Car-loving comedian Rowan Atkinson has become the fastest celebrity driver on the popular motoring show Top Gear.

Making his long-awaited debut on the latest episode of the show overnight, Atkinson lapped the track more than half a second faster than the previous record holder.

Atkinson's time of 1:42.2 seconds bested fellow comedian John Bishop's 1:42.8 second lap, and was significantly faster than the previous high-profile record holder Tom Cruise - whose time was a 1:44.2.

"It is remarkable because when Bishop did that time and it was so much faster than Tom Cruise we thought it would never be beaten," Clarkson said on the show.

Atkinson is an amateur racer in historic events in the UK and his driving style was unspectacular but smooth and quick, drawing praise from Clarkson.

"What is interesting is all your times were very consistent, as is the mark of a great racing driver," Clarkson said. "Turns out you're in the wrong career."

If you´ve been an active in the sim racing community for the past 2 1/2 years, the name Ignite Skill Gaming probably does ring a bell. If it does not, Simraceway surely will.

Back in 2009, Ignite Skill Gaming bought rFactorcentral and subsequently launched Simraceway.com, a platform that hosted paid online racing events with mod community content without the consent of the original creators.

This issue created a big uproar in the community (and on this very website) that led to a boycott of the new website that most major mod groups joined. The boycott caused Simraceway to (somewhat reluctantly) remove the content in question from their website as their service continued.

The whole concept however didn’t really take off in the community much as Simraceway failed to make big a impact in the sim racing community and was quickly forgotten by many people. Now, the chapter can be completely closed as Ignite Skill Gaming has acquired a whopping $7.5 million dollars to turn Simraceway into an online racing game.

Slightly Mad Studios have released new two high-resolution previews of their upcoming C.A.R.S. title on VirtualR.

The new previews show off the historical Lotus 49 Formula One car, including a shot of the car’s very detailed cockpit.

The model seen in the previews is made up of around 250.000 polygons and will run in-game in this kind of quality, thanks to DirectX 11 and the complexity of the used shaders as SMS is aiming to set a new benchmark in visual quality. Aside from pushing the limits in terms of graphics, the studio is also putting equal efforts into the input & physics department.

C.A.R.S., which stands for Community Assisted Race Sim, is a new project by Slightly Mad Studios that will allow sim racers to invest in an upcoming simulation title. In return, the investors will get to have a major say in the direction the title will be taking, get development builds and get to follow a completely transparent development process that shows the SMS team at work.

Slightly Mad Studios will be launching the project’s website in a few weeks, for all the details on this groundbreaking new project check out this article.

Turn 10 has started revealing the first of over 600 cars that will be included in their upcoming Forza Motorsport 4 title for Xbox 360.

Five cars have been revealed in this first round, including the 2009 Ferrari California and 1993 Mclaren F1 you can check out below.

Revealed Cars

- 2009 Ferrari California
- 1993 Mclaren F1
- 2009 Alfa Romeo Brera Italia Independent
- 2008 Lamborghini Reventon
- 1995 Ferrari F50

Forza Motorsport 4 will be released on October 11 in the US and October 14 in Europe, the new title will bring over 600 cars from 80 manufacturers, five brand new tracks and and an improved tire model thanks to a partnership with Pirelli.

After bringing countless of historical Formula One seasons among other open-wheel machinery to rFactor, F1-S-R has released new previews of their F1 1994 mod project.

The 1994 Formula One season will go down in history as one of the most tragic and exciting years of Formula One, the year seems to be especially popular among modders as F1-S-R is the third team to work on it for rFactor, following CTDP and TMG.

Slightly Mad Studios’ Ian Bell shared his vision of a community-funded simulation title right here on VirtualR. What many may have dismissed as a very much utopian vision has gotten extremely real as the studio has been hard at work for the past few months to turn a great idea into a working project.

Named Community Assisted Race Sim, or C.A.R.S. for short, the project will allow ordinary sim racers to become investors in a racing simulation title and get a share of the profits and unmatched access to the development process and a say in the title’s direction.

For the past few months, the guys at Slightly Mad Studios have been hard at work on all fronts as Ian Bell has revealed some exclusive details on the team’s progress. The legal work on the project has just been completed and SMS is ready to launch the project’s website and accept investors within the next 2-3 weeks.

The studio will be offering investment options that will fit any budged, starting out with a 5€ option ending with gold-level commitment of 1000€ and beyond. All investors will be getting access to downloadable development builds throughout the development process, the level of investment will determine the amount of influence each member has though.

While every investor will get to vote on the direction the new title will take, gold members get to participate in board meetings where the bigger calls will be made, always considering the requests from the regular investors. Gold members will even get source-code access to the simulation while smaller investors will be given script access to play with.

Online gaming company Ignite Game Technologies, revving up to release a new racing game, announced Tuesday that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B financing from private investors, led by Steve Belotti and Bill Budinger Jr. Previously, the company had raised a $3 million Series A in 2010 and a $1.7 million seed, for a total of $12.2 million in financing raised.

At its heart, Ignite seeks to continue the tradition of high-quality racing games like Gran Turismo 5, except in the online gaming space specifically.

“There are a number of great racing games on the market but the genre as a whole has seen little real innovation in the past 10 years,” said Jonathan Haswell, CEO of Ignite, in a prepared statement.  “Most titles make year-over-year incremental changes to visual fidelity and the breadth of cars and tracks on the disc – the eye candy.  Ignite will offer a fresh take on the genre, one that rethinks some of the fundamentals and focuses relentlessly on a core aim of live multiplayer racing.”

Haswell suggests there are three tiers of racing games, in terms of fidelity and physics: arcade, realistic and pinnacle. If we think of “realistic” games as those high-end consumer releases like Gran Turismo and “pinnacle” as highly-immersive simulation racing, then you see the two spaces Ignite wants to thrive in.

We get asked a lot about 40" screens on the LCD.  Officially we support up to 15kg or 30Lb with the Console and screen.

We can see the requirement and have a few idea's in development.

In the meantime, Mike Maglio from the USA sent us this video of his VisionRacer VR3 with a 40" Samsung LED LCD. 

This makes it the biggest LCD mounted to the VR3's LCD stand to date (awesome). 

Send us a video of your VR3 setup and we will add it to our website.

An interesting forum for stereoscopic 3D gamers and everyone else interested in S3D technology.   This video is from the full 3D gaming panel from the Discovery 2011 conference.