Andrew Evans

It’s official. After 5,000 votes cast across the past month, GTPlanet’s users and social media followers have decided that the greatest ever TV car is a Pontiac.

The one-off events are coming thick and fast in GT Sport, with Audi revealing its second this month. This new Audi e-tron Vision Gran Turismo Challenge is part of the brand’s #RaceHome campaign, which it’s running both to keep its professional drivers and its fans busy while much of the world is cooped up at home.

It’s hard to believe, but Gran Turismo 3 turns 19 today. Initially launched on April 28 2001 for the Japanese market — arriving in July in both Europe and the USA — GT3 was the debut Gran Turismo title for the PlayStation 2 console, and an important milestone.

This coming week is one of Japan’s biggest annual holidays: Golden Week. To celebrate — and also to mark the hiatus in world affairs right now — GT Sport and Red Bull are running a competition in the game.

There’s three more GT Sport Daily Races to get your teeth into this week, with a rare appearance from one of the game’s original circuits.

The virtual world continues to fill in for the real world this week, as the motorsport action returns to small screens and static driving rigs to provide the racing entertainment that would otherwise be absent.

Update: On May 8, Polyphony Digital pushed out a new set of Terms and Conditions in the UK for the game’s FIA mode, which modified the “Prizes” section. Previous versions of the rules included laid out Live Event attendance as a prize — including flights, transfers, hotel, and meals — with a value of around $3,000, and trophies where applicable.

Free-to-play mobile F1 game F1 Mobile Racing is due to get an update in early May that adds all of the 2020 F1 season content.

In recent weeks we’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of otherwise idle F1 drivers getting into the world of sim-racing. McLaren’s Lando Norris and Red Bull’s Max Verstappen were already heavily involved, but almost half the grid is now racing online of a weekend.

If you like going incredibly fast or incredibly slow, this fortnight’s set of GT Sport Time Trials will cater for you.

Players booting up their PS4s this morning will discover that the 1.57 update for GT Sport has arrived. It comes in at just over half a gigabyte, weighing in at 503MB. That’s enough to bring a little bit of new content, but the update’s main focus is on changes to Sport Mode.

The next GT Sport update is almost upon us, arriving on April 23 after a period of server maintenance.

After circumstances dictated that Polyphony Digital had to transmute the original first ten races of the 2020 FIA Season into an Exhibition Series, it’s ready to start again for real. The official 2020 FIA Online Championship season restarts this coming Saturday, April 25.

There’s even more pro-driver esports on the horizon, and this time there’s a chance for players to get involved too.

The outside world might be in all kinds of disarray, but GT Sport’s Daily Race schedule continues unhindered. This week we’ve got three more races, which include a track we haven’t seen in the rotation for a very, very long time.

The professional racing drivers of the world are still sitting idle as tracks remain closed and large gatherings are banned. That means they have plenty of time on their hands to get involved in the new breed of esports events which fill the gap until society returns to normal (and hopefully beyond).

We’re getting used to catching up with some esports action every weekend right now, as a whole host of famous drivers get to grips with the virtual world. This weekend’s racing starts a little early with a GT Sport event tonight, courtesy of two drivers you might not normally associate with the game.

If you’re furloughed or otherwise social distancing right now, there’s not a lot to do. Many of us have been shut indoors for a month or so, and every possible small job that we can do is now done. It’s probably not much surprise then that we’re all turning to our games consoles for solace.

When racing games become a serious hobby there’s all manner of equipment you can buy to enhance your experience and ability. There’s fancy wheels and pedals, games-oriented displays, and driving rigs to which you can mount them all.

Although it didn’t top our staff poll for best Gran Turismo game, GT4 is nonetheless among the best — and best-remembered. Like GT2, its large and wild car list introduced the world to all sorts of bizarre machines that hadn’t twitched the needle beyond their own circles.