Welcome to the Virtual GP Website!

A long tradition of simulators

In the late '90s Paolo Cattani developed Virtual GP, a racing car simulator for the Amiga range of computers, worldwide published and distributed by Islona Entertainment Ltd, a subsidiary of Epic Marketing. The aim of the simulator was not only to let the user virtually drive an open wheeled racecar in the most realistic way allowed by the technology of those years, but also to recreate the experience of a full GP weekend; practice sessions to find the best car setup, qualifying sessions to secure a good starting grid position and, of course, races against computer controlled opponents. A full championship mode was possible, too, in which the user can try to become the virtual champion by racing and scoring points on each of the 16 different tracks available in the simulator.

Virtual GP was followed by two sequels: Virtual Grand Prix 2 (VGP2) and Virtual Grand Prix 3 (VGP3), developed for the PC Windows and Mac OSX platforms (VGP2 was also available for MorphOS, an AmigaOS-like operating system). A specialized car dynamics library, AVC, was developed by Paolo Cattani's R&D company AlasSoft (in collaboration with an Italian motorsport company) to obtain a robust simulation of real-life racecars; AVC was used (in part) in VGP2 and was the foundation of VGP3, in order to continue the tradition of delivering one of the most realistic simulations available on contemporary hardware. Moreover, the sequels offered more and more options to the user, such as the possibility to create new tracks, customize car liveries, or race online against other human players.

The last installment of the Virtual GP series is the VGP3 Engine; based on the latest developments of the AVC library, it is an improvement of the original VGP3 game engine and can simulate many different car types and terrains. The VGP3 Engine can be fully modded into any type of car simulator/game, from stock cars to rallye to extreme open-wheeled racing.