McLaren makes a real-life flick book

"This project was ambitious but... not so rubbish," says Tanner Foust, TG USA host, racer extraordinaire, and driver of the world's fastest camera car - the modified McLaren MP4-12C that created this astonishing flick book.

The film was created by placing 680 aluminium boards printed with grabs from real Forza 5 gameplay, placed exactly six inches apart, on the side of Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Alabama. Tanner was then told to drive past them at fiendishly precise speeds with a £93,330 camera on the back, creating this ambitious, stunning petrol-powered flick book.

Director, Jeff Zwart, says, "In creating this I felt like I'd turned the camera inside out. But there was a lot of science in working out how we'd get it to work. Different sections of the track required different speeds - 80mph, 100mph, and 120mph - but it wasn't as simple as just hitting the speeds. You had to get there and stay there,"

Tanner adds, "All the science behind it was very exact. Exact frame rate, measuring the exact distance between the boards, and hitting exact speeds. The McLaren was ideal. It's classy in the way it makes ridiculous speed, and the suspension's really smooth.

"If we'd used a Porsche, the visibility would have been too bad for me to see what was going on with the boards, if we'd used a Lambo the brutal shifting would have snapped the camera off. This is a scientific car, and I needed to apply a lot of difficult science to make the film, so it was perfect."

As Tanner says, "this was the sort of cocktail napkin idea that never comes to pass because it's incredibly involved. And it would've been very easy to do it in CGI, but we did 100 per cent for real and it's very, very cool."

Like it TopGear.commers? And has it whetted your appetite for Forza 5, a launch title for Xbox One, out November 22? Don't forget Top Gear is in it too...

UPDATE: Want your very own slice of Forza Filmspeed pie? Well, we've got three examples of the artwork featured in the video to give away - and they're signed by Tanner himself. Head over to Top Gear's Facebook page for a chance to win... (Limited to US, CAN, UK, ROI).