Assetto Corsa Rally V0.6 hands-on: Modest improvements boosted by new cars
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← Assetto Corsa Rally • News10 September 2026 — 9 minute read
By Ross McGregor
Assetto Corsa Rally’s V0.6 build is here, and the headline feature is undoubtedly the addition of three new cars: the Group 4 Audi Quattro, the Volkswagen Polo GTI R5 and the Peugeot 206 WRC.
However, developer Supernova Games Studios has also added a powerful photo mode, alongside custom livery support. In an upgrade to the game’s nascent multiplayer mode, introduced in its V0.5 build, players can now also create private multiplayer lobbies.
Back-end changes have also taken place, with AC Rally’s throttle and tyre models fettled alongside a tranche of other fixes.
Check out our hands-on impressions of V0.6 below.
1980 Audi Quattro Gr.4
It may not be the Audi Quattro sim racing nerds wanted, but it’s the Audi Quattro we’ve got.
The Group 4 machine represents the genesis of the Ingolstadt marque’s status as an ‘80s rallying superpower.
Thanks to an FIA rule change, partly lobbied for by the Volkswagen-Audi group,four-wheel-drive cars were permitted to enter the WRC’s top category, Group 4, going up against the Fiat 131 Abarth and Lancia Stratos, among others (both of these cars are also available to drive in AC Rally, incidentally, offering extremely different driving experiences).
Harnessing the potential of its parent company’s four-wheel-drive VW Iltis military vehicle, Audi soft-launched the rally Quattro in 1980 before entering its first official WRC events in ‘81. Its impact was nearly immediate, with Hannu Mikkola claiming the car’s first win on Rally Sweden.
Mikkola would win again on the RAC Rally, while teammate Michèle Mouton would claim her first WRC victory on Rallye Sanremo, becoming the first – and only, as it stands – woman to claim an overall WRC victory.
The writing was on the wall for Audi’s opponents, with the Quattro proving to be near-unbeatable on loose surfaces in spite of its extra mass and unreliability.
With one season in the books, the pair helped claim the Manufacturers’ title for Audi in 1982, with Mouton narrowly losing out to Walter Röhrl’s Opel in the Drivers’ standings. However, Mikkola went on to claim the 1983 Drivers’ championship in the first year of Group B regulations, after the pioneering Quattro was phased out.
However, Lancia was ‘83’s top constructor with its svelte 037, which would prove to be the last time a two-wheel-drive car won a WRC championship.
Four-wheel-drive had officially taken over, thanks in no small part to the Audi Quattro.
Vorsprung durch technikal failure
A huge part of the car’s character is its 2.1-litre five-cylinder engine: on the WRC stage, nothing sounded like a Quattro. And it’s the same in AC Rally, with Supernova capturing the lethargic drawl of its turbocharged powerplant, which eventually gave way to the wailing banshee in its Sport Quattro S1 Evo 2.
Turbocharging was in its infancy in 1980, and it certainly feels like it, with the Quattro easily bogging down at low revs in-game, requiring a clutch kick to spring the 300 bhp+ inline-five into life.
It feels slightly heavy and cumbersome, too, forcing you to brake for corners earlier than either of its Lancia or Fiat rivals. The engine’s size means a lot of its mass extends beyond the front axle, making it nose-heavy: it requires severe provocation to hit those apexes.
It’s predictable, though, and its total traction is reassuring on loose gravel. Patience is definitely required to get the best out of it, though, especially as the handbrake locks all four wheels, making it a bit of a nightmare around tight hairpins…
1999 Peugeot 206 WRC
Although the Peugeot 206 WRC is best known as the car Marcus Grönholm took to two WRC titles, the ‘99 version has a slightly different specification.
For the true rally nerds (for example, Traxion’s Tom Harrison-Lord), this car can be easily distinguished from its modern counterparts by its sequential shifter, with later cars upgraded to the steering column-mounted push-pull paddle ring system (privateer entries more often than not reverted to the sequential stick due to ease of maintenance and costs).
The car scanned by the developers is the one driven in period by Renato Travaglia, who won the Italian and European Rally Championship in 2002 for FPF Sport. Nicknamed ‘Enfant Terrible’, it feels anything but when switching from the Quattro.
Featuring a lighter and stiffer body and a more tightly-packaged engine, the 206 benefits from the extra two decades of technological advancements to feel more like a scalpel in comparison to the Audi’s sledgehammer, although it wasn’t quite the ideal weapon of choice in its debut WRC season.
In a partial campaign, the car picked up a solitary podium: second for Gilles Panizzi on Rallye Sanremo, before it was heavily updated for 2000, Grönholm’s first title-winning year.
