Van-Uber lore?

[Thane Corrigan]

Possibly the rise of the combat-oriented events in the FX350 (Fury) caused them to not want to deal with that again, and just backed out of the scene after the FX350?

Or we could go with Charlie's version of events and say they couldn't sustain themselves and ended up becoming bankrupt, but just shift that point to between the FX350 and the FX400 instead of FX300->FX350.

Yup. The team kind of got the short end of the stick by entering the most violent era of AG racing. Wolfgang Van-Über was actually a former AG pilot, and he put his own reputation on the line by establishing his own pacifist team, preferring his pilots to win by putting the purity of the race before anything else (i.e. by using very few, if any, weapons). Considering this, Wolfgang might even have possibly been a retired Auricom pilot, since he shared the same mentality that Auricom's team directors wanted to maintain against all odds.

It's possible that the disadvantage of no weapons would cause the team a fair share of race losses and issues performing under pressure, making sponsors lose confidence and pull funding.

And besides. FX300 had no Eliminator event, and FX350 reintroduced it late on with the Fury upgrades. And then in FX400 they'd made Eliminator a main attraction. What better way to bring a team focused on pure racing to rethink it's place in the league? Even Auricom took some extra time out to finish development of their ship, but there were a few rumours that they were hesitant to rejoin with a slightly more combat-heavy season.

Either way, Rob said he's working on it, so it'll be interesting to see what he comes up with!

Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this! Personally, the lore makes this game series come alive, with the team rivalries and the development of a 150+ year history of the sport.

IIRC (and I usually do :v) the FX350 was more or less a test league run in 2206, together with the FX300. I however am not sure if it continued after 2206, or was just run for one year, to test the FX400 craft...

Yeah, I don't think it was ever mentioned if FX350 ran simultaneously with FX400 at all.

But I imagine that while FX400 took over as the main event, with the vast changes for the Fury ships the FX350 league became its own entity. Harimau's Fury ship even has "Season 2207" written on the front of the cockpit, but it's entirely different from the one we see in Pulse.