The second Nations Cup Exhibition Season of 2026 is on its way, with Polyphony Digital announcing a four-round calendar that gets underway on Saturday, September 19 and runs through October 17.
It follows the same compact format as last month’s Manufacturers Cup exhibition, but there is one wrinkle in the schedule this time: the four rounds are spread across five Saturdays, with a weekend off on October 3 while the World Series Round 3 broadcast from Singapore takes over.
The Schedule
The variety is the draw here, with four different car categories across the four rounds:
- Round 1 – September 19 – Autódromo de Interlagos – Gr.3 Selection – 20 laps
- Round 2 – September 26 – Fuji International Speedway – Gr.1 Selection – 27 laps
- Round 3 – October 10 – Sardegna Road Track A – 1950s Classics – 10 laps
- Round 4 – October 17 – Deep Forest Raceway Reverse – Red Bull X2019 – 35 laps
Every round uses a specified car list rather than a full category, and all four are rolling starts with 16-car grids. Full race details are on the official championship page.
What to Watch
The opening round is a Gr.3 race with a twist. Rather than the full category, Interlagos uses a five-car selection (the Audi R8 LMS Evo, Ferrari 296 GT3, Lamborghini Huracán GT3, McLaren 650S GT3, and Porsche 911 GT3 R) on Racing Medium tires, with a mandatory pit stop, 2x fuel consumption, and a 5x tire wear rate. Testing is already underway in the GTPlanet forums, where Moose78’s early full-distance runs suggest going the full 20 laps without a tire change will be tight.
Round 2 is the longest race of the season. It’s 27 laps of Fuji in a five-car Gr.1 selection made up of the Toyota GR010 Hybrid and the four LMH/LMDh cars that arrived in Update 1.70 in June. Tire wear is 3x with Racing Medium and Racing Soft available, fuel consumption is 1x, and there’s no mandatory pit stop. Fuji is one of the circuits that supports rain in GT7, and qualifying is only five minutes, so there’s not much margin for a scrappy session.
Round 3 is the odd one out. It’s a ten-lap sprint around Sardegna’s Road Track A in a dozen pre-war and 1950s classics on Sports Hard tires, with fuel and tire wear switched off. The list runs from the Mercedes-Benz S Barker Tourer ’29 to the C1 Corvette, so there’s a bit of something for everyone. These are event-specified cars with fixed settings, so there’s nothing to buy and nothing to tune.
The finale is the Red Bull X2019 at Deep Forest Reverse. It’s 35 laps with all three racing compounds mandatory, a 5x tire wear rate, and 2x fuel consumption. There’s no minimum pit stop count in the regulations, but the tire requirement means at least two stops.
Leagues and Entry Slots
The league system works as it has all year. Players are placed into GT1, GT2, or GT3 League based on their Driver Rating at the time they first enter the season, and stay there for the duration regardless of where their DR goes afterwards. The regulations are identical across all three tiers; only the slot times and the points on offer differ.
Slot times are keyed to Pacific Time, and the Nations Cup runs an hour later than the Manufacturers Cup did. GT1 League (DR A and A+) gets three evening slots at 6:00pm, 8:00pm, and 10:00pm PDT, while GT2 and GT3 (DR B and below) have ten slots spread across the day, running hourly from 9:00am to 1:00pm and again from 6:00pm to 10:00pm.
That later start pushes the first GT1 slot to 9:00pm on the US East Coast and past midnight in Europe, so check your in-game times carefully. As always, you can enter as many slots as you like per round, but only your last race counts.
Points
With only four rounds, every one of them counts towards the final ranking. There’s no dropped round, so a disconnect or a bad slot choice can’t be written off the way it could in the six-round seasons.
Ties are broken by highest total points across all rounds, then highest single-round score, then DR, then SR, and finally by which account started playing GT7 first.
The GT1 League points adjustment that Polyphony introduced back in April, adding 100 bonus points uniformly at the top tier to help matchmaking, continues here.
Rewards
Credit rewards match the structure from the Manufacturers Cup exhibition, with the Manufacturer ranking replaced by a Domestic (country) ranking alongside the Regional and two Local rankings.
GT1 players finishing in the top 5% across every category can collect up to 8 million credits in total, with a GT2/GT3 ceiling of 4 million. A Bronze finish (top 75%) still pays out in each category, so anyone who completes all four rounds will see something for their trouble. Rewards are distributed at the end of the season through Sport mode.
Round 1 at Interlagos gets underway on September 19. Strategy testing for the opener is already well underway in the GT World Series discussion thread if you want a head start.
See more articles on Gran Turismo World Series and GT World Series Exhibition Season.
