Assetto Corsa Competizione to debut this summer

You don't need to have barely scraped a C in GCSE Italian like we did to know that Competizione refers to competition, and that in the context of cars that means motorsport. The next Assetto Corsa game, scheduled to arrive as an 'early access' title on PCs this summer, will be squarely focussed on reproducing the real-life Blancpain GT Series in fastidious detail.

Long-time sim racing fans will already be feeling a tingling deep in their loins because the last game to dedicate itself to accurately simulating top level GT racing was the legendarily brilliant GTR 2, preserved in amber like a Jurassic Park mosquito all the way back in 2006. Chances are, at the very moment you're reading this, someone somewhere in the world is still turning laps in a howling Ferrari 550 Maranello in that seminal game.

Assetto Corsa Competizione: The Official Blancpain GT Series Game, to give it its full, headline-unfriendly title will pack in all the cars that feature in the series, including Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, on laser scanned reproductions of all the various circuits they visit. Both the Sprint and Endurance championships are represented, a combined calendar of 10 races including series centrepiece the Spa 24 hours.

A new game engine for the series means that particular twice-round-the-clock enduro will be absolutely authentic in a way that simply wasn't possible in the previous Assetto Corsa game. A proper day-night cycle means you'll be shielding your eyes as the sun sets on the Kemmel straight and a dynamic weather system will replicate Spa-Francorchamps' unpredictable climate. And by unpredictable, we mean it will almost certainly rain.

Single player racing and most of the cars should be in there when the game debuts in a work-in-progress state on PCs this summer, just like the original Assetto Corsa did. We're expecting only a couple of circuits to start with, including Spa, but for that to be fleshed out to the full calendar over the following months. There'll also be a new multiplayer mode, which sounds similar to iRacing and GT Sport's more organised online competition, arriving at some point before a full release.

So an officially licensed spiritual successor to GTR 2 but with state of the art simulation technology? To borrow the only other Italian word we remember from those torturous years of secondary school: bellissimo...