Peugeot Sport’s return to top-line competition was facilitated by the homologation of the Peugeot 206 Grand Tourisme road car, which conveniently featured bumper extensions that took it beyond the FIA’s mandated 4000mm minimum length.
Ultimately, this contrivance led to three consecutive Manufacturers’ championships (2001-2003).
For 2004, Peugeot binned the 206 in favour of the rather incongruous 307 WRC, which didn’t go too well for the flying Finn… or for co-driver Timo Rautiainen’s bottom…
2018 Volkswagen Polo GTI R5
After VW cancelled its WRC Plus car for the 2017 season amid the fallout of ‘Dieselgate’, its full effort went into developing a second-tier challenger, the Polo GTI R5.
Launched in 2017, the car made its international rallying debut the following year in the hands of Petter Solberg at Rally Catalunya.
The former World Champion finished third in WRC2, with the car taking its maiden WRC2 win at 2019’s Rally Sweden in the hands of Ole Christian Veiby. Solberg would notch another win for VW on that year’s Rally GB, his final international rally victory.
The VW sports its striking launch livery in-game and slots into the same category as the incumbent Hyundai i20 and Skoda Fabia RS Rally2 machines, with R5 and Rally2 cars now lumped together as the ‘Group R’ class.
Unsurprisingly, given that the VW was co-developed with Skoda, both cars are very similar to drive in-game, feeling both approachable and performative, with each having a five-speed sequential gearbox and 280 bhp outputs.
Private lobbies
Players can create private multiplayer lobbies in V0.6, a small but necessary improvement many virtual rallyists have craved.
Before, all lobbies were public and unprotected by passwords, meaning anyone could join you and your friends, which would be immensely annoying if they were much faster.
No other major multiplayer features have dropped in V0.6, meaning you can still only choose to run one stage. This limits much of the game’s appeal to single-player driving or hotlapping, a situation which may need to change to keep the game’s momentum going.
Photo mode and custom liveries
As an amateur motorsport photographer, photo modes in racing games are a huge feature for me, and AC Rally’s is good. Like, unbelievably good.
If you have a rudimentary understanding of photography, the process is incredibly simple, but needless to say, you’ll be creating perfect pans, arty close-ups, and moody scenic screenshots in no time.
We’ve created a standalone guide on how to get the best out of the game’s photo mode here, but one key point to remember is to hit the space bar to allow the full extent of your image’s dynamism to shine through.
Custom liveries have also been activated, letting players install their own paint schemes in-game.
Each car can support multiple liveries, and players can select their favourites from the car selection screen. Paint templates for each car can be found in your game files here: /steamapps/common/Assetto Corsa Rally/acr/Content/LiveryTemplates, with a comprehensive livery customisation guide available in the same location (file name: ‘README’).
Physics and other improvements
Tyre thermal modelling has finally been introduced to AC Rally, with optimal tyre pressures also coming into play (28 psi on asphalt and 32 psi on gravel and ice).
In theory, the tyre heating mechanic should make the game’s longer Monte Carlo stages more challenging as you need to avoid overheating rubber to prevent grip loss. However, I never felt like this was as important as managing pressures, which have a discernible effect on car handling (and besides, tyre wear still hasn’t been implemented, removing some jeopardy).
The tyre widget works much like in Assetto Corsa Competizione, with each tyre represented by three bars. If the middle bar is out of line with the others, it means the tyre isn’t at optimal pressure.
Fortunately, the default setups have tyre pressures roughly at optimal levels anyway, so it’s not a huge headache to set up (certainly nowhere near as pernickety as it is in ACC), and in my testing so far I’ve found that pressure values don’t change much during a stage.
Running at minimum pressures is definitely not a good idea, though…
The game’s gravel stages (Wales and Greece) have also been tweaked to offer more realistic stage times. As a result, the online leaderboards have been reset. The changes seem subtle, but generally it feels like loose surfaces offer a bit more resistance when sliding, which is a positive step forward.
Gripes
The lack of VR continues to frustrate many AC Rally players, especially since the V0.6 patch notes make no mention of it. Ultimately, it’s a feature a minority of players will use, so it makes more sense for Supernova to focus on other areas for now.
On a more positive note, the performance issues I suffered from in previous builds have pretty much disappeared, showing that the game is gradually being optimised over time.
More importantly, the introduction of custom liveries represents the ‘first step towards modding support’, according to the developers. Given the scarcity of in-game stages, this is an encouraging sign.
AC Rally is undoubtedly heading in the right direction.
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