F1 Race Stars in TK2
January 29, 2026Have any of you heard of The Karters 2?
It's a game on Steam that i discovered a month ago after it was directly recommended to me, and i don't think i've ever been sold quicker on any game in my life. For anyone who's never played it, imagine Crash Team Racing, now port it to PC, give it an infinite skill ceiling and give it modding tools so easy to wrap your head around that even your grandma could make a track mod given enough time. As you can tell, that combination gives us a game that's VERY special, and even though i've only owned the game for about a month now i've already played it for 53 hours. If that isn't a sign of quality, i don't know what is.
As you can probably tell from the fact that i dedicated an entire tab to it, i am no stranger to video game modding, so i don't think it's a surprise that i would want to dabble with modding this game for a little bit, and for me there was nothing i wanted to port over more than the content in F1 Race Stars. Anyone who knows me probably knows that i'm a HUGE Formula 1 nerd, and the opportunity to be the first person to port some content that the fandom i'm already a part of would salivate over was something i did NOT want to waste. Also, F1 Race Stars is a fantastic game in it's own right and i wanted to do it justice. This page is dedicated to the wild rollercoaster of a journey that making the two mods in this pack brought me on.
First of all, i needed the models. Fortunately, i already knew what i was going to do for this, as there's a site called "pd3m.ru" which is mainly focused on ripping the models from video games to make them work in Blender, and one of their most consistent lineups are their selection of Codemasters model rips. I was already very familiar with their rips of the Colin McRae Rally 2005 models due to how many times i've seen the models from that game in different projects, so i thought that finding the F1 Race Stars models would be just as easy. Initially, this seemed like the case, but the more i looked into their F1 Race Stars model rips, the more i realised that the ripper probably didn't give a single shit about the game.
First of all, the good. At the bare minimum, EVERY important model was extracted. The car model, the helmet model and even every individual driver. The bad? This didn't account for the textures. The drivers had all of their textures, but there was only ONE helmet texture, which was Vettel's helmet. And in terms of the teams included on the car, only SIX teams had their texture rips available, those being Red Bull, Ferrari, Lotus, Mercedes, Caterham, One of the fictional teams and McLaren. And even then, the McLaren texture was completely broken as it's silver base texture was replaced with a pitch black, seemingly paying homage to the 2015 McHonda. So yeah, i had a LOT of work to do.
But then i ran into yet another problem. You see, TK2 is currently in early access, and there are a LOT of kinks that they are in the process of ironing out. One of the biggest one is how compatible their tools are with Linux. Blender works completely fine, which is great as that's where about half of the modding is done. However, even if you have the right version of Unity for the SDK to read, it simply refuses to load the SDK template correctly which makes finishing off the mods completely impossible. I found a workaround by asking some other members of the community to help me out with finishing the mods that i had made the basis for. The two people i have to thank for this are out_ofbounds_gaming and Da_Bubby. Big props to you two, as without you these mods would have never been finished.
Anyway, now that we've got that cleared up, i had to figure out how to get the missing textures. It didn't seem TOO hard to do. After all, i had the PC version in my Steam library and every Codemasters game made using the Ego engine uses the same, easily moddable file types. However, that dream was quickly shattered when i found out that F1 Race Stars had it's own completely proprietary file types that had quite obviously not been cracked yet.
That may not have gone how i was expecting, but it was fine, because i had a backup plan. Emulators. You see, a lot of emulators have a feature included that let you dump any textures read by the emulator into a folder. You can also set up another folder that lets you replace these textures, but that's not important for what we're talking about. Out of the 3 console ports of F1 Race Stars that exist, the consoles it released on were the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and most importantly the Wii U. Why is the Wii U version important here? Because Cemu DOES have a texture dumping tool. Now we're im business.
After installing Cemu and a copy of F1 Race Stars on the Wii U (it should be legal if you own it on another platform, right?), i got to the title screen... and then it crashed. This wasn't an anomaly either, as it would do this every time i tried to enter the game. I thought this was another Linux issue, and i asked one of my friends to set it up on their Windows PC only to get the exact same results. At that point i checked the compatibility list only to realise that F1 Race Stars is one of the few games that are COMPLETELY unplayable on Cemu.
Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. ALL we needed from it was for it to LOAD into a race, and it couldn't even do that.
Not to worry though, we still had two other versions to go through. We tried the Xbox 360 version next, as after some forum searching, we found out that Xenia does infact have a Texture Dumping feature, it's just hidden behind Xenia's typical weird ass config files. After flicking it on, we noticed after loading the game that nothing was extracting. We read into it again and found out that it WASN'T extracting the textures and was instead extracting the SHADERS. 2 console ports down, 1 to go. And unfortunately, the PS3 version was already a lost cause, as despite how feature rich RPCS3 is, it SOMEHOW doesn't have a Texture Dump feature. So that meant we were seemingly completely out of luck. We'd either have to go on with heaps of missing textures OR we'd have to wait for the Wii U version of F1 Race Stars to become playable on Cemu, which would take GOD knows how long.
It was at this point that one of my friends who was trying to help me with all of this told me about Ninja Ripper, which is a program solely focused on extracting textures and models from video games. We tested it, and the game was STILL being a stingy bastard as instead of grabbing textures it was instead taking screenshots and using THOSE as the ripped textures. Ninja Ripper was seemingly also a dead end... until i looked on their Patreon page and found a Direct3D11 version that they had released for free. Curiously, i looked into what version of Direct3D F1 Race Stars used on the PC... and it also used D3D11. Our prayers were seemingly answered, but we needed someone who had the game on PC to try it with that specific version to see if it would work. (and on someone else's PC as well, because Ninja Ripper is Windows only.)
