Okay, so, Le Mans Safety Car 2024, right? I figured, why not try and recreate something similar in a sim? It’s been bugging me since I saw the real thing.
First things first: finding a suitable base car. I spent ages scrolling through the available cars in Assetto Corsa (my go-to sim). Needed something relatively modern, decent handling, and most importantly, a good canvas for a custom livery. Ended up going with a GT3 car, the Ferrari 488 GT3. Looked aggressive enough, and I knew there were already some decent mods out there.
Next up, the livery. This was the time-consuming part. I grabbed some high-res photos of the actual Le Mans safety car. The key elements were the red/white striping, the official Le Mans branding, and of course, the safety car lights on the roof. I fired up Photoshop and started mapping out the design. Layers upon layers, tweaking colors, adjusting angles… you know how it goes. The devil is in the details. Spent a good few hours just on the striping alone, making sure it wrapped around the bodywork realistically.
Then came the trickiest bit: the safety car lights. The sim doesn’t just have a safety car light bar. I had to get creative. I looked at some other mods, saw how people faked it with extra lights and textures, and tried to copy the technique. It involved a lot of fiddling with the car’s .kn5 file (the 3D model), adding some extra geometry on the roof to serve as the light bar housing, and then creating a texture that simulated flashing lights. This took a lot of trial and error. Placed a bunch of blue and orange lights. After several tests in the sim I tweaked the position of the new lights.
After getting everything together, I started the car in the game to see what it looked like. The lights were way too bright and too close to the cockpit so I had to reduce the brightness and move them slightly further from the car.
The final touches involved adjusting the car’s setup. I wanted it to feel stable and predictable, not twitchy like a typical race car. Increased the ride height slightly, softened the suspension, and dialed in some extra rear wing angle. The goal was to make it easy to drive smoothly and consistently, even at low speeds.
It took a few evenings of tinkering, but eventually, I had something I was pretty happy with. It wasn’t a perfect replica, but it captured the essence of the Le Mans safety car. Hopped online, joined a few races, and spent some time pacing the field. It was actually quite fun! People were even asking me about the mod. All in all, a satisfying project. Definitely learned a few things about car modding along the way.
