Ford Turned This ’90s Touring Car Legend Into a Racing Simulator. Now It’s For Sale

Professional racing teams have serious sim equipment, with state-of-the-art computers, massive displays, and a full-on motion rig to subject drivers to the kinds of forces they’ll experience on track. For some enthusiasts (me), it’s less about the immersion and more about the vibe. I’d much prefer this 1999 Ford Mondeo British Touring Car to live out my fantasies in, even if it’s mostly just a very big, very expensive controller for a 25-year-old PlayStation game.

This Mondeo was once a true racing car, as it served as a test vehicle for Ford and Prodrive’s BTCC crew in 1999. The following season, while Ford’s Alain Menu was busy claiming the drivers’ title, the automaker converted this obsolete chassis into a simulator and kept it in London’s Millennium Dome. Per a listing at Iconic Auctioneers, who expects the car to sell for between $13,000 and $15,500, this rig was built to run “the PS1 TOCA racing game.” This is the part where I point out that Codemasters actually released three TOCA games for the original PlayStation, so in all likelihood, this one’s either designed for TOCA 2 or TOCA World Touring Cars. If the latter’s name doesn’t sound familiar, you might know it as Jarrett & Labonte Stock Car Racing.

The TOCA series was beloved in its day and pretty punishing relative to contemporary rivals, with real tracks and damage modeling. Still, it’s amusing to think of this Mondeo shell being positioned as a “simulator,” given that it’s paired with such a rudimentary game. I’d love to know how the vehicle’s inputs are wired up to the console, wherever it’s been tucked away. A mobile monitor extended on an arm above the hood displays the game, while the LCD readout behind the steering wheel looks to be a sticker, rather than presenting any actual data.

Whoever is buying this is almost assuredly keeping it as a display piece, but if it were me, I’d love to use it to play some old TOCA and so much more. I’m unsure how feasible that would be; plug-and-play racing wheels supported across a wide number of titles weren’t exactly a thing back then. Naturally, you’d want to enjoy some Gran Turismo 2, and you’d definitely get more mileage out of a rig like this if it could interface with more sophisticated games on the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox. That’s the generation when sim racing truly took off.

For now, I’ll just admire this Mondeo from afar. Touring cars from this era were simply the coolest. Every manufacturer seemed to field something that was really just a stripped-down, sharpened-up version of something sold in British showrooms, from this Mondeo to the Renault Laguna, Honda Accord, Vauxhall Vectra, and that one Volvo estate a few years earlier in the ’90s. Time machines don’t exist yet, but playing TOCA in this thing would have me damn well feeling like I’ve stepped into one.

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