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This battle was during the 2016 "Japanese Threat" event, featuring Allies versus Axis. Not to be confused with the Me 209 prototype of 1943. The Me 209 V1 was developed in 1937 with the primary goal of breaking the speed record for a single engine aircraft. It was not originally intended for a combat role. Early in 1939, the speed record was broken by the Heinkel He 100. Flown by Hans Dieterle, the He 100 achieved a top speed of 463.9 mph (746.6 kph). Less than a month later, in April 1939 the Me 209 took the title away from Heinkel when pilot Fritz Wendel took his aircraft up to 469 mph (756 kph). After the Battle of Britain, there was consideration for adapting the Me 209 for combat. One attempt for this conversion was to install a pair of 7.92mm machine guns within the engine cowling. This modification, however, caused a great reduction in speed and the project was abandoned. The V4 variant was mainly a fake re-dressing of the racing aircraft to make it appear to be combat capable. Military markings were applied and it visually appeared to be armed. In this capacity it was photographed and used for propaganda as the next evolutionary step of the Bf 109 Fighter. In 1943, an unrelated project also called Me 209 was prototyped as a potential replacement for the Bf 109, but had no correlation with the racer aircraft of 1937.