“I could see all the choices this artist made that nearly matched all the same choices I made. “Now looking at the wireframe was a dead giveaway that it was indeed my model F2002 that I worked on for months,” he said. Somchith downloaded the model and compared it to his own work. Months later, however, he came across an Artstation page run by a senior artist at Codemasters, which he says contained some of the assets from F1 2017, including a model for the classic car. “They have people to model these things for them right?”

“Now I didn't want to believe my work was stolen because Codemasters is a well renowned video game developer,” he said in the forum post where he first brought this up. But in May this year he saw a trailer for Codemasters’ latest F1 racer, which featured the same iconic car, and felt that the particular 3D model shown off by the developers had some troubling similarities to his own work. The car – Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari F2002 – was reproduced by modder Somchith Vongprachanh last year for players of the Italian-made racing sim. One of the most iconic cars in Formula One racing sim F1 2017 appears to be the work of a modder for a completely different racing game, Assetto Corsa. Get ready for a copyright-related headache, friends.

F1 2017 forum