Modders have turned one of racing's most hardcore sims into a Speed Racer game

I love Speed Racer, the Wachowski's kaleidoscopic family film which depicts a form of racing that's both a transcendent act of self-expression and an absurd, Wacky Races-style gauntlet around the coolest Hot Wheels track you've ever seen. The film was accompanied at the time by Speed Racer: The Videogame, a middling tie-in for the Wii. It deserved better.

Enter Assetto Corsa. The 2014 racing game is a staggeringly detailed simulation of real cars and racetracks, but it's also home to a vibrant modding community. Which I discovered when YouTube offered up a video titled "Insane Speed Racer mod" and didn't disappoint.

I love arcade racing games, but sims tend to be beyond my tolerance (unless they're about delivering freight across Europe). I have therefore never previously had any interest in playing Assetto Corsa until I saw the video above, at which point I immediately got it on Steam.

If you're now considering doing the same, I should warn you: all my dreams did not come true.

For a start, there is no "Speed Racer mod", as the YouTube video title suggests. There are instead two different mods: a T-180 mod which adds the vehicles from the movie with as-accurate-as-possible models, liveries and physics; and a Thunderhead Raceway mod which adds the primary track from the movie.

You'll then need to work out how to install them. Everyone will tell you to download Content Manager, which replaces Assetto Corsa's default launcher with one better equipped to handle the ecosystem of mods that has developed over the past twelve years. There's a Lite version, which is free, and a Full version, which I paid for but didn't need.

If you later visit the T-180 Discord, you'll find that they'll tell you to never under any circumstances use Content Manager's drag-and-drop installation to update or install the cars, after everyone else told you to do that, but take a deep breath and persevere. Doing things that way worked fine for me, and Content Manager also made it easy to install a Custom Shaders Patch (found under Settings) which proved essential to get the track to actually run.

Once installed, Content Manager lets you select the track, your car, other settings such as opponents and time of day, and then load directly into the race. I wish I could say that this was the moment when I yelled Go Speed Racer Go and did a sideways flip, but no. It turns out it's really difficult to drive a car at over 400km/h in a simulation game, even one where the physics have been re-wired to accommodate Speed Racer's rocket cars, corkscrew tracks, and impossible oversteer. What I actually did, over and over, was drive slowly around the first corner, crash off the track at the second, and fall through the ground, before automatically re-spawning in a sort of purgatorial no-cars-land in front of a PNG of a pitstop lollipop man.

I badly want to play the game or mod that gives me the experience shown in the video above. Perhaps, having watched it yourself, you are yelling at the screen: play Trackmania, Graham. I have! I have played many, many hours of Trackmania across many, many iterations. It's not quite it, though.

Do I have it in me to study this video tutorial, tweak my setup, and learn how to drive like Speed?

Probably not.