Oh, don't worry. They'll weed out the scrubs eventually if they keep releasing packs like this and not giving 'em the ESFORTEEN RAKEET BUNNEEH WIZ DEM OFFSEEET they so much crave.
Anyways...
I must admit - the Opel GT wasn't exactly the
first car I would've choosen to add to Forza's car roster. Mostly because I didn't know much about it; but boy, ain't it a
cutesy ball of fun. Essentially a cartoon-cute Corvette, the GT featured a lot of clever design features, from the manually-operated pop-up headlights to a surpisingly spacious interior. Not unlike the other Opel in the game, it has a 1.9 litre cam-in-head engine which has enough grunt to keep things
interesting, but also plenty more grip than it'd ever need.
Ah, the Dino. Why is it that everytime Fiat tries to make a sportscar it ends up producing something so enchantingly beautiful? I know, technically speaking, the Dino's a Ferrari, but who cares? If it's called a Fiat, then
it's a Fiat. Imagine how it must've felt to see this on the
Autostrade in 1969! Handling's superb, the car could probably use stiffer suspension, but that's it; and the engine sound and its nigh-immediate response really make this an impeccable ride.
The W 113 SL is the iteration of the legendary model which saw it transform from a sportscar to the drophead luxury GT we all know and love nowadays; the 280 SL representing the apex of this process. The "
Pagoda" is an instant classic with timeless lines and an engine that's just as memorable: it looks (and sounds) so good that the floaty handling and self-indulgent brakes are easily forgivable. Of course I had to get mine in black!
And I couldn't resist pitting the 488 GTB against Forza Motorsport 6's cover car, the all-new twin-turbocharged Ford GT. While the choice made by Ferrari to keep evolving on the 458 platform with the adoption of a force-inducted, smaller engine has been met with some raised eyebrows, it's hard to remain skeptical after a lap (albeit virtual) in the end product of such a well-studied metamorphosis. What the 458 did well, the 488 simply does
better. By the end of a lap of Sonoma, the GT was just a far-off glimpse in the rear-view mirror.
The P3... I just
needed this, it's so much fun driving it! This Alfa is one of the last cars of its era: park it next to an 8CTF Maserati or a W154 Merc (not to mention the Typ-D Auto Union!) and you'll see what I'm talking about. The P3 (which was directly derivated from the 19
24 P2, the car that made Alfa Romeo the first ever World Manufacturer Champion) is a brutal machine: tall, narrow and as aerodynamic as a brickhouse, with thin bias ply tires that look like they've been wrapped around the rims just because it was mandatory and an engine that sounds
mechanical and downright sinister. It's surprising how well-behaved it is compared to the other pre-war GP cars, although maybe it shouldn't be, as the increases in speed of the era were achieved with no parallel increase in the available amount of grip. Tazio Nuvolari estabilished a long tradition of Italian cars and drivers making
ze Germans cry, a tradition that a few years later Nicola Larini would revive in his V6 155 DTM machine.
I didn't think I really needed another Daytona Prototype in my life, but boi was I wrong! The Corvette DP is heaps more fun than the Ford. Is it the fire-spitting, naturally aspired V8? Or has Dallara made a better job at producing a well-sorted chassis? We may never know. All I know is that I'm really glad the Corvette DP is in the game, despite what I may have believed in the past.
Finally, there's the Jaguar. I was about to wax poetic on the
962's purity, but the XJR-9 is on another planet entirely. The scream of the V12 - the same V12 that should've been fitted to the XJ13, ended up in the XJ-S, and was partly derived from the famous XK that netted Jaguar Le Mans victories in the
50s - is brutal and deafening; the amount of grip available,
infinite. I may be in the minority to say that they prefer the looks of the car in the Castrol white, green and red - but I guess that only makes this even more the perfect car to close off the season pass for me.