On the edge of my seat, i waited... and after a few minutes, i had Schumacher's helmet texture. We had done it, we had FINALLY found a way to extract the missing textures. After a few more hours of waiting, we now had every helmet texture and every car texture. This was all we needed in terms of resources, so it was time for me to put it all together.
First things first, we needed to do the car mod. I'm not going to waste your time any more than i already have, because making the car mod was a piece of cake. I Just needed to import the model, weight paint the steering wheel, align the engine and wheel hitboxes to match where they were on the car and we were all done and dusted. One trip to out_ofbounds later with a pack of all of the car textures, and the first half of the F1 Race Stars mod was done with ALL of the F1 cars from the 2012 season now being represented in TK2. (Plus two fictional teams that nobody cares about.)
Now, for the driver mod i wanted to do something a little bit ambitious. First of all, even though i love the artstyle of F1 Race Stars, i've never been the biggest fan of how the heads for the drivers were made as most of them didn't even get close to replicating the likeness of the driver they were trying to imitate. So, i decided to put all of their helmets over the heads of the models so that the only thing you could see were the helmets and not the faces. I did have to do some model squishing though, and you can see this by clipping the camera into their heads using photo modes. My favourite ones are Kimi and Vettel who have had their top halves shrunken down resulting in an oversized chin, Rosberg who reused Schumachers model to save time and Alonso who doesn't even HAVE most of his head rendered. Infact, i think the only model that didn't give me any trouble and converted properly was the model for Hamilton.
The second thing i wanted to impliment was to do with their voicelines. Instead of replicating the voicelines from F1 Race Stars, i wanted to make it so that every voice consisted of actual team radios that the drivers said at different points in their career. This not only forced me to get a bit creative with what sound clips i included but also lead to me finding some quotes that i didn't even know existed. I think the 50 second long track limit rant from Raikkonen that has a 1 in 3 chance to play when you drive off the track might be my favourite.
Surprisingly, the three drivers i had the most trouble finding voice clips for were Nico Rosberg, Jenson Button and Michael Schumacher. For Nico and Jenson i was eventually able to scrap together enough voice lines to make a complete character by doing some vocal splitting on videos that probably didn't think about the voice clips that they were showcasing. For Michael though, you may be surprised to find that despite being one of the most iconic and greatest drivers the sport has ever seen... Schumacher has almost NO distinct team radios. I was only able to find 9 in total, and almost all of them were from his wins. Obviously i had to think a little outside the box for him, and i settled on having the majority of his voice lines be read out by commentators from around the time, with the majority of that real estate being taken up by the legendary Murray Walker. This was a great decision on my part due to a phenomenon called "Murrayisms" where Murray would say something completely wrong with no warning or build up and usually not even dwell on what he said. I was able to cram so many of these into Michael's voice lines that it was honestly hilarious.
However, there was still one more thing that i wanted to include. If you were paying attention, you will have noticed a theme with the drivers that i have already mentioned, those being Vettel, Alonso, Button, Hamilton, Rosberg, Raikkonen and Schumacher. ALL of them are Champions. Granted, Rosberg wasn't a champion at the time that F1 Race Stars was released, but it would still feel a little odd not to include him. However, if you're keeping count, that only makes for 7 drivers, and TK2 maximum grid size is 8. Even though it wasn't necessary, i still wanted to completely fill the grid with a unique champion for every spot. After thinking for about 6 seconds about who i wanted to add to fill this void, i already knew exactly who the apple of my eye was.
Max Verstappen.
Yes, it may not make a single lick of sense timeline wise, but i still felt like it could visually fit in, as Max made his debut with Toro Rosso in 2015, and despite the fairly drastic change to the shape, the STR7 and STR10 have a near identical livery. Plus, i felt like the idea of putting a Champion in a Toro Rosso was really funny. The only problem was that i couldn't find a SINGLE model online that contained his helmet from 2015, so i had to settle for a somewhat immersion breaking 2023 helmet instead. As a little fun fact, the base model for Verstappen in the mod is actually Daniel Ricciardo, but to cover it i made the skin tone under the helmet pitch black so you can't make out who it is. Pretty sneaky way to make the illusion of a Verstappen model, but hey, if it works it works.
Max was probably the most fun driver to get the voice lines for, as Verstappen's team radios are a pot of gold. I'm not going to spoil what i put into the mod because i want you to experience it for yourself, but if anyone wants to know where i'd rank all of the team radios, this is where i'd put them:
The last little goof that happened during the production of it was really funny. I told the guy who was compiling together the driver mod, Da_Bubby, that i wanted the icons for the drivers to match what they looked like in F1 2010, as i felt that they would fit perfectly given the context of the driver icons. However, because Lotus-Renault didn't exist in 2010, i decided to make my own custom icon that gave off the same vibe as the others. However, when handing Da_Bubby all of the icons from the game and telling him what drivers used what icons, i completely forgot that Lotus-Cosworth existed which lead to Bubby using the wrong team icon for Raikkonen in the first test version of the mod. Needless to say, that small goof was completely on me, and it's still visible in the preview footage for the mod on the Steam Workshop.
So yeah, that was my journey into making a mod for The Karters 2. Honestly, the process of making it even though it was a bit tricky at times only made me fall in love with the game even more. Given what the devs have planned for the game, i'm going to be sticking with them every step of the way, and i cannot WAIT for the modding tools to be made more accessible to Linux users. The day that comes, you are going to see me having a FIELD DAY with the modding scene, let me tell you.
The most surreal part of all of this was seeing someone in the wild using my Vehicle mod to put Sonic The Hedgehog in the RB8. Seeing that knowing that i contributed to a build they were running was something truly special and truly surreal.
If you want to install these mods for yourself, you can download the Car Pack here and the Champions Pack here.