Lately, there’s been something of an arms race happening between sim racing titles, and we don’t mean whose biceps can withstand the most torque through their direct-drive wheel. The likes of Le Mans Ultimate, iRacing, and Gran Turismo 7 have spent years trying to outdo each other at the exact same thing: track racing simulation.
While those titles squabble over who’s better at tire carcass temperature modeling and who’s got the best laser-scanned version of Spa-Francorchamps’ drainage gutters, Kunos Simulazioni has gone rogue with Assetto Corsa Evo. Sure, it’s still going for the highest levels of realism, but with the addition of free roam mode, it’s giving you a completely fresh way to enjoy all the complex physics. In short, it’s giving you a space to go for a drive.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
The idea began as far back as the late ’90s, when studio founder Marco Massarutto was a young gamer with a very rational fear of online lobbies. “When I started to get involved in sim racing,” he tells TG at Sim Racing Expo 2026, “it was with Grand Prix Legends at the end of the ’90s.
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“I spent almost one year training offline before making my first multiplayer race, because I was scared. ‘I don’t want to ruin the race for anyone,’ ‘maybe I’m not good enough,’ et cetera. The very first race, my hands were sweating. I was so emotional.”
Flash-forward a couple of decades to the release of Assetto Corsa, the debut release from Massarutto’s Kunos Simulazioni studio and a haven for modders looking to craft their own driving experiences on top of Kunos’ realistic physics foundation. The team noticed that players weren’t just making new race circuits and vehicles, but much larger, open areas, too. And they wouldn’t race the roads there. They’d just...drive them.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
“What really caught my attention was that the people driving these free roam roads were behaving correctly,” he shares. “Using the light indicators. They were actually driving and simulating the right way of driving, not just a Need for Speed style thing.”
In that moment, Massarutto realized it wasn’t just him who was apprehensive about enrolling as the sacrificial lamb in an online race lobby. There were plenty of sim racing fans out there who wanted the fantasy of owning and driving rare and exotic vehicles, but wanted to express that fantasy as a joyride rather than a quest for purple sectors.
And so Assetto Corsa Evo’s free roam mode was born. Partly inspired by the original AC community’s non-competitive creations and partly born of the Kunos head’s vision for a different kind of in-game driving experience, free roam captures a vast swathe of Germany’s Eifel region and simply lets you loose in it. There are activities and objectives dotted around on its roads, like time trials and sightseeing, but the point here is that you set your own missions. Either solo, or in co-op.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
What’s striking is how accurately scaled it all is. The height of the roadside curbs. The tight parking spaces in its towns and villages. The seat-troublingly narrow lanes, and the tight squeeze required when a lorry’s coming the other way.
It feels like the conclusion of an idea Gran Turismo set forth back in its PS2 days when it introduced oil changes and the car wash. These mundane tasks were of little consequence and were basically just busywork, on the face of it. But they went a long way towards fulfilling an ownership fantasy. You weren’t just racing your cars, but maintaining them, too.
And that’s how free roam feels. It feels like owning your car, and deciding to simply take it out for a drive. Imagine owning a Ferrari F40, not losing sleep about putting mileage on it, and living just near the Nordschleife. That’s the dream this mode makes real.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
But it was almost so different. While the mode itself had been on Kunos’ minds for years, the location was far from locked in.
“At the beginning, the idea was to place it in Italy. We needed to have something that is beautiful from a visual point of view. So we thought, ‘Let’s choose a place where we have the seaside, the hills, the mountains, everything else.’ And we located that place in Tuscany. At the Argentario.”
However, the devs soon identified a problem with that plan: “We said okay, fine, but what do you actually do there? You go from the restaurant to a pizzeria. You see the seaside, then there’s nothing. There’s no gameplay.”
During Massarutto’s travels to Germany’s Eifel mountains, though, the best candidate for free roam’s setting became obvious. Being based in Rome, it takes 45 minutes to get out of the city and onto the more drivable country roads. But in the vicinity of the Nordschleife, it’s nothing but great views and twisties.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
“I said to myself, first of all, I should come live here because this is paradise,” he says. “The winter is quite cold there, but the roads are unbelievable.” And second, it’s the ideal free roam location. “It’s the only place in the world where you can find beautiful roads everywhere, and in the middle of it all is the best track ever made.”
And in order to capture it, the studio gathered 1,600sqm of data from the Eifel region. Not all of it was usable data that would make for enjoyable driving, so after some refinement, a 1,100sqm region was created with 400sqm of playable area. That’s bigger than Manhattan. Or, to put it another way, “two and a half times the size of GTA 6.”
Free roam’s earliest incarnation is already live and playable in Evo’s Early Access release, with plenty more real estate and functionality coming down the pipeline. But what’s most exciting about it is that Kunos clearly understands the best racing sim isn’t just the one that gets brake temperatures the most correct; it’s the one that makes you feel like you’re inside a car, living an ownership fantasy as well as a racing one.
PHOTO BY TopGear.com
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made