Lara Croft goes miniature as the Croft Crawler turns classic Tomb Raider into Motorfest’s newest RC machine

Lara Croft has escaped collapsing temples, crossed forgotten ruins, survived prehistoric predators and spent almost three decades proving that archaeology becomes considerably more complicated when somebody starts shooting at you. Her latest vehicle is much smaller than anything normally associated with those adventures. The PHAZR RC Croft Crawler is now available in The Crew Motorfest, translating the visual identity of classic Tomb Raider into the remote-controlled vehicle category introduced earlier this year.

Ubisoft Ivory Tower’s latest Tomb Raider spotlight is not announcing another chapter of Secrets of Ni'ihau. The premium adventure already launched with Season 11 on October 7. Instead, the new presentation highlights an additional crossover vehicle sold separately through Motorfest’s in-game shop: a 2026 PHAZR RC Croft Crawler, accompanied by a Quartz Tire vanity and a particularly appropriate T-Rex Footprint Smoke effect in its 70,000 Crew Credit bundle.

The Croft Crawler is deliberately looking backward

The most obvious difference between this vehicle and the broader Secrets of Ni'ihau collaboration is its inspiration. While the DLC places the modern Lara Croft and Jonah into an original Motorfest adventure, the Croft Crawler explicitly draws from classic Tomb Raider, allowing Ubisoft to reference the version of Lara that established the series in the 1990s.

That connection is especially visible in the promotional campaign surrounding the RC car. Ubisoft has paired the vehicle with polygonal classic Lara imagery, embracing the sharply modelled silhouette associated with Core Design’s original games rather than attempting to modernise every aspect of her appearance. The result is an unusually direct nostalgia play inside a collaboration whose actual story otherwise belongs to a much broader contemporary interpretation of Tomb Raider.

It is also a sensible direction for an RC vehicle. A full-size licensed off-roader inspired by classic Lara would have to balance realism with references to a character rather than a particular historical car. A remote-controlled machine can be much more playful about proportions, graphics and visual identity without needing to convince anyone that Lara literally drove it during one of her expeditions.

This is not one of the five vehicles included with the Tomb Raider DLC

The acquisition structure is worth clarifying because Season 11 now contains several different Tomb Raider-related vehicles. The PHAZR RC Croft Crawler is not one of the five exclusive machines included with Tomb Raider: Secrets of Ni'ihau. Ubisoft lists it separately as a Rally Raid vehicle available through the in-game shop for Crew Credits.

The five vehicles attached to the paid Tomb Raider adventure are the Honda Africa Twin Adventure Sports ES, Suzuki QuadRacer R450Z, Mercedes-AMG G 63 6x6, Proto A500 Croft Copter and Proto Makani S1 aircraft. Those are part of the standalone Tomb Raider Pack and are also included through the Year 4 Pass.

The Croft Crawler instead functions as an additional crossover collectible that can exist alongside that package. Ubisoft’s official Season 11 lineup places the RC machine in its own 70,000 CC bundle with two vanities: Quartz Tire and T-Rex Footprint Smoke.

That separation is useful for players primarily interested in the RC car. Buying the complete Tomb Raider adventure and acquiring the Croft Crawler are two different decisions rather than one automatically unlocking the other.

The T-Rex smoke is a joke that only works because Ni'ihau went completely prehistoric

The second vanity in the bundle would have sounded bizarre before Season 11. A T-Rex Footprint Smoke effect attached to a tiny remote-controlled Tomb Raider vehicle is now perfectly consistent with what Motorfest has actually done with the franchise.

Secrets of Ni'ihau does not stop at tombs and archaeological mysteries. The island contains prehistoric wildlife, including a massive Mosasaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex, with the latter becoming the centrepiece of one of the expansion’s more overtly cinematic pursuit sequences. Ubisoft’s own marketing for the Croft Crawler jokes that Lara has survived ancient ruins, deadly traps and a T-Rex before challenging her to take on Motorfest.

The smoke vanity turns that encounter into a permanent visual reference players can carry away from the DLC. Rather than producing conventional tyre smoke, the themed effect evokes the giant predator that tries to make the Ni'ihau expedition substantially shorter.

It is deliberately ridiculous, but that has increasingly become part of Motorfest’s identity. The same game that spends considerable effort reproducing a Bugatti Tourbillon can also let somebody drive a tiny Tomb Raider RC vehicle trailing dinosaur footprints through Hawaii.

