Championship Overhaul
December 6, 2025Depending on when you grew up and where you grew up, you may or may not have heard of a series called Colin McRae Rally.
Nowadays the series is known as DiRT. Or i guess, WAS known as "DiRT" before EA willed it out of existence. (Seriously, what were Codemasters thinking accepting a deal from THOSE twats?)
Before the franchise was rebranded, there were 5 games released under the original title.
...and then there's Colin McRae Rally 3.
Being the first game to release on the 6th Gen Consoles, there's a lot of things that 3 had to experiment with, and those experiments brought varying levels of success. On one hand, the graphics for the game were insane for the time and still hold up really well today. On top of that, they upped the Super Special Stage count, with this being the ONLY game in the entire series to have a Super Special Stage for every rally. On the other hand, the normal stages per rally were cut down to 6, the PlayStation version only released in Europe, the physics and handling models were all over the place and for the worst sin the game commits... you couldn't even pick the car you wanted to drive for the Championship Mode. You HAD to use the Ford Focus.
With all of those problems, you may expect me to hate the game. But 3 always had a very specific aura to it that none of the other games could capture. This was due to a combination of things such as the Y2K Digital Cube aesthetic that the game came with, the amazing Service Area animations that no future game could replicate the charm of, The liveries for the cars (as this was the final game where they had the WRC license), the absurd hidden bonus cars and the game's immaculate soundtrack. The problem was, i couldn't enjoy any of these aspects as much as i wanted to because every time i went to play the game, i was reminded of the fact that i was playing the worst Colin McRae Rally game. It's like if F1 2014 had the same vibes as F1 2010.
For years i had been waiting for someone to release a mod that let you change the car you were driving in Career Mode at the bare minimum, but the game's code stood undoccumented and unexplored even 23 years on from it's release. But one day i decided that i'd had enough, and i went through every single individual .dat file to see if there was anything i could uncover, and my eyes eventually landed on "drivers.dat".
After staring at the file for a while, i noticed a couple points where specific values were repeating. For example, a few numbers after the listings for some of the names, there was a value that ended in 0A, but for some of the names in that exact same spot the value was 06 and in some cases lower down on the list numbers like 14 and 0D were introduced. I then looked at what the number in that spot was for C Mcrae, and i found that the value was simply 00. Curiously, i switched the value to 0A, and just like that it switched the car used for the Career Mode to the Impreza. I had cracked a case that people had been trying to figure out for the past 23 years in a matter of 5 minutes.
Naturally i was over the moon after this discovery, but i didn't celebrate victory just yet, as picking a car in career mode was only half the battle. I still had to somehow find a way to make the cars fun to drive. And luckily for me, i had an answer for that too.
Earlier that day, i was experimenting with the game's secret cars. The intended method for unlocking these secret cars was to call Codemasters directly, give them a unique access code that was different with every save file and then they'd give you exclusive codes to unlock all of the secret cars. The code it uses has since been cracked by Silent, and a code generator can be found here.
During my experiments, i found myself kinda impressed when i played around with the Tank, as it had a handling model that was very reminiscent of Colin McRae Rally 04, which i've always thought had the best handling model out of all of the original 5 games. From there, all i had to do was figure out the value of the Tank and load it into career mode.
After some trial and error, i found out that the hex value for the Tank was 17. For anyone passing by that wants to do some hex swapping themselves, here's a list of every car's hex value:
From there, the rest is history. I took a couple of days to develop a mod that would put all of this together, the mod received unanimous praise from the wider CMR community and i even released a few DLC championships as separate mods. (And i'm definitetly going to release more when i get the motivation)
For me, the Championship Overhaul mod isn't just a video game mod, it's a symbol for what happens when someone ignores a general consensus and decides to look out of the box. If i hadn't looked closer at drivers.dat, we would have never been able to see Colin McRae Rally 3 at it's full potential.
If you want to install this mod for yourself, you can do so by clicking the link here.