Following a landmark summer that saw the game achieve record daily and concurrent player numbers with its Version 1.0 launch, the latest update delivers significant new content with the addition of European Le Mans Series and features that expand both the scope and accessibility of the title. Here’s everything you need to know about our next release on 23rd September…

European Le Mans Series joins the grid!

We announced it alongside the ACO in June but we are already here with it’s first installment. In this release we are unlocking the ELMS race weekend format for all players on the tracks that are released and available so far. All players will also be receiving (for FREE) access to ELMS liveries and the unrestricted LMP2 car that races in ELMS – which has also been revisited on the physics side. Additionally, so you can see the difference when on track and in the menus, we’ve added a new LMP2 icon for the faster specification to the UI to make things a bit clearer which specification of car is racing.

ELMS DLC will have 3 packs – each with 1 car and 1 track. This will also be available in a Season Pass format for a discount which will automatically unlock as we release the packs. Pack 1 will be available on 23rd September, alongside this update, Pack 2 is expected before the end of the year and Pack 3 will be in the first quarter of 2026.

The price will be £8.99 / €9.99 / $11.99 per pack but it will also be available in Season Pass at £21.99 / €24.99 / $28.99 with a further 10% launch discount for a limited time only.

So what’s in Pack 1? We are delighted to welcome Silverstone – ELMS is visiting the iconic British circuit for the first time since 2019 and will prove an incredible circuit for these cars and this series. As always, this is an officially licensed and laser scanned track, created with utmost love, care and attention. You should expect no less from a simulation.

As ELMS races from the classic “National” pitlane, this is the variation you’ll find upon release but we’re happy to confirm that we will be adding the Grand Prix pitlane option as well as the National and International shorter layouts in a future update. Additionally, the tracks in the game that ELMS already races at will receive a boost to 44 car grids in a later release.

The first of three LMP3 cars coming in the ELMS pack is the Ligier JS P325 – the latest and most modern of this class out available for racing in this category. Featuring a 3.5L Toyota V6 Bi Turbo outputting 470 bhp this car is a wonderful example of modern prototype engineering and will no-doubt create some memorable on track experiences. We really hope you enjoy this new class and series in Le Mans Ultimate.

Custom Livery Improvements & LiveryHub

We have been delighted to see the response to the custom livery feature we added in June with over 93,000 uploaded so far but it’s time to up the ante. In this release we are bring a number of great new additions.

Firstly, it is now possible to drive and view your livery in a single player Race Weekend session. No longer do you need to load into an online lobby to take pretty pictures of your wonderful creation or race it against other icons in a recreated 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans for example.

Additionally, we’re pleased that custom numbers are now working and that you can use liveries on every server – including practice servers and hosted servers without entry lists – making league hosting more flexible than before.

Finally, thanks to our partners at SimGrid we’re presenting to you for the first time the ability to share and add liveries to your team via the “LiveryHub”. Here creators can set their liveries to “public” and then add some tags for visibility. You can then search and find liveries you like to you your team which will then be automatically available in game.

For those of you new to the custom liveries feature, you do need to be a RaceControl Pro or Pro+ subscriber which pays for the maintenance of the infrastructure we use to create the UI imagery on-the-fly and transfer the liveries automatically to all players. We also need to moderate the service as part of our license commitments.

Regional Hosted Servers

Good news league racers – we’re adding server locations! So far all servers have been located in our European server farms which, in some cases despite our industry leading netcode, causes some issues particularly when multiple racers are far away from the server which can cause some latency due to the unfortunate laws of physics.

Therefore, we are adding new options for servers in Asia and North America, alongside the existing European default location. You can now select this when setting up your server on racecontrol.gg or on SimGrid. The investment you make in us, means we’re able to push this back into scaling our service.

More Driver Swaps!

We know you’ve been enjoying the first driver swap events – it’s really pleasing to get “real world” testing and scale in multiple splits across multiple time zones. Thank you all for your feedback, we’ve noted your comments and will continue to work to refine this complicated game mode.

We do however know you have been missing the “engineer mode” which had been temporarily removed due to some frustrating issues.

We’re happy to confirm this will be available in the next Driver Swap race – the 6 Hours of Fuji available on 3rd, 4th and 5th October. More details available soon.

Additional Improvements

Car select has been tidied up once again – we realised that the year filter was getting in the way of finding your favourites. We have also added in icons to easily see cars that are in your virtual garage so you don’t mindlessly click around when you first download the game to see what content you own.

Fans of TrackIR can now rejoice – it has been added to the sim natively. We hope you’ll make the most of it to check your blindspots…

We are also very pleased to be adding Simplified Chinese language option as well. Huge thanks to Xudong – one of our community members who spearheaded this project and passed it over to our team to implement. We hope the growing LMU Chinese community will be excited to access the game in their native language. We are just getting started with the ramping up of localised languages so watch this space.

We will also be making some changes to the sizes of the Driver Rank brackets. Silver has been smaller than the other brackets, which has made changes in rating from race to race seem much bigger than they actually are. The effect of this is it is likely when we deploy this update that drivers ranked Silver 2 or above will move down compared to where they are currently.

Of course, as always that isn’t everything – make sure you read the full release notes when they get posted.

What’s next for LMU?

We’re working hard at a number of things here, as always. You now know of course that more ELMS content will come pack-by-pack and we expect the next car and track to release before the end of the year.

We are still working on the “career mode” but nothing that we can share at this time.

For the next release, we’ve got a number of online rules related features to help stamp out the worst offenders – in the meantime keep reporting players for deliberate collisions in Daily Races and for racing incidents only in Online Championships. We are adding more resources here as we know you value LMU as one of the premier online sim racing titles.

We are also aware that you’re waiting to host your own team endurance races, we are targeting hosted team endurance races in the next release as well.

Message from the studio

Stephen Hood, CEO of Motorsport Games & Head of Studio 397 said – “We are extremely excited to be adding another endurance series with the European Le Mans Series with even more tracks and a new class of racing. We’re excited to see if players enjoy this as much as we have during its development.”