PHAZR RC exists because Motorfest stopped treating scale as a fixed rule

The Croft Crawler would not have been possible in the same form when Motorfest launched. Remote-controlled cars only became a dedicated playable experience during Season 9, when Ivory Tower introduced the premium RC Frenzy Playlist in May 2026.

RC Frenzy changed the physical perspective of the open world rather than merely adding another performance category. At normal vehicle scale, a curb is an insignificant obstacle and a ventilation opening is scenery. From the perspective of a small PHAZR machine, the same environment can become a cliff, tunnel, ramp or improvised racing line.

Ivory Tower created a dedicated handling system around that change of scale. RC vehicles can make unusually sharp directional changes, launch themselves across obstacles and interact with terrain in ways that would make little sense for a conventional full-sized car. The developers specifically built the experience around jumping, flipping, swimming and using parts of the environment that previously existed largely as decoration.

That established the technical foundation the Croft Crawler is now using. It is not a novelty object that can only appear inside one Tomb Raider event; it belongs to an actual vehicle family with its own driving behaviour.

RC Frenzy introduced four machines before Lara joined the collection

The original RC lineup consisted of four fictional PHAZR RC vehicles, each approaching the concept differently. The Trickshot and Rust Bucket occupy Street Tier 1, while the General and Coyote move the miniature format toward more aggressive Rally Raid-style terrain.

RC Frenzy itself contains 10 main events, 25 challenges, eight Feats, five Photo Ops and 11 Rivals, along with specialised races that experiment with a top-down camera. The objective was to make Hawaii feel unfamiliar even to players who had already driven across its roads for hundreds of hours.

The Croft Crawler becomes another extension of that experiment rather than replacing it. Ubisoft officially classifies the 2026 machine under Rally Raid, which is particularly appropriate for a Tomb Raider crossover because the character fantasy has far more to do with scrambling across broken terrain than maintaining a perfect racing line on asphalt.

That also separates it from a conventional branded vanity. A Tomb Raider livery on an existing truck would have added another collectible. A Tomb Raider RC car takes advantage of one of Motorfest’s stranger recent gameplay systems.

Classic Tomb Raider and remote-controlled exploration are an unexpectedly good fit

The thematic connection goes beyond putting Lara’s imagery onto a toy car. Classic Tomb Raider was fundamentally about reading environments. The player looked for routes through spaces that initially appeared impassable, recognised climbable geometry, discovered hidden passages and treated architecture itself as a puzzle.

RC Frenzy asks players to reinterpret Motorfest’s environments through scale in a surprisingly similar way. A passage that is meaningless to a sports car may be large enough for an RC vehicle. Furniture, drainage systems, rooftops and narrow architectural gaps suddenly become part of the drivable world.

The Croft Crawler therefore represents a version of Tomb Raider’s exploratory mentality even when Lara is nowhere nearby. The surroundings have not necessarily changed; what changes is how the player learns to look at them.

That principle also runs through Secrets of Ni'ihau, where Season 11 introduces environmental puzzles, ancient mechanisms and the Winch system as alternatives to Motorfest’s usual emphasis on getting from checkpoint to checkpoint as quickly as possible.

Secrets of Ni'ihau is far more than a themed racing playlist

The wider collaboration matters because the Croft Crawler is being released into a season where Ivory Tower has already made one of its largest departures from straightforward driving. Tomb Raider: Secrets of Ni'ihau is a premium PvE adventure created with Crystal Dynamics, built around a newly accessible island that had previously remained outside the playable world.

The story begins with Jonah disappearing while searching for an ancient artefact. Lara is unable to reach him directly, leaving the Motorfest player to follow her instructions, investigate his route and eventually uncover what happened on the island.

That structure gives the playlist a stronger adventure-game premise than Motorfest normally uses. Driving remains the fundamental interaction, but the player also follows clues, enters ancient ruins, solves environmental puzzles and uses vehicles to manipulate obstacles.

Ni'ihau consequently functions less like another scenic location for racing and more like a playable expedition.

The Winch is what lets a driving game imitate Tomb Raider puzzles

One of Season 11’s most important mechanical additions is the Winch, available on selected vehicles. During the free Kaua'i Expeditions playlist it can move cargo and remove blocked paths, but the Tomb Raider DLC expands the same idea into puzzle solving.

That matters because converting Tomb Raider into a racing game could easily have produced a superficial result. Lara explores ruins on foot because she can climb, jump, pull objects and interact directly with architecture. Motorfest’s player normally approaches the world through a vehicle, so Ivory Tower needed a tool capable of turning driving into meaningful environmental interaction.

