Announced just six weeks after the release of the first Project Cars, Project Cars 2, funded via the developer’s own crowdfunding portal is possibly being pegged for a September release, if comments by Slightly Mad’s CEO are anything to go by.

Ian Bell made the comments in a forum thread about the game, saying that it had just entered the QA testing phase, expected to last roughly seven months. The post also mentions that the team is a bit behind on developing the GUI and the Career aspects, so we could see it pushed to Q4, if necessary.

Also new in Project Cars 2 is a reworked handling system, and all of the “famous brands” for the sequel. Early in crowdfunding, Project Cars 2 was slated to have 50 unique locations and 200+ courses for racing, plus 8 different Motorsport disciplines, so hopefully we’ll see if it meets those criteria later this year. Regardless, screenshots have surfaced from the Polish gaming forum Simrace, and while they do seem a bit like bullshots, there’s much to look forward to for racing fans.

Personally, I’m hoping for much improved performance and optimization out of the sequel, as its predecessor suffered legendarily poorly on AMD cards, due to heavy integration of Nvidia Gameworks and PhysX. Top of the line AMD cards six months from release still struggled to get above 40 FPS on High settings, so hopefully Slightly Mad have learned something from the post-release outcry.

Regardless, it’s still one I’ll be keeping my eyes on.