Ultra-realistic racing sim Project CARS may end up ducking out of a Wii U release, despite being one of the very first third-party games to be announced for Nintendo's console.

The game released this month on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC after a long and successful crowdfunding campaign by Slightly Mad Studios. The Wii U version was implicitly taken to be quietly worked on for later in the year, but studio head Ian Bell had some disappointing revelations for Nintendo fans hoping to get in on the action soon.

Bell revealed that the studio was having difficulty getting the game to run at a satisfactory level on the Wii U hardware. In its current form, Project CARS is running at "about 23FPS" at a resolution of 720p.

He also candidly went on to say that the best chance of Nintendo fans seeing Project CARS on their system was if Nintendo announced their next-generation console fairly soon, adding: "we're awaiting/hoping for more of a hardware announcement at E3..." The studio could, he said, manage to scale back the game to hit a "fairly solid 30FPS" on Wii U, but that "it might take a hell of a lot of work". Bell indicated that the studio's preference was to play a "waiting game" on Nintendo's next system instead of starting that hard work now, theorizing that "our work might just be the best thing that ever hit that new console in the driving sim genre."

With Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirming that we would not hear about Nintendo's next system - codenamed 'NX' - at this E3, Project CARS may be in limbo for some yet for Nintendo fans.