The Winch supplies that missing verb.

Instead of getting out of the vehicle and controlling Lara directly, players can attach to environmental objects, shift mechanisms and open routes while remaining within Motorfest’s core vehicle framework. It does not make the game mechanically equivalent to a Tomb Raider platformer, but it allows the collaboration to reproduce the process of examining an obstruction and working out how to overcome it.

The Croft Crawler takes the same philosophy in another direction. Its small scale turns existing spaces themselves into new navigation problems.

Ni'ihau is deliberately separate from the free Kaua'i expansion

Season 11 actually introduces two new geographical additions with different access models. Kaua'i is a free island available to Motorfest players and serves as the major open-world expansion for Year 4, while Ni'ihau belongs specifically to the premium Tomb Raider experience.

Everyone can see Ni'ihau represented in Motorfest’s world, but accessing the island and playing its activities requires either Tomb Raider: Secrets of Ni'ihau or the Year 4 Pass. The standalone Tomb Raider Pack costs $9.99 on Steam, while the Year 4 Pass launched at $29.99 / €29.99 and bundles the adventure with the rest of its scheduled vehicle content.

Kaua'i takes a different approach. It adds swamps, rough terrain, the enormous Red Canyon, wildlife and the free Kaua'i Expeditions Playlist. More than 40 animal species have also been distributed across Motorfest’s islands as part of Season 11’s wider exploration push.

The result is a season where simply driving around the map has been given much more emphasis than usual. Ni'ihau uses Tomb Raider to push that concept into scripted adventure, while Kaua'i makes exploration part of the free game.

The dinosaurs are not just trailer decoration

The T-Rex reference surrounding the Croft Crawler is grounded in actual gameplay. Ubisoft has confirmed that Ni'ihau contains prehistoric creatures, with the Mosasaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex singled out in its official Year 4 presentation.

The T-Rex in particular becomes part of a chase, taking one of Tomb Raider’s most recognisable pieces of iconography and translating it into Motorfest’s vehicle-driven structure. Lara’s encounter with a Tyrannosaurus in the original 1996 Tomb Raider remains one of the series’ most famous surprises, and the modern crossover clearly understands the nostalgic value of invoking that memory.

Other dinosaurs are also present around the island as wildlife, reinforcing the impression that Ni'ihau has remained isolated from the rest of Motorfest’s version of Hawaii for far longer than anyone realised. The premise is intentionally pulpy, combining lost ruins, forbidden territory, mercenaries and prehistoric predators exactly the way a crossover inspired by classic Tomb Raider should.

The Croft Crawler’s dinosaur vanity therefore does more than decorate the tyres. It connects the miniature vehicle back to one of the franchise references around which the entire adventure has been built.

Lara herself guides the adventure rather than becoming a playable on-foot character

Players should also understand what the crossover is not. The Crew Motorfest has not suddenly added third-person Lara Croft gameplay. The player remains fundamentally a Motorfest driver, with Lara guiding the expedition while vehicles perform the traversal and environmental interaction.

This is one reason the vehicle selection matters so much. The Africa Twin gives the adventure a motorcycle suited to narrow terrain. The QuadRacer provides another compact off-road option. The Mercedes-AMG G 63 6x6 is built for brute-force exploration, while the Croft Copter and Makani S1 extend the expedition into the air.

The Croft Crawler exists outside that five-vehicle DLC set, but it completes the fantasy from the opposite extreme. Instead of becoming larger and more capable, it shrinks the player until the environment itself feels oversized.

Motorfest is essentially representing Tomb Raider through its own language: every adventure problem has to become a vehicle problem.

The crossover is also a showcase for how broad Motorfest’s garage has become

A remote-controlled Tomb Raider buggy sharing the same game with a Bugatti Tourbillon, NASCAR stock cars, motorcycles, planes, boats, helicopters and conventional street vehicles would have sounded absurd when The Crew series first established itself as an open-world driving franchise.

That breadth is now intentional.

Ubisoft’s current Motorfest page advertises more than 800 vehicles from over 50 manufacturers, and Year 4 is already scheduled to stretch the definition of “vehicle” further. Season 13, due in April 2027, will introduce semi-trucks as an entirely new category while exploring professional driving activities such as taxis and limousines.

