etcetera. Some cars are so exceedingly rare that the closest we can get to them are their digital manifestations, even if they were extremely inaccurate in older titles. That’s not a problem we have anymore, though. And thank goodness, because Project Motor Racing has just added one of the coolest—and arguably most important—tracks I’ve ever seen.
The racing sim’s new World Endurance Pack includes Fuji Speedway, but it hasn’t just brought the modern version you know well. It’s also throwing in the original incarnation of the circuit from 1966. This version has never been immortalized in a video game before, and actual footage of it in use is exceedingly rare today.
Fuji’s original layout featured the NASCAR-inspired, 30-degree-banked Daiichi (literally “first”) corner. Not only was Daiichi absolutely massive, but drivers dropped into it, following a blind crest at the end of the start/finish straight that must’ve felt like launching into the abyss.
This unsurprisingly proved quite dangerous, and a number of competitors tragically lost their lives around this part of the circuit. It’s said that Fuji’s grisly first turn also played a part in Japanese automakers canceling their Can Am programs in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
The first three corners were effectively chopped off for safety reasons after 1974, significantly shortening the lap and creating the trademark hairpin Turn 1 that we know today.
Other aspects have of course changed over the years. The old final corner used to be another long, fast right-hander, though it wasn’t banked. That first change, however, was the most drastic, and erased the greatest link to Fuji’s original pitch, as a NASCAR-backed stock-car haven in Japan. You can still visit the Daiichi banking—like Monza’s oval, it remains—but it’s eerily overgrown today.
It’s this track that is now playable in Project Motor Racing. Recreated in close collaboration with the Fuji International Speedway Company, which supplied archival assets of the ’60s-era venue for Straight4 Studios’ artists, this DLC helps players experience, even in a small way, a lost place and time. It’s somewhat poetic too, because if you know your gaming history, the very first real track ever to be featured in a video game was indeed Fuji Speedway, in 1982 via Namco’s Pole Position—though, by then, the banking was already ditched.
It’s uncanny to see this version of Fuji that did once exist, but hasn’t properly in over half a century, recreated with so much attention to detail. From the tents to the spectators, original pit complex, catch fencing, and the way the course parts the hills, PMR’s rendition feels carefully crafted and alive. The only thing it’s really missing are those gigantic, multi-story advertising boards that used to line circuits back then. Here’s to revisiting history through games, and let’s see more classic versions of these hallowed grounds of motorsport in racing sims, please.
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