This past weekend, Xbox Canada held an event at the Better Living Centre in the CNE to promote the upcoming release of Forza Motorsport 3. The had some stations setup to play the game (including 3-TV setups), a few of the cars from the game on display, and an artist who was painting a custom Toronto skin onto a car. There was also an autocross track where you can take rides as people race around the circuit for the best time (which ended up being 18.88s), or race your own car around. Here were our VIP Pit Passes to the event.

Pretty cool eh? It looks like we were all special and all that, being VIP and having pit access; but in reality everyone who filled in the entrance survey received one of these (and you had to to get in).

The had various Audis (a couple of TTs, and a R8) a Ferarri, a Lamborghini and a Mercedes McLaren SLR on display. Did you know the SLR goes for half a million? Someone in Ontario actually owned the SLR and while we were there let some (real) VIPs sit in it. Normal VIPs like us were only able to sit in the Audi TTS and the Ferrari.

The autocross track was a bit lame since it was just in a parking lot (compared to Montreal’s F1 circuit), but we did watch for awhile. It was fun watching people’s cars actually slide around in real life. There were some normal cars like a Golf, souped up Civic; some sports cars like the S2000, GT-R, Fairlady-Z (aka not the NA 350z) and some real rally cars. Here’s a run of the track by a Lotus Elan S3 from the 60s:

It was a bit too chilly for us to stand around in line waiting for a 20 second ride around the track, but that is a neat option. You had to wear a helmet and everything – I guess the air bag is not safe enough.

I didn’t actually try Forza3 because I am not really a fan of simulation racing (and I tried Forza2 which was too hard to be worth the effort), but it was fun to go to this event. I hope it was worth it for Microsoft to put their marketing money into this effort rather than buying more billboards!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: cars, xbox