FEATURE
How The Nordschleife in ASSETO CORSA COMPETIZIONE was built.
With over 20 kilometres of winding tarmac in the German mountains, the Nürburgring is the most loved, and feared, track in all of motorsport. However, digitally recreating this unique track has proven difficult for countless developers. Now, KUNOS Simulazioni thinks it has nailed it with the launch of the Nordschleife in Assetto Corsa Competizione.
Since launching in 2018, the most requested addition to Assetto Corsa Competizione has been the iconic Nordschleife track. With the Nürburgring GP circuit, a shorter more traditional racetrack at the same location, already being in the game, many assumed that adding in the Nordschleife (‘north loop’) would be a natural next step. However, there was one sticking point; SRO, the real-life racing championship that ACC is a simulation of, didn’t race on the Nordschleife.
“That was the only reason,” says Marco Massurutto, co-founder of ACC developer KUNOS Simulazioni. “SRO included the Nordschleife in their calendar [this year] and before then, it was not included in the calendar. So actually, we weren’t allowed to include a track that is not in the championship. Of course, people asked the most for the Nordschleife from the very first day and our reply was, ‘The day when SRO will include it in the calendar, you will get it.’ Eventually, we did it.”
But the process of getting to this point wasn’t quite as smooth as you might have imagined. Despite being a partner of the SRO championship and mirroring the competition as closely as possible for years, KUNOS wasn’t given a heads up about the announcement of the Nordschleife being added, meaning the studio found out at the same time as everyone else in early July 2023. At this point the team was working on another DLC pack, adding GT2 cars and the Red Bull Ring circuit to ACC and what we now know as Asseto Corsa Evo, a new game in the series that is due to arrive later this year.
“As you can imagine, when we have more than one project in progress, you have a timescale that you define far in advance the tasks you are going to do,” says Massurutto. “This news about the Nordschleife surprised us at KUNOS as much as any other person, because SRO, didn’t tell us in advance. So we had a meeting, a ten-minute meeting, to decide what to do. [It was a] ten-minute meeting because in the end, we can’t ignore the Nordschleife. Certainly, it is changing our working schedule, but we can’t complain because the experience of driving in Competizione on the Nürburgring, it’s quite amazing.”
BUILDING AN ICON
With the decision made that it would bring the Nordschleife to ACC, the team got to work straight away on building what has to be the mos
