Prodrive has spent decades building race cars that win actual races – Le Mans, World Rally Championships, Dakar, the kinds of events where failure is public and expensive. So when the British motorsport company decided to build a racing simulator, it did not do what everyone else does, which is slap together a metal frame, call it “professional,” and hope you hide it in the garage.
Instead, Prodrive built something you’re meant to look at.
This is the updated Prodrive Racing Simulator for 2026, and it is aggressively not pretending to be humble. It looks less like gaming equipment and more like a piece of furniture commissioned by someone who says things like “We entertain a lot” and means it. Which, frankly, tells you almost everything you need to know about who this is for.
Prodrive is currently preparing Aston Martin’s GT race cars and serving as the technical partner on Land Rover’s new Defender entry for Dakar. In other words, this is not a lifestyle brand cosplaying as motorsport. This is a motorsport company indulging in lifestyle—and doing it with alarming competence.
Founder David Richards, a former Formula 1 team principal, didn’t want a simulator that felt like a tool. He wanted something that could live in a home without being apologized for. That’s a surprisingly honest ambition and also a very expensive one.
To pull it off, Prodrive went back to British car designer Ian Callum, who was the head of design for Jaguar for a longtime and definitely knows a thing or two about how to make cars look civilized. The result is a carbon-fiber tub suspended inside a sculpted, bentwood frame that has more in common with high-end furniture than with anything that usually involves lap times. It’s tasteful. It’s intentional. It’s the opposite of subtle.
And yes, Prodrive will deliver it white-glove. They’ve already figured out how to get one into a 22nd-floor apartment, which is not a logistical flex so much as a quiet acknowledgment of the customer profile.
For 2025, the company decided that if it was going to lean into excess, it might as well do it properly. So it enlisted a roster of British specialists who normally work on things that float, or things that royalty touches. The structural hoop is built by Pendennis, a superyacht manufacturer. The cockpit is upholstered by Connolly, which has been wrapping luxury car interiors for longer than most tech companies have existed. Badging comes from Vaughtons, the same firm that supplies Aston Martin identifiers. Audio is handled by Bang & Olufsen, because of course it is.
At this point, you could reasonably assume the simulator is more sculpture than substance. That would be the wrong assumption.
Under the carefully curated surface is an unapologetically serious machine. A high-powered gaming PC is hidden in the nose, driving a deeply curved 49-inch 5K display. The steering wheel comes with everything you might except from an F1 steering wheel: rotary dials, push buttons and even carbon-fiber paddles that can be configured to replicate the layout of a real race car, muscle memory included.
The most important part, though, is probably the least glamorous: the pedals. Most simulators get this wrong. Prodrive didn’t. The brake pedal is short, heavy, and punishing in exactly the way real motorsport brakes are. It doesn’t ease you in. It demands commitment. That one detail does more for realism than any screen ever could.
I drove laps of Silverstone Circuit on the system, and the effect is disconcerting. Your body responds before your brain reminds you that you are indoors. The feedback is immediate. Mistakes feel earned. That’s not an accident. Each simulator is assembled in basically the same workshop where Prodrive’s engineers also build the actual race cars.
Which brings us to the real point. This simulator is not about accessibility. It is not about democratizing motorsport. It is not pretending to be practical. What it is about is control—of performance, of aesthetics, and of narrative. It’s for people who want the credibility of motorsport engineering without the inconvenience of race weekends, and who want their toys to signal taste as much as capability.
There is something very 2026 about that.
The Prodrive Racing Simulator is what happens when a company that actually knows how to build winning machines decides to care deeply about how those machines look in a living room. It’s beautiful. It’s excessive. It’s technically excellent. And it says far more about the person who buys it than about the person who needs it.
Which, honestly, is exactly the point.
