Ian Bell, founder of Slightly Mad Studios, while working on GTR2, stole the sourcecode to an early version of isiMotor from Simbin and all games that use what they call the "Madness Engine" (NFS Shift, Project CARS, that weird FnF movie game, Automobilista 2) all run on this 20+ year old horrifically outdated pilfered code backbone that few people outside of the autistic simracing world even know about.
isimotor is better known as the game engine that underpins the GTR games, several EA F1 games and Nascar SimRacing from the mid '00s, rFactor 1 and 2, and Le Mans Ultimate. Commercial variants of isimotor are also used to train self-driving cars and other scientific uses.

NFS Shift 2 was made to handle badly on purpose so SMS could get out of the contract with EA and make Project CARS which was then "crowdfunded" through their website and forum World of Mass Development. Promising that people could influence the direction of the game and even get royalty kickbacks for backing it, it got funded easily. But then when it came time to pay the royalties....They paid out only one round and then promptly announced and released Project Cars 2 under Bamco, which was literally completely the exact same game in every single way but without the crowdfunding scheme or references to World of Mass Development. With pCars 1 pulled from sale and replaced with a new game barely 6 months after release it turned out the royalty kickbacks were all just a scam to get people on board. When people accosted him in a Project Cars 3 Twitch stream chat for it he simply went "Anyway back to my yacht, have fun."

He also had a thing with sim racing blogger Austin Ognoski, a Canadian guy who used to run a blog called "Pretend Racecars". When Austin started to shit a bit too hard on Project Cars, Ian Bell flew to Edmonton, literally bought the man an entire WESCAR stock car with a pit crew and gave him a job at SMS just to get the rather influential blog shut down.

all 100% true