IGN had an interview with Turn 10's Content Director, they revealed some really cool info.
You can paint race cars in the game now too, so you can take the V8 Supercars, strip 'em down to a base white gel coat and re-livery 'em and paint them up any way you want, which is going to add a level of customisation to those that normally you don't get with a race car.
When asked about the Nissan GT-R he said:
Yes and no. There's some details we're not divulging around that quite yet.
We love that car. It's a hot car. We're highly motivated to get it in the game. We can't confirm anything right now, sorry.
When asked about DLC pricing:
Typically it's usually around $5 a pack for between eight and twelve cars. Part of it will depend on which cars they are, because sometimes there are some really hot cars that potentially cost us a lot of money to get. We have to source all these cars. If you've seen the Bugatti Veyron video (embedded below) we do laser scanning, we tape it up; it's a lot of work to go to to get these cars in the game. Then we strap them to a dyno, get their audio under load, we put a race pipe on 'em see what they sound like under race trim, so there's a lot of effort that actually goes into building this content. We don't really make much money on downloadable content. We do it really just for the fans to keep the game fresh, and keep it changing, so they keep coming back and playing it over time.
When asked about audio capturing:
I don't have the specific mic information, but I can tell you that we have something like 18 mics on the car when we put it on the dyno. We get the exhaust, we get the intake, transmission, key points around the car where unique noises are going to be emitted. If its got a turbo charger or super charger forced induction we'll actually bench dyno that separately and mic that and get the recording for that separately because it gets so mixed with the rest of the sound that you want those things to be clean. So to get all these source recordings we put it on a dyno and we run it just like a standard dyno – run through every gear from low end to red line in every gear, both positive and negative load, because a car will sound very different under negative load as well as under positive load. We get all that, and stock trim, with the race pipe on it, all that stuff.
We then go back and cut those loops – it's tied to the physics, so depending on what you're doing with your inputs, where the wheel speed is, what your input is with the throttle or the brake, or what traction levels are doing at that point, it will go back and pick the right points of those recordings and blend them together. It's a really sophisticated proprietary system that we developed to take these series' of recordings we've done and piece them together so that when the physics inputs are going to it, it knows how to play the audio back the right way. Cos you'll never hear, like, loop cuts or edits or anything like that – it sounds like the car should.
When asked about drifting:
We have this mechanic now, it's called 'Always Drifting', so they're not specific drift events, but at any point you can bring up the drift hud, which is a little drift score – it's kinda like the Kudos from Project Gotham, and it's always on – you're always getting points for it whether you have the hud on or not, and there'll be drift leaderboards. We've got all kinds of new leaderboards as well, so the top painters will go to their leaderboard, the top drifters, the top tuners, the top videographers… so yeah, drifting is on all the time.
When asked about interior gauges:
Not every dial will work in every scenario, but all the big ones that you care about will, so tach, speed, fuel on most cars, boost gauges, digital gauges as well as analogue, like the Lamborghini Reventon has this crazy Star Wars looking 'stay on target' kind of thing, and it all animates and does all cool stuff, so each car we had to get in, start it up, see how all this stuff actually works and reacts. The Bugatti's got its horsepower gauge and all that kind of stuff. We basically went through each car, and some cars – especially race cars – have a million gauges, they look like an aeroplane, and not every one's going to be important to the player, so we picked the ones that we felt were the most useful.
When asked about rolling:
Yeah, you're able to roll the car now, so we've modelled under-carriages and suspension for every car in the game. Every car can be damaged, every car can be rolled, and already we're starting to see some spectacular results of that as you get multiple cars together...
When asked about the driver shifting gears:
He doesn't, right now. We just couldn't get that feature in in time, unfortunately. It was something we looked at, we had it close, but it was a little too buggy for us to put in… what we couldn't reconcile was that it was a very detailed hand with fingers and it actually grips the wheel, and it was difficult to get him to let go of the wheel and do this (moves hand off wheel) without his fingers passing through the wheel, because you don't actually do real collision detection on the wheel, and depending on how it was turned, there's a lot to work out there to get it [right], and we just felt like the visual trade-off there was too great. We'd rather have it not do it than look bad. And a lot of cars these days have paddle shifters so you're not going to be doing that anyway, so that's how I've rationalised it at least. (Laughs)