The RC category sits at the other end of that spectrum. Semi-trucks will make ordinary cars feel tiny; PHAZR machines already make ordinary environmental objects feel enormous.

The Croft Crawler benefits from that willingness to stop treating the garage as a collection of comparable road cars. A crossover vehicle can now be chosen because it creates a different perspective rather than because it competes directly with another production model.

The 70,000 CC bundle is primarily selling personality

Ubisoft’s official package is straightforward: 70,000 Crew Credits for the PHAZR RC Croft Crawler, Quartz Tire and T-Rex Footprint Smoke. There is no claim that the Tomb Raider variant provides some extraordinary performance advantage over other RC vehicles.

That is an important distinction. The attraction here is visual identity and crossover appeal rather than purchasing a mandatory competitive machine. Players interested only in finishing Secrets of Ni'ihau already receive access to the DLC’s own five vehicles through that content; the Croft Crawler is an optional extension for collectors who want Tomb Raider represented in the RC portion of their garage.

The two vanities make that intention even clearer. Quartz tyres are a visual customisation, while dinosaur-footprint smoke is almost pure spectacle. Neither exists because Lara needed it to solve a puzzle.

They exist because seeing a tiny RC vehicle blast across Hawaii leaving evidence of a giant dinosaur behind it is exactly the kind of nonsense a Motorfest garage is increasingly designed to support.

The timing connects two of Motorfest’s strangest premium experiments

There is another reason the Croft Crawler feels particularly appropriate in Year 4. RC Frenzy and Secrets of Ni'ihau are both examples of Ivory Tower using paid Playlists to test experiences that would be difficult to justify as ordinary racing content.

RC Frenzy changes scale and handling. Tomb Raider introduces puzzle solving, archaeological exploration, prehistoric wildlife and scripted adventure sequences. Neither is simply a ten-race championship constructed around another automotive manufacturer.

The Croft Crawler physically links those two ideas.

It takes the premium RC concept introduced during Year 3 and gives it a vehicle themed around the premium adventure opening Year 4. Players who have followed Motorfest’s post-launch evolution therefore get something more meaningful than a random licensed miniature: it is a crossover between two of the game’s own recent gameplay experiments as much as a crossover between Ubisoft and Tomb Raider.

Season 11 has made exploration the common language connecting everything

The Croft Crawler also arrives at exactly the moment when Motorfest is redefining what players are expected to do between races. Season 11’s central theme is exploration, from wildlife photography and newly tracked routes across the islands to Kaua'i’s rough landscapes and Ni'ihau’s archaeological mysteries.

RC vehicles already encourage that behaviour because their scale reveals spaces ordinary cars ignore. The Tomb Raider collaboration naturally depends on it because Lara Croft is defined by entering places other people failed to reach. The Winch turns environmental obstacles into interactable problems, while wildlife gives players a reason to deliberately slow down and observe the surroundings.

All of those systems point in the same direction.

Motorfest began as a festival of car culture, but Year 4 increasingly treats the vehicle as a tool for discovering the world rather than merely something placed on a starting grid. The Croft Crawler may be one of the smallest additions in physical size, yet it fits that larger design shift almost perfectly.

Classic Lara has found one of Motorfest’s most appropriately ridiculous vehicles

The best licensed vehicles usually work because the connection makes immediate sense after someone has pointed it out. Lara Croft does not have an obvious history of remote-controlled racing cars, yet a miniature off-road machine inspired by her classic adventures feels strangely appropriate inside this version of Motorfest.

It can scramble across terrain, squeeze through spaces full-sized machines cannot use and transform ordinary geometry into something that needs to be explored rather than simply passed at 250 km/h. The classic polygonal imagery gives the collaboration a nostalgic identity separate from the modern adventure, while the dinosaur smoke connects it directly back to Ni'ihau’s T-Rex.

More importantly, Ivory Tower has resisted the temptation to pretend this is another part of the Tomb Raider DLC entitlement. It is a distinct 70,000 CC shop offer aimed at players who want the crossover to extend beyond its five premium adventure vehicles.

Lara may have survived the T-Rex.

The Croft Crawler lets players leave its footprints behind.

The PHAZR RC Croft Crawler is available now in The Crew Motorfest’s in-game shop as part of Season 11. Its 70,000 Crew Credit bundle includes the 2026 Rally Raid RC vehicle, Quartz Tire vanity and T-Rex Footprint Smoke. Tomb Raider: Secrets of Ni'ihau is available separately or through the Year 4 Pass on supported platforms.