Castrol Blends VR & Reality ‘Matrix-style’ with Titanium Gamer

Castrol and Need for Speed pit a professional gamer and a professional driver against each other in race like no other.

Video game companies are currently doing an incredible job of capturing the feel and excitement of car racing. Diving into a modern driving game brings us everything but the actual sensation of moving. However, Castrol and Need for Speed created a promotional video called “Titanium Gamer,” and found a way to see if that “seat of the pants” tactility of racing a real car is transferrable back into a video game. Sounds pretty crazy, right?

Well believe it or not, they actually raced a car using the traditional arcade-style view (fed from an attached camera and gimbal on the trunklid) from behind the wheel of the car—and it worked.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

So, how is this possible, you ask? Titanium Gamer features a specifically-modified Mustang and two professionals with very different skill-sets. Theo Thomas makes his living playing racing video games and Luke Woodham is a professional drifter.

To create the crossover between video game and real driving, the Mustang is raced on a time attack stage. However, their Mustang has completely blacked out windshields and windows. That forces the competitors to drive only using a screen that shows the view of the Mustang from a camera mounted both behind and above the car.

The big kicker is that the time-attack stage isn’t just a bunch of cones in a big car park. Instead, the race takes place on a twisting dirt road that features a very real pinch point. Putting video game players into real cars to race isn’t new, but this twist is compelling. As an experience, it looks like a surreal and nerve-wracking way to drive a car. As Thomas points out, “There’s no reset button.”

Check out the behind the scenes video below:

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Ian Wright

Ian Wright has been a professional writer for two years and is a regular contributor to Corvette Forum, Jaguar Forum, and 6SpeedOnline, among other auto sites.

His obsession with cars started young and has left him stranded miles off-road in Land Rovers, being lost far from home in hot hatches, going sideways in rallycross cars, being propelled forward in supercars and, more sensibly, standing in fields staring at classic cars. His first job was as a mechanic and then trained as a driving instructor before going into media production.

The automotive itch never left though, and he realized writing about cars is his true calling. However, that doesn’t stop him from also hosting the Both Hand Drive podcast.

Ian can be reached at bothhanddrive@gmail.com